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An exploration of zero-click attack surface for the popular video conferencing solution Zoom has yielded two previously undisclosed security vulnerabilities that could have been exploited to crash the service, execute malicious code, and even leak arbitrary areas of its memory. Natalie Silvanovich of Google Project Zero, who  discovered  and reported the  two   flaws  last year, said the issues impacted both Zoom clients and Multimedia Router (MMR) servers, which transmit audio and video content between clients in  on-premise deployments . The weaknesses have since been addressed by Zoom as part of  updates  shipped on November 24, 2021. The goal of a zero-click attack is to stealthily gain control over the victim's device without requiring any kind of interaction from the user, such as clicking on a link. While the specifics of the exploit will vary depending on the nature of vulnerability being exploited, a key trait of zero-click hacks is...

A coordinated law enforcement operation has resulted in the arrest of 11 members allegedly belonging to a Nigerian cybercrime gang notorious for perpetrating business email compromise (BEC) attacks targeting more than 50,000 victims in recent years. The disruption of the BEC network is the result of a ten-day investigation dubbed  Operation Falcon II  undertaken by the Interpol along with participation from the Nigeria Police Force's Cybercrime Police Unit in December 2021. Cybersecurity firms  Group-IB  and Palo Alto Networks'  Unit 42 , both of which shared information on the threat actors and their infrastructure, said six of the 11 suspects are believed to be a part of a prolific group of Nigerian cyber actors known as SilverTerrier (aka TMT). BEC attacks, which began to gain dominance in 2013, are  sophisticated scams  that target legitimate business email accounts through social engineering schemes to infiltrate corporate networks and subseq...

A threat actor with potential links to an Indian cybersecurity company has been nothing if remarkably persistent in its attacks against military organizations based in South Asia, including Bangladesh, Nepal, and Sri Lanka, since at least September 2020 by deploying different variants of its bespoke malware framework. Slovak cybersecurity firm ESET attributed the highly targeted attack to a hacking group known as  Donot Team . "Donot Team has been consistently targeting the same entities with waves of spear-phishing emails with malicious attachments every two to four months," researchers Facundo Muñoz and Matías Porolli  said . Operating since at least 2016, Donot Team (also known as APT-C-35 and SectorE02) has been linked to a string of intrusions primarily targeting embassies, governments, and military entities in Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Pakistan, and Nepal with Windows and Android malware. In October 2021, Amnesty International  unearthed evidence  tying the g...

Gone are the days when ransomware operators were happy with encrypting files on-site and more or less discretely charged their victims money for a decryption key. What we commonly find now is encryption with the additional threat of leaking stolen data, generally called Double-Extortion (or, as we like to call it: Cyber Extortion or Cy-X). This is a unique form of cybercrime in that we can observe and analyze some of the criminal action via 'victim shaming' leak sites. Since January 2020, we have applied ourselves to identifying as many of these sites as possible to record and document the victims who feature on them. Adding our own research, analyzing, and enriching data scraped from the various Cy-X operators and market sites, we can provide direct insights into the victimology from this specific perspective. We must be clear that what we are analyzing is a limited perspective on the crime. Nevertheless, the data gleaned from an analysis of the leak-threats p...

A new evasive crypto wallet stealer named BHUNT has been spotted in the wild with the goal of financial gain, adding to a list of digital currency stealing malware such as CryptBot,  Redline Stealer , and  WeSteal . "BHUNT is a modular stealer written in .NET, capable of exfiltrating wallet (Exodus, Electrum, Atomic, Jaxx, Ethereum, Bitcoin, Litecoin wallets) contents, passwords stored in the browser, and passphrases captured from the clipboard," Bitdefender researchers said in a technical report on Wednesday. The campaign, distributed globally across Australia, Egypt, Germany, India, Indonesia, Japan, Malaysia, Norway, Singapore, South Africa, Spain, and the U.S., is suspected to be delivered to compromised systems via cracked software installers. The modus operandi of using cracks as an infection source for initial access mirrors similar cybercrime campaigns that have leveraged tools such as  KMSPico  as a conduit for deploying malware. "Most infected u...

Microsoft on Wednesday disclosed details of a new security vulnerability in SolarWinds Serv-U software that it said was being weaponized by threat actors to propagate attacks leveraging the Log4j flaws to compromise targets. Tracked as  CVE-2021-35247  (CVSS score: 5.3), the issue is an "input validation vulnerability that could allow attackers to build a query given some input and send that query over the network without sanitation," Microsoft Threat Intelligence Center (MSTIC)  said . The flaw, which was discovered by security researcher Jonathan Bar Or, affects Serv-U versions 15.2.5 and prior, and has been addressed in Serv-U version 15.3. "The Serv-U web login screen to LDAP authentication was allowing characters that were not sufficiently sanitized," SolarWinds  said  in an advisory, adding it "updated the input mechanism to perform additional validation and sanitization." The IT management software maker also pointed out that "no downstre...

Potential connections between a subscription-based crimeware-as-a-service (CaaS) solution and a cracked copy of Cobalt Strike have been established in what the researchers suspect is being offered as a tool for its customers to stage post-exploitation activities. Prometheus , as the service is called, first came to light in August 2021 when cybersecurity company Group-IB disclosed details of malicious software distribution campaigns undertaken by cybercriminal groups to distribute Campo Loader, Hancitor, IcedID, QBot, Buer Loader, and SocGholish in Belgium and the U.S. Costing $250 a month, it's marketed on Russian underground forums as a traffic direction system (TDS) to enable phishing redirection on a mass scale to rogue landing pages that are designed to deploy malware payloads on the targeted systems. "Prometheus can be considered a full-bodied service/platform that allows threat groups to purvey their malware or phishing operations with ease," BlackBerry Resear...

Just as animals use their senses to detect danger, cybersecurity depends on sensors to identify signals in the computing environment that may signal danger. The more highly tuned, diverse and coordinated the senses, the more likely one is to detect important signals that indicate danger. This, however, can be a double-edged sword. Too many signals with too little advanced signal processing just leads to a lot of noise. The right, diverse set of signals with highly evolved signal processing leads to survival. It therefore makes sense that broad threat visibility across the IT environment is fundamental for detecting cyberattacks. Cybersecurity company Cynet puts this in perspective in a new eBook,  The Guide for Threat Visibility for Lean IT Security Teams – link to this . The Ongoing Problem of Limited Threat Visibility The complexity of today’s IT environments has made it exceedingly difficult to protect. The defensive perimeter has expanded with an expanded remote workforce, ...

The financially motivated  FIN8 actor , in all likelihood, has resurfaced with a never-before-seen ransomware strain called " White Rabbit " that was recently deployed against a local bank in the U.S. in December 2021. That's according to new findings published by Trend Micro, calling out the malware's overlaps with Egregor, which was taken down by Ukrainian law enforcement authorities in February 2021. "One of the most notable aspects of White Rabbit's attack is how its payload binary requires a specific command-line password to decrypt its internal configuration and proceed with its ransomware routine," the researchers  noted . "This method of hiding malicious activity is a trick that the ransomware family Egregor uses to hide malware techniques from analysis." Egregor, which commenced operations in September 2020 until its operations took a huge hit, is widely believed to be a  reincarnation of Maze , which shut down its criminal enterp...

An IRC  (Internet Relay Chat) bot strain programmed in GoLang is being used to launch distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks targeting users in Korea. "The malware is being distributed under the guise of adult games," researchers from AhnLab's Security Emergency-response Center (ASEC)  said  in a new report published on Wednesday. "Additionally, the DDoS malware was installed via downloader and  UDP RAT  was used." The attack works by uploading the malware-laced games to webhards — which refers to a web hard drive or a remote file hosting service — in the form of compressed ZIP archives that, when opened, includes an executable ("Game_Open.exe") that's orchestrated to run a malware payload aside from launching the actual game. This payload, a GoLang-based downloader, establishes connections with a remote command-and-control (C&C) server to retrieve additional malware, including an IRC bot that can perform DDoS attacks. "It is...

The coordinated cyberattacks targeting  Ukrainian government websites  and the deployment of a data-wiper malware called  WhisperGate  on select government systems are part of a broader wave of malicious activities aimed at  sabotaging critical infrastructure  in the country. The Secret Service of Ukraine on Monday confirmed that the two incidents are related, adding the breaches also exploited the recently disclosed  Log4j vulnerabilities  to gain access to some of the compromised systems. "The attack used vulnerabilities in the site's content management systems (October CMS) and Log4j, as well as compromised accounts of employees of the development company," the SSU  said , corroborating prior disclosure from the  Ukraine CERT team . The disclosure comes days after Microsoft warned of a malware operation aimed at government, non-profit, and information technology entities in Ukraine, attributing the attacks to a threat cluster cod...

Cybersecurity researchers have disclosed details of a now-patched bug in Box's multi-factor authentication (MFA) mechanism that could be abused to completely sidestep SMS-based login verification. "Using this technique, an attacker could use stolen credentials to compromise an organization's Box account and exfiltrate sensitive data without access to the victim's phone," Varonis researchers  said  in a report shared with The Hacker News. The cybersecurity company said it reported the issue to the cloud service provider on November 2, 2021, post which fixes were issued by Box. MFA is an authentication method that relies on a combination of factors such as a password (something only the user knows) and a temporary one-time password aka TOTP (something only the user has) to provide users a second layer of defense against credential stuffing and other account takeover attacks. This two-step authentication can either involve sending the code as an SMS or alternat...