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The cybercriminal group behind the infamous DNSpionage malware campaign has been found running a new sophisticated operation that infects selected victims with a new variant of the DNSpionage malware. First uncovered in November last year, the DNSpionage attacks used compromised sites and crafted malicious documents to infect victims' computers with DNSpionage —a custom remote administrative tool that uses HTTP and DNS communication to communicate with the attacker-controlled command and control server. According to a new report published by Cisco's Talos threat research team, the group has adopted some new tactics, techniques and procedures to improve the efficacy of their operations, making their cyber attacks more targeted, organised and sophisticated in nature. Unlike previous campaigns, attackers have now started performing reconnaissance on its victims before infecting them with a new piece of malware, dubbed Karkoff , allowing them to selectively choose which t...

Hackers have been found exploiting a pair of critical security vulnerabilities in one of the popular social media sharing plugins to take control over WordPress websites that are still running a vulnerable version of the plugin. The vulnerable plugin in question is Social Warfare which is a popular and widely deployed WordPress plugin with more than 900,000 downloads. It is used to add social share buttons to a WordPress website or blog. Late last month, maintainers of Social Warfare for WordPress released an updated version 3.5.3 of their plugin to patch two security vulnerabilities—stored cross-site scripting (XSS) and remote code execution (RCE)—both tracked by a single identifier, i.e., CVE-2019-9978 . Hackers can exploit these vulnerabilities to run arbitrary PHP code and take complete control over websites and servers without authentication, and then use the compromised sites to perform digital coin mining or host malicious exploit code. However, the same day when Soc...

Security researchers have discovered the full source code of the Carbanak malware—yes, this time it's for real. Carbanak—sometimes referred as FIN7, Anunak or Cobalt—is one of the most full-featured, dangerous malware that belongs to an APT-style cybercriminal group involved in several attacks against banks, financial institutions, hospitals, and restaurants. In July last year, there was a rumor that the source code of Carbanak was leaked to the public, but researchers at Kaspersky Lab later confirmed that the leaked code was not the Carbanak Trojan . Now cybersecurity researchers from FireEye revealed that they found Carbanak's source code, builders, and some previously unseen plugins in two RAR archives [ 1 , 2 ] that were uploaded on the VirusTotal malware scanning engine two years ago from a Russian IP address. "CARBANAK source code was 20MB comprising 755 files, with 39 binaries and 100,000 lines of code," researchers say. "Our goal was to find ...

A white-hat hacker found a way to get into the French government's newly launched, secure encrypted messaging app that otherwise can only be accessed by officials and politicians with email accounts associated with the government identities. Dubbed " Tchap ," the end-to-end encrypted, open source messaging app has been created by the French government with an aim to keep their officials, parliamentarians and ministers data on servers inside the country over concerns that foreign agencies could use other services to spy on their communications. The Tchap app is built using the Riot client, an open source instant messaging software that implements self-hostable Matrix protocol for end-to-end encrypted communication. Yes, it's the same " Riot and Matrix " that was in the news earlier this week after an unknown hacker breaks into its servers and successfully stole unencrypted private messages, password hashes, access tokens, and GPG keys the project ma...

Facebook late last month revealed that the social media company mistakenly stored passwords for "hundreds of millions" of Facebook users in plaintext, including "tens of thousands" passwords of its Instagram users as well. Now it appears that the incident is far worse than first reported. Facebook today quietly updated its March press release, adding that the actual number of affected Instagram users were not in hundreds of thousands but millions. These plaintext passwords for millions of Instagram users, along with millions of Facebook users, were accessible to some of the Facebook engineers, who according to the company, did not abuse it. According to the updated post, Facebook discovered "additional logs of Instagram passwords" stored in a readable format, but added that its investigation revealed that the stored passwords were never "abused or improperly accessed" by any of its employees. Here's the full updated statement p...

Not a week goes without a new Facebook blunder. Remember the most recent revelation of Facebook being caught asking users new to the social network platform for their email account passwords to verify their identity? At the time, it was suspected that Facebook might be using access to users' email accounts to unauthorizedly and secretly gather a copy of their saved contacts. Now it turns out that the collection of email contacts was true, Facebook finally admits. In a statement released on Wednesday, Facebook said the social media company "unintentionally" uploaded email contacts from up to 1.5 million new users on its servers, without their consent or knowledge, since May 2016. In other words, nearly 1.5 million users had shared passwords for their email accounts with Facebook as part of its dubious verification process. A Facebook spokesperson shared information with Business Insider that the company was using harvested data to "build Facebook'...

Drupal, the popular open-source content management system, has released security updates to address multiple "moderately critical" vulnerabilities in Drupal Core that could allow remote attackers to compromise the security of hundreds of thousands of websites. According to the advisories published today by the Drupal developers, all security vulnerabilities Drupal patched this month reside in third-party libraries that are included in Drupal 8.6, Drupal 8.5 or earlier and Drupal 7. One of the security flaws is a cross-site scripting (XSS) vulnerability that resides in a third-party plugin, called JQuery, the most popular JavaScript library that is being used by millions of websites and also comes pre-integrated in Drupal Core. Last week, JQuery released its latest version jQuery 3.4.0 to patch the reported vulnerability, which has not yet assigned a CVE number, that affects all prior versions of the library to that date. "jQuery 3.4.0 includes a fix for som...

A cybersecurity professional today demonstrated a long-known unpatched weakness in Microsoft's Azure cloud service by exploiting it to take control over Windows Live Tiles , one of the key features Microsoft built into Windows 8 operating system. Introduced in Windows 8, the Live tiles feature was designed to display content and notifications on the Start screen, allowing users to continuously pull up-to-date information from their favorite apps and websites. To make it easier for websites to offer their content as Live Tiles, Microsoft had a feature available on a subdomain of a separate domain, i.e., " notifications.buildmypinnedsite.com ," that allowed website admins to automatically convert their RSS feeds into a special XML format and use it as a meta tag on their websites. The service, which Microsoft had already shut down, was hosted on its own Azure Cloud platform with the subdomain configured/linked to an Azure account operated by the company. However,...

An unprotected database belonging to JustDial , India's largest local search service, is leaking personally identifiable information of its every customer in real-time who accessed the service via its website, mobile app, or even by calling on its fancy "88888 88888" customer care number, The Hacker News has learned and independently verified. Founded over two decades ago, JustDial (JD) is the oldest and leading local search engine in India that allows users to find relevant nearby providers and vendors of various products and services quickly while helping businesses listed in JD to market their offerings. Rajshekhar Rajaharia , an independent security researcher, yesterday contacted The Hacker News and shared details of how an unprotected, publicly accessible API endpoint of JustDial's database can be accessed by anyone to view profile information of over 100 million users associated with their mobile numbers. The leaked data includes JustDial users' na...

Even after Google's security oversight over its already-huge Android ecosystem has evolved over the years, malware apps still keep coming back to Google Play Store. Sometimes just reposting an already detected malware app from a newly created Play Store account, or using other developers' existing accounts, is enough for 'bad-faith' developers to trick the Play Store into distributing unsafe apps to Android users. Since the mobile device platform is growing rapidly, every new effort Google makes apparently comes with trade-offs. For example, Google recently made some changes in its Play Store policies and added new restriction in Android APIs that now makes it mandatory for every new app to undergo rigorous security testing and review process before appearing in the Google Play Store. These efforts also include: restricting developers from abusing Android accessibility services, restricting apps access to certain permissions like call logs and SMS permi...

A new powerful rootkit-enabled spyware operation has been discovered wherein hackers are distributing multifunctional malware disguised as cracked software or trojanized app posing as legitimate software like video players, drivers and even anti-virus products. While the rootkit malware—dubbed Scranos —which was first discovered late last year, still appears to be a work in progress, it is continuously evolving, testing new components and regularly making an improvement to old components, which makes it a significant threat. Scranos features a modular design that has already gained capabilities to steal login credentials and payment accounts from various popular services, exfiltrate browsing history and cookies, get YouTube subscribers, display ads, as well as download and execute any payload. According to a 48 page in-depth report Bitdefender shared with The Hacker News prior to its release, the malware gains persistence on infected machines by installing a digitally-signed ...

It's no secret that Google tracks you everywhere, even when you keep Google's Location History feature disabled. As revealed by an Associated Press investigation in 2018 , other Google apps like Maps or daily weather update service on Android allows the tech giant to continuously collect your precise latitude and longitude. According to Google, the company uses this location-tracking features with an intent to improve its users' experience, like "personalized maps, recommendations based on places you've visited, help finding your phone, real-time traffic updates about your commute, and more useful ads." Moreover, it's also known that Google could share your location data with federal authorities in criminal investigations when asked with a warrant. Google 'SensorVault' Database Help Police Solve Crimes But what many people weren't aware of is that Google also helps federal authorities identify suspects of crimes by sharing locati...