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Google on Friday shipped an out-of-band security update to address a high severity vulnerability in its Chrome browser that it said is being actively exploited in the wild. Tracked as  CVE-2022-1096 , the zero-day flaw relates to a type confusion vulnerability in the V8 JavaScript engine. An anonymous researcher has been credited with reporting the bug on March 23, 2022. Type confusion errors, which arise when a resource (e.g., a variable or an object) is accessed using a type that's incompatible to what was originally initialized, could have serious consequences in languages that are not  memory safe  like C and C++, enabling a malicious actor to perform out-of-bounds memory access. "When a memory buffer is accessed using the wrong type, it could read or write memory out of the bounds of the buffer, if the allocated buffer is smaller than the type that the code is attempting to access, leading to a crash and possibly code execution," MITRE's Common Weakness Enum...

The U.S. government on Thursday released a cybersecurity advisory outlining multiple intrusion campaigns conducted by state-sponsored Russian cyber actors from 2011 to 2018 that targeted the energy sector in the U.S. and beyond. "The [Federal Security Service] conducted a multi-stage campaign in which they gained remote access to U.S. and international Energy Sector networks, deployed ICS-focused malware, and collected and exfiltrated enterprise and ICS-related data," the U.S. government  said , attributing the attacks to an APT actor known as  Energetic Bear . In addition, the Justice Department  charged  four Russian government employees, including three officers of the Russian Federal Security Service and a computer programmer at the Central Scientific Research Institute of Chemistry and Mechanics (TsNIIKhM), for their roles in carrying out the attacks on oil refineries, nuclear facilities, and energy companies. The four Russian nationals are Pavel Aleksandro...

The City of London Police has arrested seven teenagers between the ages of 16 and 21 for their alleged connections to the prolific LAPSUS$ extortion gang that's linked to a recent burst of attacks targeting NVIDIA, Samsung, Ubisoft, LG, Microsoft, and Okta. "The City of London Police has been conducting an investigation with its partners into members of a hacking group," Detective Inspector, Michael O'Sullivan, said in a statement shared with The Hacker News. "Seven people between the ages of 16 and 21 have been arrested in connection with this investigation and have all been released under investigation. Our enquiries remain ongoing." The development, which was first  disclosed  by BBC News, comes after a report from Bloomberg  revealed  that a 16-year-old Oxford-based teenager is the mastermind of the group. It's not immediately clear if the minor is one among the arrested individuals. The said teen, under the online alias White or Breachbase, is al...

If you invite guest users into your Entra ID tenant, you may be opening yourself up to a surprising risk.  A gap in access control in Microsoft Entra's subscription handling is allowing guest users to create and transfer subscriptions into the tenant they are invited into, while maintaining full ownership of them.  All the guest user needs are the permissions to create subscriptions in their home tenant, and an invitation as a guest user into an external tenant. Once inside, the guest user can create subscriptions in their home tenant, transfer them into the external tenant, and retain full ownership rights. This stealthy privilege escalation tactic allows a guest user to gain a privileged foothold in an environment where they should only have limited access. Many organizations treat guest accounts as low-risk based on their temporary, limited access, but this behavior, which works as designed, opens the door to known attack paths and lateral movement within the resource t...

Researchers have blown the lid off a sophisticated malicious scheme primarily targeting Chinese users via copycat apps on Android and iOS that mimic legitimate digital wallet services to siphon cryptocurrency funds. "These malicious apps were able to steal victims' secret seed phrases by impersonating Coinbase, imToken, MetaMask, Trust Wallet, Bitpie, TokenPocket, or OneKey,"  said  Lukáš Štefanko, senior malware researcher at ESET in a report shared with The Hacker News. The wallet services are said to have been distributed through a network of over 40 counterfeit wallet websites that are promoted with the help of misleading articles posted on legitimate Chinese websites, as well as by means of recruiting intermediaries through Telegram and Facebook groups, in an attempt to trick unsuspecting visitors into downloading the malicious apps. ESET, which has been tracking the campaign since May 2021, attributed it to the work of a single criminal group. The trojanized cr...

Google's Threat Analysis Group (TAG) on Thursday disclosed that it acted to mitigate threats from two distinct government-backed attacker groups based in North Korea that exploited a recently-uncovered remote code execution flaw in the Chrome web browser. The campaigns, once again "reflective of the regime's immediate concerns and priorities," are said to have targeted U.S. based organizations spanning news media, IT, cryptocurrency, and fintech industries, with one set of the activities sharing direct infrastructure overlaps with previous attacks  aimed at security researchers  last year. The shortcoming in question is  CVE-2022-0609 , a use-after-free vulnerability in the browser's Animation component that Google addressed as part of updates (version 98.0.4758.102) issued on February 14, 2022. It's also the first zero-day flaw patched by the tech giant since the start of 2022. "The earliest evidence we have of this exploit kit being actively deploy...

A 23-year-old Russian national has been indicted in the U.S. and added to the Federal Bureau of Investigation's (FBI) Cyber Most Wanted List for his alleged role as the administrator of Marketplace A, a cyber crime forum that sold stolen login credentials, personal information, and credit card data. Igor Dekhtyarchuk , who first appeared in hacker forums in 2013 under the alias "floraby," has been accused of charges of wire fraud, access device fraud, and aggravated identity theft, a set of offenses that could lead to up to 20 years in federal prison. According to the FBI's  Wanted poster , Dekhtyarchuk previously studied at the Ural State University in Yekaterinburg, Russia, and was last known to reside in the city of Kamensk-Uralsky. "Marketplace A specialized in the sale of unlawfully obtained access devices for compromised online payment platforms, retailers, and credit card accounts, including providing the data associated with those accounts such as na...

A Chinese-speaking advanced persistent threat (APT) has been linked to a new campaign targeting gambling-related companies in South East Asia, particularly Taiwan, the Philippines, and Hong Kong. Cybersecurity firm Avast dubbed the campaign  Operation Dragon Castling , describing its malware arsenal as a "robust and modular toolset." The ultimate motives of the threat actor are not immediately discernible as yet nor has it been linked to a known hacking group. While multiple initial access avenues were employed during the course of the campaign, one of the attack vectors involved leveraging a previously unknown remote code execution flaw in the WPS Office suite ( CVE-2022-24934 ) to backdoor its targets. The issue has since been addressed by Kingsoft Office, the developers of the office software. In the case observed by the Czech security firm, the vulnerability was used to drop a malicious binary from a fake update server with the domain update.wps[.]cn that triggers a m...

Before hunting malware, every researcher needs to find a system where to analyze it. There are several ways to do it: build your own environment or use third-party solutions. Today we will walk through all the steps of creating a custom malware sandbox where you can perform a proper analysis without infecting your computer. And then compare it with a ready-made service. Why do you need a malware sandbox?  A sandbox allows detecting cyber threats and analyzing them safely. All information remains secure, and a suspicious file can't access the system. You can monitor malware processes, identify their patterns and investigate behavior. Before setting up a sandbox, you should have a clear goal of what you want to achieve through the lab.  There are two ways how to organize your working space for analysis: Custom sandbox.  Made from scratch by an analyst on their own, specifically for their needs. A turnkey solution.  A versatile service with a range of configurat...

Authentication services provider Okta on Wednesday named Sitel as the third-party linked to a  security incident  experienced by the company in late January that allowed the LAPSUS$ extortion gang to remotely take over an internal account belonging to a customer support engineer. The company added that 366 corporate customers, or about 2.5% of its customer base, may have been impacted by the "highly constrained" compromise. "On January 20, 2022, the Okta Security team was alerted that a new factor was added to a Sitel customer support engineer' Okta account [from a new location]," Okta's Chief Security Officer, David Bradbury,  said  in a statement. "This factor was a password." The disclosure comes after LAPSUS$ posted screenshots of Okta's apps and systems earlier this week, about two months after the hackers gain access to the company's internal network over a five-day period between January 16 and 21, 2022 using remote desktop proto...

A new large scale supply chain attack has been observed targeting Azure developers with no less than 218 malicious NPM packages with the goal of stealing personal identifiable information. "After manually inspecting some of these packages, it became apparent that this was a targeted attack against the entire  @azure NPM scope , by an attacker that employed an automatic script to create accounts and upload malicious packages that cover the entirety of that scope," JFrog researchers Andrey Polkovnychenko and Shachar Menashe  said  in a new report. The entire set of malicious packages was disclosed to the NPM maintainers roughly two days after they were published earlier this week, leading to their quick removal, but not before each of the packages were downloaded around 50 times on average. The attack refers to what's called typosquatting, which takes place when bad actors push rogue packages with names mimicking legitimate libraries to a public software registry such ...

VMware on Wednesday released software updates to plug two critical security vulnerabilities affecting its Carbon Black App Control platform that could be abused by a malicious actor to execute arbitrary code on affected installations in Windows systems. Tracked as  CVE-2022-22951 and CVE-2022-22952 , both the flaws are rated 9.1 out of a maximum of 10 on the CVSS vulnerability scoring system. Credited with reporting the two issues is security researcher Jari Jääskelä. That said, successful exploitation of the vulnerabilities banks on the prerequisite that the attacker is already logged in as an administrator or a highly privileged user. VMware Carbon Black App Control is an  application allow listing solution  that's used to lock down servers and critical systems, prevent unwanted changes, and ensure continuous compliance with regulatory mandates. CVE-2022-22951 has been described as a command injection vulnerability that could enable an authenticated, high pri...

A China-based advanced persistent threat (APT) known as Mustang Panda has been linked to an ongoing cyber espionage campaign using a previously undocumented variant of the  PlugX  remote access trojan on infected machines. Slovak cybersecurity firm ESET dubbed the new version Hodur , owing to its resemblance to another PlugX (aka Korplug) variant called  THOR  that came to light in July 2021. "Most victims are located in East and Southeast Asia, but a few are in Europe (Greece, Cyprus, Russia) and Africa (South Africa, South Sudan)," ESET malware researcher Alexandre Côté Cyr  said  in a report shared with The Hacker News. "Known victims include research entities, internet service providers (ISPs), and European diplomatic missions mostly located in East and Southeast Asia." Mustang Panda, also known as TA416, HoneyMyte, RedDelta, or PKPLUG, is a  cyber espionage group  that's primarily known for targeting non-governmental organizations with...