social engineering | Breaking Cybersecurity News | The Hacker News

The North Korea-linked threat actor known as Sapphire Sleet is estimated to have stolen more than $10 million worth of cryptocurrency as part of social engineering campaigns orchestrated over a six-month period. These findings come from Microsoft, which said that multiple threat activity clusters with ties to the country have been observed creating fake profiles on LinkedIn, posing as both recruiters and job seekers to generate illicit revenue for the sanction-hit nation. Sapphire Sleet, which is known to be active since at least 2020, overlaps with hacking groups tracked as APT38 and BlueNoroff. In November 2023, the tech giant revealed that the threat actor had established infrastructure that impersonated skills assessment portals to carry out its social engineering campaigns. One of the main methods adopted by the group for over a year is to pose as a venture capitalist, deceptively claiming an interest in a target user's company in order to set up an online meeting. Targ...

Five alleged members of the infamous Scattered Spider cybercrime crew have been indicted in the U.S. for targeting employees of companies across the country using social engineering techniques to harvest credentials and using them to gain unauthorized access to sensitive data and break into crypto accounts to steal digital assets worth millions of dollars. All of the accused parties have been charged with one count of conspiracy to commit wire fraud, one count of conspiracy, and one count of aggravated identity theft. They include - Ahmed Hossam Eldin Elbadawy, 23, aka AD, of College Station, Texas Noah Michael Urban, 20, aka Sosa and Elijah, of Palm Coast, Florida Evans Onyeaka Osiebo, 20, of Dallas, Texas Joel Martin Evans, 25, aka joeleoli, of Jacksonville, North Carolina; and Tyler Robert Buchanan, 22, aka tylerb, of the U.K. While the name Scattered Spider  is not directly referenced in the indictment document, it has been described as "a loosely organized financi...

The Iranian threat actor known as TA455 has been observed taking a leaf out of a North Korean hacking group's playbook to orchestrate its own version of the Dream Job campaign targeting the aerospace industry by offering fake jobs since at least September 2023. "The campaign distributed the SnailResin malware, which activates the SlugResin backdoor," Israeli cybersecurity company ClearSky said in a Tuesday analysis. TA455, also tracked by Google-owned Mandiant as UNC1549 and by PwC as Yellow Dev 13, is assessed to be a sub-cluster within APT35 , which is known by the names CALANQUE, Charming Kitten, CharmingCypress, ITG18, Mint Sandstorm (formerly Phosphorus), Newscaster, TA453, and Yellow Garuda. Affiliated with Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), the group is said to share tactical overlaps with clusters referred to as Smoke Sandstorm (previously Bohrium) and Crimson Sandstorm (previously Curium). Earlier this February, the adversarial collecti...

Threat actors with ties to the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK aka North Korea) have been found embedding malware within Flutter applications, marking the first time this tactic has been adopted by the adversary to infect Apple macOS devices. Jamf Threat Labs, which made the discovery based on artifacts uploaded to the VirusTotal platform earlier this month, said the Flutter-built applications are part of a broader activity that includes malware written in Golang and Python. It's currently not known how these samples are distributed to victims, and if it has been used against any targets, or if the attackers are switching to a new delivery method. That said, North Korean threat actors are known to engage in extensive social engineering efforts targeting employees of cryptocurrency and decentralized finance businesses. "We suspect these specific examples are testing," Jaron Bradley, director at Jamf Threat Labs, told The Hacker News. "It's p...

Cybersecurity researchers have flagged a new ransomware family called Ymir that was deployed in an attack two days after systems were compromised by a stealer malware called RustyStealer. "Ymir ransomware introduces a unique combination of technical features and tactics that enhance its effectiveness," Russian cybersecurity vendor Kaspersky said . "Threat actors leveraged an unconventional blend of memory management functions – malloc, memmove, and memcmp – to execute malicious code directly in the memory. This approach deviates from the typical sequential execution flow seen in widespread ransomware types, enhancing its stealth capabilities." Kaspersky said it observed the ransomware used in a cyber attack targeting an unnamed organization in Colombia, with the threat actors previously delivering the RustyStealer malware to gather corporate credentials. It's believed that the stolen credentials were used to gain unauthorized access to the company's n...

A threat actor with ties to the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK) has been observed targeting cryptocurrency-related businesses with a multi-stage malware capable of infecting Apple macOS devices . Cybersecurity company SentinelOne, which dubbed the campaign Hidden Risk , attributed it with high confidence to BlueNoroff, which has been previously linked to malware families such as RustBucket , KANDYKORN , ObjCShellz , RustDoor (aka Thiefbucket ), and TodoSwift . The activity "uses emails propagating fake news about cryptocurrency trends to infect targets via a malicious application disguised as a PDF file," researchers Raffaele Sabato, Phil Stokes, and Tom Hegel said in a report shared with The Hacker News. "The campaign likely began as early as July 2024 and uses email and PDF lures with fake news headlines or stories about crypto-related topics." As revealed by the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) in a September 2024 advisory, the...

Cybersecurity researchers have uncovered an ongoing malvertising campaign that abuses Meta's advertising platform and hijacked Facebook accounts to distribute an information stealer known as SYS01stealer. "The hackers behind the campaign use trusted brands to expand their reach," Bitdefender Labs said in a report shared with The Hacker News. "The malvertising campaign leverages nearly a hundred malicious domains, utilized not only for distributing the malware but also for live command and control (C2) operations, allowing threat actors to manage the attack in real-time." SYS01stealer was first documented by Morphisec in early 2023, describing attack campaigns targeting Facebook business accounts using Google ads and fake Facebook profiles that promote games, adult content, and cracked software. Like other stealer malware, the end goal is to steal login credentials, browsing history, and cookies. But it's also focused on obtaining Facebook ad and busin...

The North Korean threat actor known as Lazarus Group has been attributed to the zero-day exploitation of a now-patched security flaw in Google Chrome to seize control of infected devices. Cybersecurity vendor Kaspersky said it made the discovery after it came across a novel attack chain in May 2024 that targeted the personal computer of an unnamed Russian national with the Manuscrypt backdoor. This entails triggering the zero-day exploit simply upon visiting a fake game website ("detankzone[.]com") that was aimed at individuals in the cryptocurrency sector. The campaign is estimated to have commenced in February 2024. "On the surface, this website resembled a professionally designed product page for a decentralized finance (DeFi) NFT-based (non-fungible token) multiplayer online battle arena (MOBA) tank game, inviting users to download a trial version," Kaspersky researchers Boris Larin and Vasily Berdnikov said . "But that was just a disguise. Under the...

Threat actors are leveraging fake Google Meet web pages as part of an ongoing malware campaign dubbed ClickFix to deliver infostealers targeting Windows and macOS systems. "This tactic involves displaying fake error messages in web browsers to deceive users into copying and executing a given malicious PowerShell code, finally infecting their systems," French cybersecurity company Sekoia said in a report shared with The Hacker News. Variations of the ClickFix (aka ClearFake and OneDrive Pastejacking) campaign have been reported widely in recent months , with threat actors employing different lures to redirect users to bogus pages that aim to deploy malware by urging site visitors to run an encoded PowerShell code to address a supposed issue with displaying content in the web browser. These pages are known to masquerade as popular online services, including Facebook, Google Chrome, PDFSimpli, and reCAPTCHA, and now Google Meet as well as potentially Zoom - meet.googl...

Social media accounts help shape a brand's identity and reputation. These public forums engage directly with customers as they are a hub to connect, share content and answer questions. However, despite the high profile role these accounts have, many organizations overlook social media account security. Many lack the safeguards to prevent unauthorized access — a situation no organization wants as it can quickly spiral to include reputational damage and financial losses.  With the impact this high, the need for deep understanding of social media risks as well as how to protect an organization's social media account are more crucial than ever. This article dives into the details of social media accounts, how social media can be misused and how to protect oneself. Understanding the Layers of Social Media Access Platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn typically have two layers of access.  The Public Facing Page : where brands post content and engage with users. ...

Microsoft is warning of cyber attack campaigns that abuse legitimate file hosting services such as SharePoint, OneDrive, and Dropbox that are widely used in enterprise environments as a defense evasion tactic. The end goal of the campaigns are broad and varied, allowing threat actors to compromise identities and devices and conduct business email compromise ( BEC ) attacks, which ultimately result in financial fraud, data exfiltration, and lateral movement to other endpoints. The weaponization of legitimate internet services (LIS) is an increasingly popular risk vector adopted by adversaries to blend in with legitimate network traffic in a manner such that it often bypasses traditional security defenses and complicates attribution efforts. The approach is also called living-off-trusted-sites (LOTS), as it leverages the trust and familiarity of these services to sidestep email security guardrails and deliver malware. Microsoft said it has been observing a new trend in phishing c...

A large-scale fraud campaign leveraged fake trading apps published on the Apple App Store and Google Play Store, as well as phishing sites, to defraud victims, per findings from Group-IB. The campaign is part of a consumer investment fraud scheme that's also widely known as pig butchering , in which prospective victims are lured into making investments in cryptocurrency or other financial instruments after gaining their trust under the guise of a romantic relationship or an investment advisor. Such manipulative and social engineering operations often end with the victims losing their funds, and in some cases, the extraction of even more money from them by requesting various fees and other payments. The Singapore-headquartered company said the campaign has a global reach, with victims reported across Asia-Pacific, European, Middle East, and Africa. The bogus apps, built using the UniApp Framework, have been classified under the moniker UniShadowTrade . The activity cluster i...

More than 140,000 phishing websites have been found linked to a phishing-as-a-service (PhaaS) platform named Sniper Dz over the past year, indicating that it's being used by a large number of cybercriminals to conduct credential theft. "For prospective phishers, Sniper Dz offers an online admin panel with a catalog of phishing pages," Palo Alto Networks Unit 42 researchers Shehroze Farooqi, Howard Tong, and Alex Starov said in a technical report. "Phishers can either host these phishing pages on Sniper Dz-owned infrastructure or download Sniper Dz phishing templates to host on their own servers." Perhaps what makes it even more lucrative is that these services are provided for free. That said, the credentials harvested using the phishing sites are also exfiltrated to the operators of the PhaaS platform, a technique that Microsoft calls double theft . PhaaS platforms have become an increasingly common way for aspiring threat actors to enter the world of cy...