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Threat actors are exploiting ProxyLogon and ProxyShell exploits in unpatched Microsoft Exchange Servers as part of an ongoing spam campaign that leverages stolen email chains to bypass security software and deploy malware on vulnerable systems. The findings come from Trend Micro following an investigation into a number of intrusions in the Middle East that culminated in the distribution of a never-before-seen loader dubbed SQUIRRELWAFFLE. First publicly  documented  by Cisco Talos, the attacks are believed to have commenced in mid-September 2021 via laced Microsoft Office documents. "It is known for sending its malicious emails as replies to pre-existing email chains, a tactic that lowers a victim's guard against malicious activities," researchers Mohamed Fahmy, Sherif Magdy, Abdelrhman Sharshar  said  in a report published last week. "To be able to pull this off, we believe it involved the use of a chain of both ProxyLogon and ProxyShell exploits." ProxyLo...

Spain's National Court ruled on Tuesday to extradite a 36-year-old Russian computer programmer, accused by American authorities of malicious hacking offences, to the United States, according to a court document. Peter Yuryevich Levashov , also known as Peter Severa, was arrested in April this year when he was travelling with his family to Barcelona, Spain from his home in Russia—a country without an extradition treaty with the United States—for his role in a huge computer botnet. However, since Levashov has previously worked with for Vladimir Putin's United Russia Party for ten years, he fears that the US authorities would torture him for information about his political work if sent there to face the charges against him. " If I go to the U.S., I will die in a year. They want to get information of a military nature and about the United Russia party ," RIA news agency quoted Levashov as saying. " I will be tortured, within a year I will be killed, or I wil...

Vulnerability Management (VM) has long been a cornerstone of organizational cybersecurity. Nearly as old as the discipline of cybersecurity itself, it aims to help organizations identify and address potential security issues before they become serious problems. Yet, in recent years, the limitations of this approach have become increasingly evident.  At its core, Vulnerability Management processes remain essential for identifying and addressing weaknesses. But as time marches on and attack avenues evolve, this approach is beginning to show its age. In a recent report, How to Grow Vulnerability Management into Exposure Management (Gartner, How to Grow Vulnerability Management Into Exposure Management, 8 November 2024, Mitchell Schneider Et Al.), we believe Gartner® addresses this point precisely and demonstrates how organizations can – and must – shift from a vulnerability-centric strategy to a broader Exposure Management (EM) framework. We feel it's more than a worthwhile read an...

Smart Devices are growing at an exponential rate and so are the threats to them. After your Computers, Servers, Routers , Mobiles and Tablets, now hackers are targeting your Smart TVs, warns Eugene Kaspersky the co-founder and chief executive of Kaspersky Lab. As the increase in the manufactures of Smart TVs by different companies, it could be estimated that by 2016, over 100 million TVs are expected to be connected to the Internet and in the time it may rise as a profitable fruit for the malware authors and cyber criminals to exploit these devices. The 48 year-old Eugene Kaspersky , one of the world's top technology security experts, has thrown light on the future of Computer Security and warned that  Internet of Things (IoT) such as TVs, Refrigerators, Microwave or dishwashers will necessarily bring undesirable cyber threats to your home environment, because any device connected to the Internet is vulnerable and can be infected. " The threats will dive...

Yahoo! The one who enabled the HTTPS connections by default from the beginning of this year, the one who encrypts traffic moving between its data centers from 31st March , now has been accused of harming every  Mailing List  across the world. Experts from the Internet Engineering Council John R. Levine , specialized in email infrastructure and spam filtering claimed this in the post titled " Yahoo breaks every mailing list in the world including the IETF's. " on Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF). Yahoo has established a new rule to automatically exclude Yahoo users from the mailing list, because Mailing List server does not comply with DMARC requirements and they strongly modifies each email. He talks about an " emerging e-mail security scheme " known as Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting and Conformance (DMARC) that has been implemented by almost every largest email service providers, including Gmail, Hotmail, Comcast, and Yahoo. DMARC helps to reduce ...

Germany has confirmed its biggest Data theft in the country's history with usernames and passwords of some 18 million email accounts stolen and compromised by hackers. The Story broke by the German press, Der Spiegel on Thursday, when German Authorities revealed another mass hacking of private data belonged to German citizens and major Internet companies both in Germany and abroad. 16 MILLION AND NOW 18 MILLION Authorities in the northwestern city of Verden unearthed a treasure of personal information, a list of about 18 million stolen email addresses and passwords, and seized it just after only two months from the previous major data breach, when researchers came across 16 million compromised email accounts of German users while conducting research on a botnet, a network of computers infected with malware.  The accounts were compromised by hackers in the mid of January, and Der Spiegel suggests that the same group of hackers is responsible for both thefts and t...

A location based Social Networking platform with 45 million users,' Foursquare ' was vulnerable to the primary email address disclosed.  Foursquare is a Smartphone application that gives you details of nearby cafes, bars, shops, parks using GPS location and also tells about your friends nearby. According to a Penetration tester and hacker ' Jamal Eddin e ',  an attacker can extract email addresses of all 45 million users just by using a few lines of scripting tool. Basically the flaw exists in the Invitation system of the Foursquare app. While testing the app, he found that invitation received on the recipient's end actually disclosing the sender's email address, as shown above. Invitation URL:  https://foursquare.com/mehdi?action=acceptFriendship&expires=1378920415&src=wtbfe& uid = 64761059 &sig=mmlx96RwGrQ2fJAg4OWZhAWnDvc%3D Where 'uid' parameter represents the sender's profile ID.  Hacker noticed th...

Have you given shed to Zombies in your house? No???? May be you have no idea about it. After Computers, Servers, Routers, Mobiles, Tablets…. Now its turn of your home appliances to be a weapon or a victim of cyber war. Recently Security Researchers from Proofpoint  found more than 100,000 Smart TVs, Refrigerator, and other smart household appliances compromised by hackers to send out 750,000 malicious spam emails. As the ' Internet of Things ' becoming smart and popular it became an easy weapon for cyber criminals to launch large scale of cyber attacks. " The attack that Proofpoint observed and profiled occurred between December 23, 2013 and January 6, 2014, and featured waves of malicious email, typically sent in bursts of 100,000, three times per day, targeting Enterprises and individuals worldwide." Previously, such attacks were only drafted theoretically by researchers, but this is the first such proven attack involved smart household appliances that are used as ' thingB...

With all the popular social networking websites there on the web, managing them from several different internet browser tabs or windows can get frustrated very quickly. Besides our own Facebook Page, Twitter account, and Google+ profile, I also manage several others and, YES, I feel the " time management " pain! To make social media management and monitoring easier for users, some very innovative desktop applications and mobile apps were developed to help organize multiple platforms and information sharing across selected networks. Using online tools like TweetDeck, Seesmic, Hootsuite , Feedly, Twuffer and Buffer App for scheduling and posting directly from a web page has become an absolute necessity especially where Twitter is concerned. Additionally these apps gives you the ability to post on one or all of your connected accounts together i.e Multiple Facebook, Twitter or Google+ profiles. These applications don't require your passwords for social me...

If you're a user of the Buffer app, the social-media management service that let you cross-posting to various social networks, be aware that the service got hacked yesterday, with spam messages going out over Facebook.  " Buffer was hacked around 1 hour ago, and many of you may have experienced spam posts sent from you via Buffer. I can only understand how angry and disappointed you must be right now. " Buffer team said, in an email sent to users and also posted to Buffer's blog . It's not yet clear how many of Buffer's 1 million or so users were affected by the hack, but buffer maintains that user passwords are safe nor has any "billing or payment information been affected or exposed" . Photo Credit : The Next Web It appears that Buffer's Facebook and Twitter spam messages were first sent at around 2:20 p.m. ET. Hackers have used the exploit to spam user accounts on Facebook, Twitter, Google+, and other sites. Just recently, Instagram saw a viral wa...

16-Year-Old Teenager has been arrested over his alleged involvement in the World's biggest largest DDoS attacks against the Dutch anti-spam group Spamhaus . The teenager, whose name is unknown at this point, was arrested by British police in April, but details of his arrest were just leaked to the British press on Thursday. He was taken into custody when police swooped on his south-west London home after investigations identified significant sums of money were flowing through his bank account. The suspect was found with his computer systems open and logged on to various virtual systems and forums. The March 20 attack on Spamhaus has been dubbed as the " biggest cyber attack in the history of the Internet " which saw server of the Dutch anti-spam organization being bombarded with traffic in tune of 300 billion bits per second (300Gbps). A DDoS attack takes place when hackers use an army of infected computers to send traffic to a server, causing a shutdown in the process. I...

Famous poker player 'Masaaki Kagawa' who won about $1.5 million in poker tournaments has been arrested by Japanese authorities for allegedly distributing Android malware. According to Symantec , He is just one of nine men arrested for distributing spam that included emails with links to Android malware ' Android.Enesoluty ', used to collect contact details stored on the owner's device. Security researchers discovered Android.Enesoluty first time in September 2012, it steals information and sends it to computers run by hackers. The operation began around September, 2012 and ended in April, 2013 when authorities raided the company office. Around 150 domains were registered to host the malicious apps and the group was able to collect approximately 37 million email addresses from around 810,000 Android devices. The company earned over 3.9 million US dollars by running a fake online dating service called Sakura site. " His passion for taking chances ...

Researchers from Kaspersky Lab have discovered a new spam message campaign being transmitted via Skype contains malware capable of using an infected computer to mine for Bitcoins. The malware, identified as Trojan.Win32.Jorik.IRCbot.xkt . Bitcoin is a non-governmental, fully-digital currency based on an open-source and peer-to-peer internet protocol. Cybercriminals have figured out that distributed Bitcoin mining is a perfect task for botnets and have started developing malware that can abuse the CPUs and GPUs of infected computers to generate Bitcoins. " Bitcoin mining is the process of making computer hardware do mathematical calculations for the Bitcoin network to confirm transactions and increase security, " Victims are encouraged to install malware file that is included with messages like " this my favourite picture of you ". Those who click the links, infected with a virus dropper downloaded from a server in India. If the malicious file is ins...

Spammy Facebook apps are nothing new, the web giant has been dealing with suspicious behavior apps since the website launched the Facebook Platform for developers in 2007. As an open source app development tool, anyone can create an app, including people who really just want to steal your information, and your money. With cyber crime  including identity theft, on the rise, more Facebook users should begin to pay closer attention to what they click on, especially if it is shared in a spammy way. Sophos reports that nearly 60,000 people have clicked on one scam in particular, which is one that promises to allow you to see who has viewed your profile. The app automatically posts a comment to the users timeline, and sometimes posts as a photo with the message ' OMG OMG OMG… I cant believe this actually works! Now you really can see who viewed your profile ! on (link here). ' The app does not actually allow users to see profile views but instead leads them, and anyone...

A notorious group of Internet trolls says it has unleashed a worm that has littered Tumblr blogs with inflammatory and racist posts. A massive bug affecting some 8,600 unique Tumblr users.  Gay Nigger Association of America , took responsibility for the attack. The infected post begins: " Dearest 'Tumblr' users  , This is in response to the seemingly pandemic growth and world-wide propagation of the most fucking worthless, contrived, bourgeoisie, self-congratulating and decadent bullshit the internet ever had the fortune of faciliating ." How worm work ?  Worm took advantage of Tumblr's reblogging feature, meaning that anyone who was logged into Tumblr would automatically reblog the infectious post if they visited one of the offending pages. Naked Security said . In a message posted to the company's official Twitter account, the blogging site said, " We are aware that there is a viral post circulating on Tumblr. We are working to resolve the issue as sw...

TripAdvisor Inc., a hotel-review website, recently became a victim of the bug, said Trend Micro Inc., an Internet security solutions provider. Many of TripAdvisor's users received spam mail with booking confirmations for hotels they had checked out on the website , 1.89% of Indian Internet Users have already been affected. The email purporting to be in the name of one of the Hotels has a similar theme to its English counterpart as it contains confirmation and details on an alleged booking reservation.  TripAdvisor, which is among India's top five travel brands as per digital market research firm ComScore Inc., globally has 60 million unique monthly visitors and 2.4 million unique users per month in India. Gamarue is a family of malware that may be distributed by exploit kits, spammed emails or other malware, and has been observed stealing information from an affected user. Trend Micro reported that one of their manager received the spam at his personal e-mail address ...

From Yesterday CloudFlare Security team receiving various reports of a Phishing Scam, which is targeting customers by saying that " you have exceeded bandwidth ". In a blog post , CloudFlare said, " Some CloudFlare customers are currently being targeted with a phishing email that was not sent by CloudFlare. Please do not click on the links in the email. " Scammer asking users to visit a phishing link (removed from sample for readers security). In case you open the URL, we request you to do not enter your username and password in the URL. Please choose a strong password for CloudFlare to save your Domains.

Last month we reported a worm targeting Skype users with spam messages designed to infect machines with the Dorkbot ransomware has been discovered. This malware is spreading through a question/ phrase sent to the users by someone and the question is: " lol is this your new profile pic? " Same spam now targeting most of the Indian skype users, Indian CERT (Computer Emergency Response Team) issue a warning about this ongoing spam attack via advisory. A number of Indians use 'Skype' to communicate with their friends, relatives and other contacts within and outside the country. " A malicious spam campaign is on the rise targeting Skype users by sending instant message which appears to come from friends in the Skype contact list ," the advisory reads. Security researchers from Avast had intercepted this Darkbot malware campaign, and they estimate that this affecting millions of Skype users. " The worm is reported as stealing user credentials, engaging in click fr...

Symantec has reported an increase in spam messages containing .gov URLs. Cybercriminals are using 1.usa.gov links in their spam campaigns to trick users into thinking the links lead to genuine US government Web sites. Spammers have created these shortened URLs through a loophole in the URL shortening service provided by bit.ly. USA.gov and bit.ly have collaborated, enabling anyone to shorten a .gov or .mil URL into a trustworthy 1.usa.gov URL. The click rate of the campaign has been significant, redirecting more than 16,000 victims over a five day period to a malicious website designed to look like a CNBC news article pushing several work from home scams. According to researchers from security firm Symantec , they simply leveraged an open-redirect vulnerability present on the official government site of Vermont (Vermont.gov) . Therefore, something like 1.usa.gov/…/Rxpfn9 takes you to labor.vermont.gov/LinkClick.aspx?link=[spam site] which then redirects you ...

Yesterday I have reported about a huge mysterious hack in wordpress servers, that cause compromise of 15000 wordpress account and hacker managed to post same spam article of " Money making sites " with title - " Im getting paid! " on each blog. We explained how hacker was earning in thousands of dollars by just sharing his Referral link on all these hacked sites. The campaign include some malicious domains where hacker is redirecting all readers and service from a well known email marketing company - Getresponse . Using the same dork -- site:wordpress.com "Im getting paid!" , today we tried to find out number of hacked accounts and once again another shocking number - its 59300 blogs in compromised list on 2nd day of hacking campaign. So many blogs have been compromised without any known method and wordpress team still not in action. As mentioned in last article, yesterday I tried to contact with Getresponse response team whose ...

Official Twitter account of Rock band ' Garbage ' has been compromised and hacker is posting Spam tweets and links using adf.ly, which is a url shortener service that pays on clicks. Hacked twitter account hack around 55,563 Followers. Hacker can post malicious links also, but in this case we can see that purpose is not to infect other, instead hacker want to make some money by spreading links. Even he has mention this in a tweet, " All you people saying I'm dumb. I've made over 19 dollars by spamming ad.fly links. I hack twitters and spam them great money ," How hacker got access to twitter account is not yet clear, may be phishing, social engineering or can be a  password guess, but once readers should learn the importance of strong password. Yesterday we have posted another Exclusive report that, how 15000 wordpress blogs hacked and hacker is making money from referral system by posting spam articles on each...