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Cybersecurity researchers have lifted the lid on a new technique adopted by threat actors behind the Chameleon Android banking trojan targeting users in Canada by masquerading as a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) app. "Chameleon was seen masquerading as a CRM app, targeting a Canadian restaurant chain operating internationally," Dutch security outfit ThreatFabric said in a technical report published Monday. The campaign, spotted in July 2024, targeted customers in Canada and Europe, indicating an expansion of its victimology footprint from Australia, Italy, Poland, and the U.K. The use of CRM-related themes for the malicious dropper apps containing the malware points to the targets being customers in the hospitality sector and Business-to-Consumer (B2C) employees. The dropper artifacts are also designed to bypass Restricted Settings imposed by Google in Android 13 and later in order to prevent sideloaded apps from requesting for dangerous permissions (e.g., acc...

Apple on Tuesday announced an update to its next-generation macOS version that makes it a little more difficult for users to override Gatekeeper protections. Gatekeeper is a crucial line of defense built into macOS designed to ensure that only trusted apps run on the operating system. When an app is downloaded from outside of the App Store and opened for the first time, it verifies that the software is from an identified developer. It also runs checks to ensure that the app is notarized and has not been tampered with to install malware on macOS systems. Furthermore, it requires user approval before allowing any such third-party app to be run. It's this user approval mechanism that Apple has now tightened further with macOS Sequoia, the next iteration of the Mac operating system that's expected to be released next month. "In macOS Sequoia, users will no longer be able to Control-click to override Gatekeeper when opening software that isn't signed correctly or no...

INTERPOL said it devised a "global stop-payment mechanism" that helped facilitate the largest-ever recovery of funds defrauded in a business email compromise ( BEC ) scam.  The development comes after an unnamed commodity firm based in Singapore fell victim to a BEC scam in mid-July 2024. It refers to a type of cybercrime where a malicious actor poses as a trusted figure and uses email to trick targets into sending money or divulging confidential company information. Such attacks can take place in myriad ways, including gaining unauthorized access to a finance employee or a law firm's email account to send fake invoices or impersonating a third-party vendor to email a phony bill. "On 15 July, the firm had received an email from a supplier requesting that a pending payment be sent to a new bank account based in Timor-Leste," INTERPOL said in a press statement. "The email, however, came from a fraudulent account spelled slightly different to the supplier...

I had the honor of hosting the first episode of the Xposure Podcast live from Xposure Summit 2025. And I couldn't have asked for a better kickoff panel: three cybersecurity leaders who don't just talk security, they live it. Let me introduce them. Alex Delay , CISO at IDB Bank, knows what it means to defend a highly regulated environment. Ben Mead , Director of Cybersecurity at Avidity Biosciences, brings a forward-thinking security perspective that reflects the innovation behind Avidity's targeted RNA therapeutics. Last but not least, Michael Francess , Director of Cybersecurity Advanced Threat at Wyndham Hotels and Resorts, leads the charge in protecting the franchise. Each brought a unique vantage point to a common challenge: applying Continuous Threat Exposure Management (CTEM) to complex production environments. Gartner made waves in 2023 with a bold prediction: organizations that prioritize CTEM will be three times less likely to be breached by 2026. But here's the kicker -...

The North Korea-linked threat actor known as Moonstone Sleet has continued to push malicious npm packages to the JavaScript package registry with the aim of infecting Windows systems, underscoring the persistent nature of their campaigns. The packages in question, harthat-api and harthat-hash , were published on July 7, 2024, according to Datadog Security Labs. Both the libraries did not attract any downloads and were shortly pulled after a brief period of time. The security arm of the cloud monitoring firm is tracking the threat actor under the name Stressed Pungsan, which exhibits overlaps with a newly discovered North Korean malicious activity cluster dubbed Moonstone Sleet. "While the name resembles the Hardhat npm package (an Ethereum development utility), its content does not indicate any intention to typosquat it," Datadog researchers Sebastian Obregoso and Zack Allen said . "The malicious package reuses code from a well-known GitHub repository called node-...

Everyone loves the double-agent plot twist in a spy movie, but it's a different story when it comes to securing company data. Whether intentional or unintentional, insider threats are a legitimate concern. According to CSA research , 26% of companies who reported a SaaS security incident were struck by an insider.  The challenge for many is detecting those threats before they lead to full breaches. Many security professionals assume there is nothing they can do to protect themselves from a legitimate managed user who logs in with valid credentials using a company MFA method. Insiders can log in during regular business hours, and can easily justify their access within the application.  Cue the plot twist: With the right tools in place, businesses can protect themselves from the enemy from within (and without).  Learn how to secure your entire SaaS stack from both internal and external threats Subduing Identity-Centric Threats with ITDR  In SaaS security, an Ide...

Users in Russia have been the target of a previously undocumented Android post-compromise spyware called LianSpy since at least 2021. Cybersecurity vendor Kaspersky, which discovered the malware in March 2024, noted its use of Yandex Cloud, a Russian cloud service, for command-and-control (C2) communications as a way to avoid having a dedicated infrastructure and evade detection. "This threat is equipped to capture screencasts, exfiltrate user files, and harvest call logs and app lists," security researcher Dmitry Kalinin said in a new technical report published Monday. It's currently not clear how the spyware is distributed, but the Russian company said it's likely deployed through either an unknown security flaw or direct physical access to the target phone. The malware-laced apps are disguised as Alipay or an Android system service. LianSpy, once activated, determines if it's running as a system app to operate in the background using administrator privi...

Google has addressed a high-severity security flaw impacting the Android kernel that it said has been actively exploited in the wild. The vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2024-36971, has been described as a case of remote code execution impacting the kernel. "There are indications that CVE-2024-36971 may be under limited, targeted exploitation," the tech giant noted in its monthly Android security bulletin for August 2024. As is typically the case, the company did not share any additional specifics on the nature of the cyber attacks exploiting the flaw or attribute the activity to a particular threat actor or group. Google's own Pixel line is also impacted by the bug, according to its Pixel update bulletin . That said, Clement Lecigne of Google's Threat Analysis Group (TAG) has been credited with reporting the flaw, suggesting that it's likely being exploited by commercial spyware vendors to infiltrate Android devices in narrowly targeted attacks. The Augus...

A new zero-day pre-authentication remote code execution vulnerability has been disclosed in the Apache OFBiz open-source enterprise resource planning (ERP) system that could allow threat actors to achieve remote code execution on affected instances. Tracked as CVE-2024-38856 , the flaw has a CVSS score of 9.8 out of a maximum of 10.0. It affects Apache OFBiz versions prior to 18.12.15. "The root cause of the vulnerability lies in a flaw in the authentication mechanism," SonicWall, which discovered and reported the shortcoming, said in a statement. "This flaw allows an unauthenticated user to access functionalities that generally require the user to be logged in, paving the way for remote code execution." CVE-2024-38856 is also a patch bypass for CVE-2024-36104 , a path traversal vulnerability that was addressed in early June with the release of 18.12.14. SonicWall described the flaw as residing in the override view functionality that exposes critical endpoi...

Cybersecurity researchers have uncovered design weaknesses in Microsoft's Windows Smart App Control and SmartScreen that could enable threat actors to gain initial access to target environments without raising any warnings. Smart App Control ( SAC ) is a cloud-powered security feature introduced by Microsoft in Windows 11 to block malicious, untrusted, and potentially unwanted apps from being run on the system. In cases where the service is unable to make a prediction about the app, it checks if it's signed or has a valid signature so as to be executed. SmartScreen, which was released alongside Windows 10, is a similar security feature that determines whether a site or a downloaded app is potentially malicious. It also leverages a reputation-based approach for URL and app protection. "Microsoft Defender SmartScreen evaluates a website's URLs to determine if they're known to distribute or host unsafe content," Redmond notes in its documentation. "I...

Organizations in Kazakhstan are the target of a threat activity cluster dubbed Bloody Wolf that delivers a commodity malware called STRRAT (aka Strigoi Master). "The program selling for as little as $80 on underground resources allows the adversaries to take control of corporate computers and hijack restricted data," cybersecurity vendor BI.ZONE said in a new analysis. The cyber attacks employ phishing emails as an initial access vector, impersonating the Ministry of Finance of the Republic of Kazakhstan and other agencies to trick recipients into opening PDF attachments. The file purports to be a non-compliance notice and contains links to a malicious Java archive (JAR) file as well as an installation guide for the Java interpreter necessary for the malware to function. In an attempt to lend legitimacy to the attack, the second link points to a web page associated with the country's government website that urges visitors to install Java in order to ensure that th...