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The Computer Emergency Response Team of Ukraine (CERT-UA) has warned of a new phishing campaign orchestrated by the  Russia-linked APT28 group  to deploy previously undocumented malware such as OCEANMAP, MASEPIE, and STEELHOOK to harvest sensitive information. The activity, which was  detected  by the agency between December 15 and 25, 2023, targeted Ukrainian government entities and Polish organizations with email messages urging recipients to click on a link to view a document. However, to the contrary, the links redirect to malicious web resources that abuse JavaScript and the  "search-ms:" URI protocol handler  to drop a Windows shortcut file (LNK) that launches PowerShell commands to activate an infection chain for a new malware known as MASEPIE. MASEPIE is a Python-based tool to download/upload files and execute commands, with communications with the command-and-control (C2) server taking place over an encrypted channel using the TCP pr...

Nation-state actors affiliated to North Korea have been observed using spear-phishing attacks to deliver an assortment of backdoors and tools such as AppleSeed, Meterpreter, and TinyNuke to seize control of compromised machines. South Korea-based cybersecurity company AhnLab attributed the activity to an advanced persistent threat group known as  Kimsuky . "A notable point about attacks that use AppleSeed is that similar methods of attack have been used for many years with no significant changes to the malware that are used together," the AhnLab Security Emergency Response Center (ASEC)  said  in an analysis published Thursday. Kimsuky , active for over a decade, is known for its targeting of a wide range of entities in South Korea, before expanding its focus to include other geographies in 2017. It was  sanctioned  by the U.S. government late last month for amassing intelligence to support North Korea's strategic objectives. The threat actor's espionage c...

Microsoft on Thursday said it's once again disabling the  ms-appinstaller protocol handler  by default following its abuse by multiple threat actors to distribute malware. "The observed threat actor activity abuses the current implementation of the ms-appinstaller protocol handler as an access vector for malware that may lead to ransomware distribution," the Microsoft Threat Intelligence team  said . It further noted that several cybercriminals are offering a malware kit for sale as a service that leverages the MSIX file format and ms-appinstaller protocol handler. The  changes  have gone into effect in App Installer version 1.21.3421.0 or higher. The attacks take the form of signed malicious MSIX application packages that are distributed via Microsoft Teams or malicious advertisements for legitimate popular software on search engines like Google. At least four different financially motivated hacking groups have been observed taking advantage of the App I...

Google Cloud has addressed a medium-severity security flaw in its platform that could be abused by an attacker who already has access to a Kubernetes cluster to escalate their privileges. "An attacker who has compromised the  Fluent Bit  logging container could combine that access with high privileges required by  Anthos Service Mesh  (on clusters that have enabled it) to escalate privileges in the cluster," the company  said  as part of an advisory released on December 14, 2023. Palo Alto Networks Unit 42, which discovered and reported the shortcoming, said adversaries could weaponize it to carry out "data theft, deploy malicious pods, and disrupt the cluster's operations." There is no evidence that the issue has been exploited in the wild. It has been addressed in the following versions of Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) and Anthos Service Mesh (ASM) - 1.25.16-gke.1020000 1.26.10-gke.1235000 1.27.7-gke.1293000 1.28.4-gke.1083000 1.17.8-asm.8 ...

The  Operation Triangulation  spyware attacks targeting Apple iOS devices leveraged never-before-seen exploits that made it possible to even bypass pivotal hardware-based security protections erected by the company. Russian cybersecurity firm Kaspersky, which  discovered  the  campaign  at the beginning of 2023 after becoming one of the targets,  described  it as the "most sophisticated attack chain" it has ever observed to date. The campaign is believed to have been active since 2019. Operation Triangulation gets its name from the use of a fingerprinting technique called canvas fingerprinting to draw a yellow triangle on a pink background with Web Graphics Library ( WebGL ) in the device's memory. The exploitation activity involved the use of four zero-day flaws that were fashioned into a chain to obtain an unprecedented level of access and backdoor target devices running iOS versions up to iOS 16.2 with the ultimate goal of gathering ...

A new malware loader is being used by threat actors to deliver a wide range of  information stealers  such as Lumma Stealer (aka LummaC2), Vidar, RecordBreaker (aka Raccoon Stealer V2), and  Rescoms . Cybersecurity firm ESET is tracking the trojan under the name  Win/TrojanDownloader.Rugmi . "This malware is a loader with three types of components: a downloader that downloads an encrypted payload, a loader that runs the payload from internal resources, and another loader that runs the payload from an external file on the disk," the company  said  in its Threat Report H2 2023. Telemetry data gathered by the company shows that detections for the Rugmi loader spiked in October and November 2023, surging from single digit daily numbers to hundreds per day. Stealer malware is typically sold under a malware-as-a-service (MaaS) model to other threat actors on a subscription basis. Lumma Stealer, for instance, is advertised in underground forums for $250 a mo...

A new zero-day security flaw has been discovered in Apache OfBiz, an open-source Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system that could be exploited to bypass authentication protections. The vulnerability, tracked as  CVE-2023-51467 , resides in the login functionality and is the result of an incomplete patch for another critical vulnerability ( CVE-2023-49070 , CVSS score: 9.8) that was released earlier this month. "The  security measures  taken to patch CVE-2023-49070 left the root issue intact and therefore the authentication bypass was still present," the SonicWall Capture Labs threat research team, which discovered the bug,  said  in a statement shared with The Hacker News. CVE-2023-49070 refers to a pre-authenticated remote code execution flaw impacting versions prior to 18.12.10 that, when successfully exploited, could allow threat actors to gain full control over the server and siphon sensitive data. It is caused due to a deprecated XML-RPC component ...

Barracuda has revealed that Chinese threat actors exploited a new zero-day in its Email Security Gateway (ESG) appliances to deploy backdoors on a "limited number" of devices. Tracked as  CVE-2023-7102 , the issue relates to a case of  arbitrary code execution  that resides within a third-party and open-source library named Spreadsheet::ParseExcel that's used by the Amavis scanner within the gateway to screen Microsoft Excel email attachments for malware. The company attributed the activity to a threat actor tracked by Google-owned Mandiant as  UNC4841 , which was previously linked to the  active exploitation  of another zero-day in Barracuda devices (CVE-2023-2868, CVSS score: 9.8) earlier this year. Successful exploitation of the new flaw is accomplished by means of a specially crafted Microsoft Excel email attachment. This is followed by the deployment of new variants of known implants called  SEASPY and SALTWATER  that are equipped to off...

A new Android backdoor has been discovered with potent capabilities to carry out a range of malicious actions on infected devices. Dubbed  Xamalicious  by the McAfee Mobile Research Team, the malware is so named for the fact that it's developed using an open-source mobile app framework called Xamarin and abuses the operating system's accessibility permissions to fulfill its objectives. It's also capable of gathering metadata about the compromised device and contacting a command-and-control (C2) server to fetch a second-stage payload, but only after determining if it fits the bill. The second stage is "dynamically injected as an assembly DLL at runtime level to take full control of the device and potentially perform fraudulent actions such as clicking on ads, installing apps, among other actions financially motivated without user consent," security researcher Fernando Ruiz  said . The cybersecurity firm said it identified 25 apps that come with this active thr...

Poorly secured Linux SSH servers are being targeted by bad actors to install port scanners and dictionary attack tools with the goal of targeting other vulnerable servers and co-opting them into a network to carry out cryptocurrency mining and distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks. "Threat actors can also choose to install only scanners and sell the breached IP and account credentials on the dark web," the AhnLab Security Emergency Response Center (ASEC)  said  in a report on Tuesday. In these attacks, adversaries try to guess a server's SSH credentials by running through a list of commonly used combinations of usernames and passwords, a technique called dictionary attack. Should the brute-force attempt be successful, it's followed by the threat actor deploying other malware, including scanners, to scan for other susceptible systems on the internet. Specifically, the scanner is designed to look for systems where port 22 -- which is associated with the SSH ...