social engineering | Breaking Cybersecurity News | The Hacker News

Multiple threat actors are weaponizing a design flaw in Foxit PDF Reader to deliver a variety of malware such as Agent Tesla, AsyncRAT, DCRat, NanoCore RAT, NjRAT, Pony, Remcos RAT, and XWorm. "This exploit triggers security warnings that could deceive unsuspecting users into executing harmful commands," Check Point  said  in a technical report. "This exploit has been used by multiple threat actors, from e-crime to espionage." It's worth noting that Adobe Acrobat Reader – which is more prevalent in sandboxes or antivirus solutions – is not susceptible to this specific exploit, thus contributing to the campaign's low detection rate. The issue stems from the fact that the application shows "OK" as the default selected option in a pop-up when users are asked to trust the document prior to enabling certain features to avoid potential security risks. Once a user clicks OK, they are displayed a second pop-up warning that the file is about to execute...

The North Korea-linked  Kimsuky hacking group  has been attributed to a new social engineering attack that employs fictitious Facebook accounts to targets via Messenger and ultimately delivers malware. "The threat actor created a Facebook account with a fake identity disguised as a public official working in the North Korean human rights field," South Korean cybersecurity company Genians  said  in a report published last week. The multi-stage attack campaign, which impersonates a legitimate individual, is designed to target activists in the North Korean human rights and anti-North Korea sectors, it noted. The approach is a departure from the typical email-based spear-phishing strategy in that it leverages the social media platform to approach targets through Facebook Messenger and trick them into opening seemingly private documents written by the persona. The decoy documents, hosted on OneDrive, is a Microsoft Common Console document that masquerades ...

The Microsoft Threat Intelligence team said it has observed a threat actor it tracks under the name  Storm-1811  abusing the client management tool Quick Assist to target users in social engineering attacks. "Storm-1811 is a financially motivated cybercriminal group known to deploy  Black Basta  ransomware," the company  said  in a report published on May 15, 2024. The attack chain involves the use of impersonation through voice phishing to trick unsuspecting victims into installing remote monitoring and management (RMM) tools, followed by the delivery of  QakBot , Cobalt Strike, and ultimately Black Basta ransomware. "Threat actors misuse Quick Assist features to perform social engineering attacks by pretending, for example, to be a trusted contact like Microsoft technical support or an IT professional from the target user's company to gain initial access to a target device," the tech giant said. Quick Assist is a  legitimate appl...

Cybersecurity researchers have uncovered an ongoing social engineering campaign that bombards enterprises with spam emails with the goal of obtaining initial access to their environments for follow-on exploitation. "The incident involves a threat actor overwhelming a user's email with junk and calling the user, offering assistance," Rapid7 researchers Tyler McGraw, Thomas Elkins, and Evan McCann  said . "The threat actor prompts impacted users to download remote monitoring and management software like AnyDesk or utilize Microsoft's built-in Quick Assist feature in order to establish a remote connection." The novel campaign is said to be underway since late April 2024, with the emails primarily consisting of newsletter sign-up confirmation messages from legitimate organizations and done so with an aim to overwhelm email protection solutions. The impacted users are then approached over phone calls by masquerading as the company's IT team, tricking t...

Malicious Android apps masquerading as Google, Instagram, Snapchat, WhatsApp, and X (formerly Twitter) have been observed to steal users' credentials from compromised devices. "This malware uses famous Android app icons to mislead users and trick victims into installing the malicious app on their devices," the SonicWall Capture Labs threat research team  said  in a recent report. The distribution vector for the campaign is currently unclear. However, once the app is installed on the users' phones, it requests them to grant it permissions to the accessibility services and the  device administrator API , a now-deprecated feature that provides device administration features at the system level. Obtaining these permissions allows the rogue app to gain control over the device, making it possible to carry out arbitrary actions ranging from data theft to malware deployment without the victims' knowledge. The malware is designed to establish connections with a comman...

The Iranian state-backed hacking outfit called  APT42  is making use of enhanced social engineering schemes to infiltrate target networks and cloud environments. Targets of the attack include Western and Middle Eastern NGOs, media organizations, academia, legal services and activists, Google Cloud subsidiary Mandiant said in a report published last week. "APT42 was observed  posing as journalists  and event organizers to build trust with their victims through ongoing correspondence, and to deliver invitations to conferences or legitimate documents," the company  said . "These social engineering schemes enabled APT42 to harvest credentials and use them to gain initial access to cloud environments. Subsequently, the threat actor covertly exfiltrated data of strategic interest to Iran, while relying on built-in features and open-source tools to avoid detection." APT42 (aka Damselfly and UNC788),  first documented  by the company...

The U.S. government on Thursday published a new cybersecurity advisory warning of North Korean threat actors' attempts to send emails in a manner that makes them appear like they are from legitimate and trusted parties. The joint bulletin was published by the National Security Agency (NSA), the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), and the Department of State. "The DPRK [Democratic People's Republic of Korea] leverages these spear-phishing campaigns to collect intelligence on geopolitical events, adversary foreign policy strategies, and any information affecting DPRK interests by gaining illicit access to targets' private documents, research, and communications," the NSA  said . The technique specifically concerns exploiting improperly configured DNS Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting, and Conformance ( DMARC ) record policies to conceal social engineering attempts. In doing so, the threat actors can send spoofed emails as if...

An ongoing social engineering campaign is targeting software developers with bogus npm packages under the guise of a job interview to trick them into downloading a Python backdoor. Cybersecurity firm Securonix is tracking the activity under the name  DEV#POPPER , linking it to North Korean threat actors. "During these fraudulent interviews, the developers are often asked to perform tasks that involve downloading and running software from sources that appear legitimate, such as GitHub," security researchers Den Iuzvyk, Tim Peck, and Oleg Kolesnikov  said . "The software contained a malicious Node JS payload that, once executed, compromised the developer's system." Details of the campaign first emerged in late November 2023, when Palo Alto Networks Unit 42 detailed an activity cluster dubbed  Contagious Interview  in which the threat actors pose as employers to lure software developers into installing malware such as BeaverTail and Invisib...

The North Korea-linked threat actor known as Lazarus Group employed its time-tested fabricated job lures to deliver a new remote access trojan called Kaolin RAT as part of attacks targeting specific individuals in the Asia region in summer 2023. The malware could, "aside from standard RAT functionality, change the last write timestamp of a selected file and load any received DLL binary from [command-and-control] server," Avast security researcher Luigino Camastra  said  in a report published last week. The RAT acts as a pathway to deliver the FudModule rootkit, which has been recently observed leveraging a now-patched  admin-to-kernel exploit  in the appid.sys driver (CVE-2024-21338, CVSS score: 7.8) to obtain a kernel read/write primitive and ultimately disable security mechanisms. The Lazarus Group's use of job offer lures to infiltrate targets is not new. Dubbed Operation Dream Job, the  long-running campaign ...

Cybersecurity breaches can be devastating for both individuals and businesses alike. While many people tend to focus on understanding how and why they were targeted by such breaches, there's a larger, more pressing question: What is the true financial impact of a cyberattack? According to research by Cybersecurity Ventures, the global cost of cybercrime is projected to reach an astonishing 10.5 trillion USD annually by 2025, which marks a dramatic increase from the 3 trillion USD reported in 2015. This sharp rise highlights a concerning trend: cybercriminals have significantly improved their methods for conducting sophisticated and successful cyberattacks over the years. According to research firm Cybersecurity Ventures, the cost of global cybercrime will reach a staggering 10.5 trillion USD annually by 2025, up from the 3 trillion USD that it was in 2015. It’s clear, then, that these threat actors have found ways to pull off sophisticated and succes...

The threat actor known as  ToddyCat  has been observed using a wide range of tools to retain access to compromised environments and steal valuable data. Russian cybersecurity firm Kaspersky characterized the adversary as relying on various programs to harvest data on an "industrial scale" from primarily governmental organizations, some of them defense related, located in the Asia-Pacific region. "To collect large volumes of data from many hosts, attackers need to automate the data harvesting process as much as possible, and provide several alternative means to continuously access and monitor systems they attack," security researchers Andrey Gunkin, Alexander Fedotov, and Natalya Shornikova  said . ToddyCat was  first documented  by the company in June 2022 in connection with a series of cyber attacks aimed at government and military entities in Europe and Asia since at least December 2020. These intrusions leveraged a passive backdoor dubbed S...

The infamous cybercrime syndicate known as FIN7 has been linked to a spear-phishing campaign targeting the U.S. automotive industry to deliver a known backdoor called Carbanak (aka Anunak). "FIN7 identified employees at the company who worked in the IT department and had higher levels of administrative rights," the BlackBerry research and intelligence team  said  in a new write-up. "They used the lure of a free IP scanning tool to run their well-known Anunak backdoor and gain an initial foothold utilizing living off the land binaries, scripts, and libraries ( LOLBAS )." FIN7, also known as Carbon Spider, Elbrus, Gold Niagara, ITG14, and Sangria Tempest, is a well-known  financially motivated e-crime group  that has a track record of striking a wide range of industry verticals to deliver malware capable of stealing information from point-of-sale (PoS) systems since 2012. In recent years, the threat actor has  transitioned  to  conducting ransomwar...

Security researchers have uncovered a "credible" takeover attempt targeting the OpenJS Foundation in a manner that evokes similarities to the recently uncovered incident aimed at the open-source XZ Utils project. "The OpenJS Foundation Cross Project Council received a suspicious series of emails with similar messages, bearing different names and overlapping GitHub-associated emails," OpenJS Foundation and Open Source Security Foundation (OpenSSF)  said  in a joint alert. According to Robin Bender Ginn, executive director of OpenJS Foundation, and Omkhar Arasaratnam, general manager at OpenSSF, the email messages urged OpenJS to take action to update one of its popular JavaScript projects to remediate critical vulnerabilities without providing any specifics. The email author(s) also called on OpenJS to designate them as a new maintainer of the project despite having little prior involvement. Two other popular JavaScript projects not hosted by OpenJS are also sai...

The threat actor tracked as  TA558  has been observed leveraging steganography as an obfuscation technique to deliver a wide range of malware such as Agent Tesla, FormBook, Remcos RAT, LokiBot, GuLoader, Snake Keylogger, and XWorm, among others. "The group made extensive use of steganography by sending VBSs, PowerShell code, as well as RTF documents with an embedded exploit, inside images and text files," Russian cybersecurity company Positive Technologies  said  in a Monday report. The campaign has been codenamed SteganoAmor for its reliance on steganography and the choice of file names such as greatloverstory.vbs and easytolove.vbs. A majority of the attacks have targeted industrial, services, public, electric power, and construction sectors in Latin American countries, although companies located in Russia, Romania, and Turkey have also been singled out. The development comes as TA558 has also been spotted  deploying Venom RAT  via phishing attacks ...

The threat actor known as  Muddled Libra  has been observed actively targeting software-as-a-service (SaaS) applications and cloud service provider (CSP) environments in a bid to exfiltrate sensitive data. "Organizations often store a variety of data in SaaS applications and use services from CSPs," Palo Alto Networks Unit 42  said  in a report published last week. "The threat actors have begun attempting to leverage some of this data to assist with their attack progression, and to use for extortion when trying to monetize their work." Muddled Libra, which shares overlaps with clusters tracked as Scatter Swine, Scattered Spider, Starfraud, and UNC3944, is a notorious cybercriminal group that has leveraged sophisticated social engineering techniques to gain initial access to target networks.  "Scattered Spider threat actors have historically evaded detection on target networks by using living off the land techniques and allowlisted applications to navigate ...