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Japanese and U.S. authorities have formerly attributed the theft of cryptocurrency worth $308 million from cryptocurrency company DMM Bitcoin in May 2024 to North Korean cyber actors. "The theft is affiliated with TraderTraitor threat activity, which is also tracked as Jade Sleet, UNC4899, and Slow Pisces," the agencies said . "TraderTraitor activity is often characterized by targeted social engineering directed at multiple employees of the same company simultaneously." The alert comes courtesy of the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), the Department of Defense Cyber Crime Center, and the National Police Agency of Japan. It's worth noting that DMM Bitcoin shut down its operations earlier this month in the aftermath of the hack. TraderTraitor refers to a North Korea-linked persistent threat activity cluster that has a history of targeting companies in the Web3 sector, luring victims into downloading malware-laced cryptocurrency apps and ultimately ...

The U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) on Monday added a now-patched high-severity security flaw impacting Acclaim Systems USAHERDS to the Known Exploited Vulnerabilities ( KEV ) catalog, based on evidence of active exploitation in the wild. The vulnerability in question is CVE-2021-44207 (CVSS score: 8.1), a case of hard-coded, static credentials in Acclaim USAHERDS that could allow an attacker to ultimately execute arbitrary code on susceptible servers. Specifically, it concerns the use of static ValidationKey and DecryptionKey values in version 7.4.0.1 and prior that could be weaponized to achieve remote code execution on the server that runs the application. That said, an attacker would have to leverage some other means to obtain the keys in the first place. "These keys are used to provide security for the application ViewState," Google-owned Mandiant said in advisory for the flaw back in December 2021. "A threat actor with knowledge ...

The Apache Software Foundation (ASF) has released a security update to address an important vulnerability in its Tomcat server software that could result in remote code execution (RCE) under certain conditions. The vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2024-56337 , has been described as an incomplete mitigation for CVE-2024-50379 (CVSS score: 9.8), another critical security flaw in the same product that was previously addressed on December 17, 2024. "Users running Tomcat on a case insensitive file system with the default servlet write enabled (readonly initialisation parameter set to the non-default value of false) may need additional configuration to fully mitigate CVE-2024-50379 depending on which version of Java they are using with Tomcat," the project maintainers said in an advisory last week. Both the flaws are Time-of-check Time-of-use ( TOCTOU ) race condition vulnerabilities that could result in code execution on case-insensitive file systems when the default servlet is...

Cybersecurity researchers have found that it's possible to use large language models (LLMs) to generate new variants of malicious JavaScript code at scale in a manner that can better evade detection. "Although LLMs struggle to create malware from scratch, criminals can easily use them to rewrite or obfuscate existing malware, making it harder to detect," Palo Alto Networks Unit 42 researchers said in a new analysis. "Criminals can prompt LLMs to perform transformations that are much more natural-looking, which makes detecting this malware more challenging." With enough transformations over time, the approach could have the advantage of degrading the performance of malware classification systems, tricking them into believing that a piece of nefarious code is actually benign. While LLM providers have increasingly enforced security guardrails to prevent them from going off the rails and producing unintended output, bad actors have advertised tools like WormGPT...

The online world never takes a break, and this week shows why. From ransomware creators being caught to hackers backed by governments trying new tricks, the message is clear: cybercriminals are always changing how they attack, and we need to keep up. Hackers are using everyday tools in harmful ways, hiding spyware in trusted apps, and finding new ways to take advantage of old security gaps. These events aren't random—they show just how clever and flexible cyber threats can be. In this edition, we'll look at the most important cyber events from the past week and share key takeaways to help you stay safe and prepared. Let's get started. ⚡ Threat of the Week LockBit Developer Rostislav Panev Charged in the U.S. — Rostislav Panev, a 51-year-old dual Russian and Israeli national, has been charged in the U.S. for allegedly acting as the developer of the now-disrupted LockBit ransomware-as-a-service (RaaS) operation, netting about $230,000 between June 2022 and February 2024. Panev was ...

An interruption to the phishing-as-a-service (PhaaS) toolkit called Rockstar 2FA has led to a rapid uptick in activity from another nascent offering named FlowerStorm . "It appears that the [Rockstar2FA] group running the service experienced at least a partial collapse of its infrastructure, with pages associated with the service no longer reachable," Sophos said in a new report published last week. "This does not appear to be because of a takedown action, but due to some technical failure on the backend of the service." Rockstar2FA was first documented by Trustwave late last month as a PhaaS service that allows criminal actors to launch phishing attacks that are capable of harvesting Microsoft 365 account credentials and session cookies, thereby circumventing multi-factor authentication (MFA) protections. The service is assessed to be an updated version of the DadSec phishing kit, which is tracked by Microsoft under the name Storm-1575. A majority of the ph...

The 2025 cybersecurity landscape is increasingly complex, driven by sophisticated cyber threats, increased regulation, and rapidly evolving technology. In 2025, organizations will be challenged with protecting sensitive information for their customers while continuing to provide seamless and easy user experiences. Here's a closer look at ten emerging challenges and threats set to shape the coming year. 1. AI as a weapon for attackers The dual-use nature of AI has created a great deal of risk to organizations as cybercriminals increasingly harness the power of AI to perpetrate highly sophisticated attacks. AI-powered malware can change its behavior in real-time. This means it can evade traditional methods of detection and find and exploit vulnerabilities with uncanny precision. Automated reconnaissance tools let attackers compile granular intelligence about systems, employees, and defenses of a target at unprecedented scale and speed. AI use also reduces the planning time for a...

Meta Platforms-owned WhatsApp scored a major legal victory in its fight against Israeli commercial spyware vendor NSO Group after a federal judge in the U.S. state of California ruled in favor of the messaging giant for exploiting a security vulnerability to deliver Pegasus. "The limited evidentiary record before the court does show that defendants' Pegasus code was sent through plaintiffs' California-based servers 43 times during the relevant time period in May 2019," United States District Judge Phyllis J. Hamilton said . The order further lambasted NSO Group, stating it "repeatedly failed to produce relevant discovery and failed to obey court orders regarding such discovery," referring to the company's failure to produce the Pegasus source code and for limiting the access to Israeli citizens present in Israel. This information, per WhatsApp, included code only pertaining to an Amazon Web Services (AWS) server, and not the entire codebase that wo...

Italy's data protection authority has fined ChatGPT maker OpenAI a fine of €15 million ($15.66 million) over how the generative artificial intelligence application handles personal data. The fine comes nearly a year after the Garante found that ChatGPT processed users' information to train its service in violation of the European Union's General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). The authority said OpenAI did not notify it of a security breach that took place in March 2023, and that it processed the personal information of users to train ChatGPT without having an adequate legal basis to do so. It also accused the company of going against the principle of transparency and related information obligations toward users. "Furthermore, OpenAI has not provided for mechanisms for age verification, which could lead to the risk of exposing children under 13 to inappropriate responses with respect to their degree of development and self-awareness," the Garante said. ...

A dual Russian and Israeli national has been charged in the United States for allegedly being the developer of the now-defunct LockBit ransomware-as-a-service (RaaS) operation since its inception in or around 2019 through at least February 2024. Rostislav Panev , 51, was arrested in Israel earlier this August and is currently awaiting extradition, the U.S. Department of Justice (DoJ) said in a statement. Based on fund transfers to a cryptocurrency wallet owned by Panev, he allegedly earned approximately $230,000 between June 2022 and February 2024. "Rostislav Panev for years built and maintained the digital weapons that enabled his LockBit co-conspirators to wreak havoc and cause billions of dollars in damage around the world," U.S. Attorney Philip R. Sellinger said . LockBit, which was one of the most prolific ransomware groups, had its infrastructure seized in February 2024 as part of an international law enforcement operation called Cronos. It gained notoriety for tar...