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Threat actors deploying the Black Basta and CACTUS ransomware families have been found to rely on the same BackConnect (BC) module for maintaining persistent control over infected hosts, a sign that affiliates previously associated with Black Basta may have transitioned to CACTUS. "Once infiltrated, it grants attackers a wide range of remote control capabilities, allowing them to execute commands on the infected machine," Trend Micro said in a Monday analysis. "This enables them to steal sensitive data, such as login credentials, financial information, and personal files." It's worth noting that details of the BC module, which the cybersecurity company is tracking as QBACKCONNECT owing to overlaps with the QakBot loader, was first documented in late January 2025 by both Walmart's Cyber Intelligence team and Sophos, the latter of which has designated the cluster the name STAC5777.  Over the past year, Black Basta attack chains have increasingly leve...

Broadcom has released security updates to address three actively exploited security flaws in VMware ESXi, Workstation, and Fusion products that could lead to code execution and information disclosure. The list of vulnerabilities is as follows - CVE-2025-22224 (CVSS score: 9.3) - A Time-of-Check Time-of-Use (TOCTOU) vulnerability that leads to an out-of-bounds write, which a malicious actor with local administrative privileges on a virtual machine could exploit to execute code as the virtual machine's VMX process running on the host CVE-2025-22225 (CVSS score: 8.2) - An arbitrary write vulnerability that a malicious actor with privileges within the VMX process could exploit to result in a sandbox escape CVE-2025-22226 (CVSS score: 7.1) - An information disclosure vulnerability due to an out-of-bounds read in HGFS that a malicious actor with administrative privileges to a virtual machine could exploit to leak memory from the vmx process The shortcomings impact the below ...

Credential stuffing attacks had a huge impact in 2024, fueled by a vicious circle of infostealer infections and data breaches . But things could be about to get worse still with Computer-Using Agents, a new kind of AI agent that enables low-cost, low-effort automation of common web tasks — including those frequently performed by attackers. Stolen credentials: The cyber criminal's weapon of choice in 2024 Stolen credentials were the #1 attacker action in 2023/24 , and the breach vector for 80% of web app attacks. Not surprising when you consider the fact that billions of leaked credentials are in circulation online, and attackers can pick up the latest drop for as little as $10 on criminal forums.  The criminal marketplace for stolen credentials is benefitting from the publicity of high-profile breaches in 2024 such as the attacks on Snowflake customers using credentials found in data breach dumps and compromised credential feeds from infostealer and mass phishing campaigns, r...

Threat hunters are calling attention to a new highly-targeted phishing campaign that singled out "fewer than five" entities in the United Arab Emirates (U.A.E.) to deliver a previously undocumented Golang backdoor dubbed Sosano. The malicious activity was specifically directed against aviation and satellite communications organizations, according to Proofpoint, which detected it in late October 2024. The enterprise security firm is tracking the emerging cluster under the moniker UNK_CraftyCamel . A noteworthy aspect of the attack chain is the fact that the adversary took advantage of its access to a compromised email account belonging to the Indian electronics company INDIC Electronics to send phishing messages. The entity is said to have been in a trusted business relationship with all the targets, with the lures tailored to each of them. "UNK_CraftyCamel leveraged a compromised Indian electronics company to target fewer than five organizations in the United Arab E...

Internet service providers (ISPs) in China and the West Coast of the United States have become the target of a mass exploitation campaign that deploys information stealers and cryptocurrency miners on compromised hosts. The findings come from the Splunk Threat Research Team, which said the activity also led to the delivery of various binaries that facilitate data exfiltration as well as offer ways to establish persistence on the systems. The unidentified threat actors performed "minimal intrusive operations to avoid detection, with the exception of artifacts created by accounts already compromised," the Cisco-owned company said in a technical report published last week. "This actor also moves and pivots primarily by using tools that depend and run on scripting languages (e.g., Python and Powershell), allowing the actor to perform under restricted environments and use API calls (e.g., Telegram) for C2 [command-and-control] operations." The attacks have been ob...

The U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) on Monday added five security flaws impacting software from Cisco, Hitachi Vantara, Microsoft Windows, and Progress WhatsUp Gold to its Known Exploited Vulnerabilities ( KEV ) catalog, based on evidence of active exploitation. The list of vulnerabilities is as follows - CVE-2023-20118 (CVSS score: 6.5) - A command injection vulnerability in the web-based management interface of Cisco Small Business RV Series routers that allows an authenticated, remote attacker to gain root-level privileges and access unauthorized data (Unpatched due to the routers reaching end-of-life status) CVE-2022-43939 (CVSS score: 8.6) - An authorization bypass vulnerability in Hitachi Vantara Pentaho BA Server that stems from the use of non-canonical URL paths for authorization decisions (Fixed in August 2024 with versions 9.3.0.2 and 9.4.0.1) CVE-2022-43769 (CVSS score: 8.8) - A special element injection vulnerability in Hitachi Vantara...

Google has released its monthly Android Security Bulletin for March 2025 to address a total of 44 vulnerabilities, including two that it said have come under active exploitation in the wild. The two high-severity vulnerabilities are listed below - CVE-2024-43093 - A privilege escalation flaw in the Framework component that could result in unauthorized access to "Android/data," "Android/obb," and "Android/sandbox" directories, and their respective sub-directories. CVE-2024-50302 - A privilege escalation flaw in the HID USB component of the Linux kernel that could lead to a leak of uninitialized kernel memory to a local attacker through specially crafted HID reports. It's worth noting that CVE-2024-43093 was previously flagged by Google in its security advisory for November 2024 as actively exploited in the wild. It's not clear what prompted the tech giant to issue the alert a second time. When reached for comment, Google told The Hacker...

Threat actors are targeting Amazon Web Services ( AWS ) environments to push out phishing campaigns to unsuspecting targets, according to findings from Palo Alto Networks Unit 42. The cybersecurity company is tracking the activity cluster under the name TGR-UNK-0011 (short for a threat group with unknown motivation ), which it said overlaps with a group known as JavaGhost. TGR-UNK-0011 is known to be active since 2019. "The group focused historically on defacing websites," security researcher Margaret Kelley said . "In 2022, they pivoted to sending out phishing emails for financial gain." It's worth noting that these attacks do not exploit any vulnerability in AWS. Rather, the threat actors take advantage of misconfigurations in victims' environments that expose their AWS access keys in order to send phishing messages by abusing Amazon Simple Email Service (SES) and WorkMail services. In doing so, the modus operandi offers the benefit of not having to...

Cybersecurity researchers are calling attention to a new phishing campaign that employs the ClickFix technique to deliver an open-source command-and-control (C2) framework called Havoc . "The threat actor hides each malware stage behind a SharePoint site and uses a modified version of Havoc Demon in conjunction with the Microsoft Graph API to obscure C2 communications within trusted, well-known services," Fortinet FortiGuard Labs said in a technical report shared with The Hacker News. The starting point of the attack is a phishing email containing an HTML attachment ("Documents.html") that, when opened, displays an error message, which uses the ClickFix technique to trick users into copying and executing a malicious PowerShell command into their terminal or PowerShell, thereby triggering the next-stage. The ClickFix bait used in the newly discovered campaign informs the user that there is an error connecting to Microsoft OneDrive, and that they need to rectif...

The U.K.'s Information Commissioner's Office (ICO) has opened an investigation into online platforms TikTok, Reddit, and Imgur to assess the steps they are taking to protect children between the ages of 13 and 17 in the country. To that end, the watchdog said it's probing how the ByteDance-owned video-sharing service uses the personal data of children in the age range to surface recommendations and deliver suggested content to their feeds. "This is in light of growing concerns about social media and video sharing platforms using data generated by children's online activity in their recommender systems, which could lead to young people being served inappropriate or harmful content," the ICO said . Separately, the data protection regulator said it's also looking into Imgur and Reddit to see how they are using children's information and the measures they are taking to assess the age of their users and tailor content based on that criteria. The ICO ...

Threat actors have been exploiting a security vulnerability in Paragon Partition Manager's BioNTdrv.sys driver in ransomware attacks to escalate privileges and execute arbitrary code. The zero-day flaw (CVE-2025-0289) is part of a set of five vulnerabilities that was discovered by Microsoft, according to the CERT Coordination Center (CERT/CC). "These include arbitrary kernel memory mapping and write vulnerabilities, a null pointer dereference, insecure kernel resource access, and an arbitrary memory move vulnerability," CERT/CC said . In a hypothetical attack scenario, an adversary with local access to a Windows machine can exploit these shortcomings to escalate privileges or cause a denial-of-service (DoS) condition by taking advantage of the fact that "BioNTdrv.sys" is signed by Microsoft. This could also pave the way for what's called a Bring Your Own Vulnerable Driver ( BYOVD ) attack on systems where the driver is not installed, thereby allowing t...