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A nation-state actor known for its cyber espionage campaigns since 2012 is now using coin miner techniques to stay under the radar and establish persistence on victim systems, according to new research. Attributing the shift to a threat actor tracked as Bismuth, Microsoft's Microsoft 365 Defender Threat Intelligence Team said the group deployed Monero coin miners in attacks that targeted both the private sector and government institutions in France and Vietnam between July and August earlier this year. "The coin miners also allowed Bismuth to hide its more nefarious activities behind threats that may be perceived to be less alarming because they're 'commodity' malware," the researchers  said  in an analysis published yesterday. The primary victims of the attack have been traced to state-owned enterprises in Vietnam and entities with ties to a Vietnamese government agency. The Windows maker likened Bismuth to  OceanLotus  (or APT32), linking it to spyware...

Set of must-have online security tools that we believe may make a real difference to your cybersecurity program and improve your 2021 budget planning. In September, Gartner published a  list  of "Top 9 Security and Risk Trends for 2020" putting a bold emphasis on the growing complexity and size of the modern threat landscape. Incomplete visibility of external Attack surfaces led to the dramatic increase in disastrous breaches and data leaks during 2020, compromising PII and other sensitive data of millions of victims. These incidents stemmed from sophisticated intrusions by malicious nation-state actors and APT hacking groups, human error, and widespread misconfigurations exposing unprotected cloud storage or databases with confidential data to the Internet. Gartner's security analysts recommend automating laborious security tasks and processes, amid the ongoing shortage of cybersecurity skills, and promptly addressing emerging cloud and containers security risks.  G...

An Indian national on Monday was  sentenced to 20 years in prison  in the Southern District of Texas for operating and funding India-based call centers that defrauded US victims out of millions of dollars between 2013 and 2016. Hitesh Madhubhai Patel (aka Hitesh Hinglaj), who hails from the city of Ahmedabad, India, was sentenced in connection with charges of fraud and money laundering. He was also ordered to pay restitution of $8,970,396 to identified victims of his crimes. Earlier this January, Patel  pleaded guilty  to wire fraud conspiracy and general conspiracy to commit identification fraud, access device fraud, money laundering, and impersonation of a federal officer or employee. "The defendant defrauded vulnerable US victims out of tens of millions of dollars by spearheading a conspiracy whose members boldly impersonated federal government officials and preyed on victims' fears of adverse government action," said Acting Attorney General Brian C. Rabbitt...

Active Directory account lockouts can be hugely problematic for organizations. There have been documented instances of attackers leveraging the account lockout feature in a type of denial of service attack. By intentionally entering numerous bad passwords, attackers can theoretically lock all of the users out of their accounts. But what do you do if you are experiencing problems with account lockouts? The Windows operating system is somewhat limited in its ability to troubleshoot account lockouts, but there are some things that you can do. For example, you can use Windows PowerShell to determine which accounts have been locked out. The command for doing so is: Search-ADAccount -LockedOut -UsersOnly | Select-Object Name, SamAccountName Incidentally, the UsersOnly parameter prevents computer objects from being included in the results, while the Select-Object command filters the results list to display only the user's name and their account name. If you find that accounts have been ...

A cyberespionage group with suspected ties to the Kazakh and Lebanese governments has unleashed a new wave of attacks against a multitude of industries with a retooled version of a 13-year-old backdoor Trojan. Check Point Research called out hackers affiliated with a group named  Dark Caracal  in a  new report  published yesterday for their efforts to deploy "dozens of digitally signed variants" of the  Bandook  Windows Trojan over the past year, thus once again "reigniting interest in this old malware family." The different verticals singled out by the threat actor include government, financial, energy, food industry, healthcare, education, IT, and legal institutions located in Chile, Cyprus, Germany, Indonesia, Italy, Singapore, Switzerland, Turkey, and the US. The unusually large variety of targeted markets and locations "reinforces a previous hypothesis that the malware is not developed in-house and used by a single entity, but is part of an offen...

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Three Nigerian citizens suspected of being members of an organized cybercrime group behind distributing malware, carrying out phishing campaigns, and extensive Business Email Compromise (BEC) scams have been arrested in the city of Lagos, Interpol reported yesterday. The investigation, dubbed " Operation Falcon ," was jointly undertaken by the international police organization along with Singapore-based cybersecurity firm Group-IB and the Nigeria Police Force, the principal law enforcement agency in the country. About 50,000 targeted victims of the criminal schemes have been identified so far, as the probe continues to track down other suspected gang members and the monetization methods employed by the group. Group-IB's participation in the year-long operation came as part of Interpol's Project Gateway, which provides a framework for agreements with selected private sector partners and receives threat intel directly. "The suspects are alleged to have develo...

cPanel, a provider of popular administrative tools to manage web hosting, has patched a security vulnerability that could have allowed remote attackers with access to valid credentials to bypass two-factor authentication (2FA) protection on an account. The issue, tracked as "SEC-575" and discovered by researchers from  Digital Defense , has been remedied by the company in versions 11.92.0.2, 11.90.0.17, and 11.86.0.32 of the software. cPanel and WHM (Web Host Manager) offers a Linux-based control panel for users to handle website and server management, including tasks such as adding sub-domains and performing system and control panel maintenance. To date, over  70 million domains  have been launched on servers using cPanel's software suite. The issue stemmed from a lack of rate-limiting during 2FA during logins, thus making it possible for a malicious party to repeatedly submit 2FA codes using a brute-force approach and circumvent the authentication check. Digital D...

Two popular Android apps from Chinese tech giant Baidu were temporarily unavailable on the Google Play Store in October after they were caught collecting sensitive user details. The two apps in question— Baidu Maps and Baidu Search Box —were found to collect device identifiers, such as the International Mobile Subscriber Identity (IMSI) number or MAC address, without users' knowledge, thus making them  potentially trackable  online. The  discovery  was made by network security firm Palo Alto Networks, who notified both Baidu and Google of their findings, after which the search company pulled the apps on October 28, citing "unspecified violations."  As of writing, a compliant version of Baidu Search Box has been restored to the Play Store on November 19, while Baidu Maps remains unavailable until the unresolved issues highlighted by Google are fixed. A separate app named Homestyler was also found to collect private information from users' Android devices. ...

An adware and coin-miner botnet targeting Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, and Kazakhstan at least since 2012 has now set its sights on Linux servers to fly under the radar. According to a new analysis published by Intezer today and shared with The Hacker News, the trojan masquerades as  HTTPd , a commonly used program on Linux servers, and is a new version of the malware belonging to a threat actor tracked as  Stantinko . Back in 2017, ESET researchers detailed a  massive adware botnet  that works by tricking users looking for pirated software into downloading malicious executables disguised as torrents to install rogue browser extensions that perform ad injection and click fraud. The covert campaign, which controls a vast army of half a million bots, has since received a substantial upgrade in the form of a  crypto-mining module  with an aim to profit from computers under their control. Although Stantinko has been traditionally a Windows malware, the expa...

VMware has released temporary workarounds to address a critical vulnerability in its products that could be exploited by an attacker to take control of an affected system. "A malicious actor with network access to the administrative configurator on port 8443 and a valid password for the configurator admin account can execute commands with unrestricted privileges on the underlying operating system," the virtualization software and services firm noted in its  advisory . Tracked as CVE-2020-4006, the  command injection  vulnerability has a CVSS score of 9.1 out of 10 and impacts VMware Workspace One Access, Access Connector, Identity Manager, and Identity Manager Connector. While the company said patches for the flaw are "forthcoming," it didn't specify an exact date by when it's expected to be released. It's unclear if the vulnerability is under active attack. The complete list of products affected are as follows: VMware Workspace One Access (versi...

At present, web applications have become the top targets for attackers because of potential monetization opportunities. Security breaches on the web application can cost millions. Strikingly, DNS (Domain Name System) related outage and Distributed denial of service (DDoS) lead a negative impact on businesses. Among the wide range of countermeasures, a web application firewall is the first line of defense. Web Application Firewall's basic function is to establish a hardened boundary to prevent certain malicious traffic types from acquiring resources. Though WAFs have been available since the late nineties, this early generation technology is no match for recent sophisticated cyber-attacks. They are not capable enough to offer full application control and visibility. With these increasing security risks, the new age web application firewall is the only solution that can provide proper protection. Traditional WAFs Died Or At Least Dying In the early days, web apps were less common...