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High-profile companies and local governments located primarily in Asia are the subjects of targeted attacks by a previously undocumented espionage group dubbed  Worok  that has been active since late 2020. "Worok's toolset includes a C++ loader CLRLoad, a PowerShell backdoor PowHeartBeat, and a C# loader PNGLoad that uses steganography to extract hidden malicious payloads from PNG files," ESET researcher Thibaut Passilly  said  in a new report published today. Worok is said to share overlaps in tools and interests with another adversarial collective tracked as  TA428 , with the group linked to attacks against entities spanning energy, financial, maritime, and telecom sectors in Asia as well as a government agency in the Middle East and a private firm in southern Africa. Malicious activities undertaken by the group experienced a noticeable break from May 2021 to January 2022, before resuming the next month. The Slovak cybersecurity firm assessed the group's ...

Cybersecurity researchers have offered fresh insight into a previously undocumented software control panel used by a financially motivated threat group known as TA505. "The group frequently changes its malware attack strategies in response to global cybercrime trends," Swiss cybersecurity firm PRODAFT  said  in a report shared with The Hacker News. "It opportunistically adopts new technologies in order to gain leverage over victims before the wider cybersecurity industry catches on." Also tracked under the names Evil Corp, Gold Drake, Dudear, Indrik Spider, and SectorJ04, TA505 is an aggressive  Russian cybercrime syndicate  behind the infamous Dridex banking trojan and which has been linked to a  number of ransomware campaigns  in recent years.  It's also said to be connected to the  Raspberry Robin attacks  that emerged in September 2021, with similarities uncovered between the malware and Dridex. Other notable malware families assoc...

SecDevOps is, just like DevOps, a transformational change that organizations undergo at some point during their lifetime. Just like many other big changes, SecDevOps is commonly adopted after a reality check of some kind: a big damaging cybersecurity incident, for example. A major security breach or, say, consistent problems in achieving development goals signals to organizations that the existing development framework doesn't work and that something new is needed. But what exactly is SecDevOps, why should you embrace it – and how can you do it more easily in practice? The fundamentals of SecDevOps By itself, SecDevOps is not just one single improvement. You may see it as a new tool, or set of tools, or perhaps a different mindset. Some might see SecDevOps as a culture. In reality, it's all of those factors wrapped into a new approach to development that's intended to put security first. SecDevOps rely on highly reproducible scenarios, touching on topics such as system...

A new phishing-as-a-service (PhaaS) toolkit dubbed EvilProxy is being advertised on the criminal underground as a means for threat actors to bypass two-factor authentication (2FA) protections employed against online services. "EvilProxy actors are using reverse proxy and cookie injection methods to bypass 2FA authentication – proxifying victim's session," Resecurity researchers  said  in a Monday write-up. The platform generates phishing links that are nothing but cloned pages designed to compromise user accounts associated with Apple iCloud, Facebook, GoDaddy, GitHub, Google, Dropbox, Instagram, Microsoft, NPM, PyPI, RubyGems, Twitter, Yahoo, and Yandex, among others. EvilProxy is similar to adversary-in-the-middle ( AiTM ) attacks in that users interact with a malicious proxy server that acts as a go-between for the target website, covertly harvesting the credentials and 2FA passcodes entered in the login pages. It's offered on a subscription basis per service...

A previously undocumented strain of Android spyware with extensive information gathering capabilities has been found disguised as a book likely designed to target the  Uyghur community  in China. The malware comes under the guise of a book titled " The China Freedom Trap ," a biography written by the exiled Uyghur leader Dolkun Isa. "In light of the ongoing conflict between the Government of the People's Republic of China and the Uyghur community, the malware disguised as the book is a lucrative bait employed by threat actors (TAs) to spread malicious infection in the targeted community," cybersecurity firm Cyble  said  in a report published Monday. The existence of the malware samples, which come with the package name " com.emc.pdf ," was first disclosed by researchers from the  MalwareHunterTeam  late last month. Distributed outside of the official Google Play Store, the app, once installed and opened, displays a few pages of the book, includi...

QNAP has issued a new advisory urging users of its network-attached storage (NAS) devices to upgrade to the latest version of  Photo Station  following yet another wave of  DeadBolt ransomware attacks  in the wild by exploiting a zero-day flaw in the software. The Taiwanese company  said  it detected the attacks on September 3 and that "the campaign appears to target QNAP NAS devices running Photo Station with internet exposure." The issue has been addressed in the following versions - QTS 5.0.1: Photo Station 6.1.2 and later QTS 5.0.0/4.5.x: Photo Station 6.0.22 and later QTS 4.3.6: Photo Station 5.7.18 and later QTS 4.3.3: Photo Station 5.4.15 and later QTS 4.2.6: Photo Station 5.2.14 and later Details of the flaw have been kept under wraps for now, but the company is advising users to disable port forwarding on the routers, prevent NAS devices from being accessible on the Internet, upgrade NAS firmware, apply strong passwords for user accoun...

Popular short-form social video service TikTok denied reports that it was breached by a hacking group, after it claimed to have gained access to an insecure cloud server. "TikTok prioritizes the privacy and security of our users' data," the ByteDance-owned company told The Hacker News. "Our security team investigated these claims and found no evidence of a security breach." The denial follows alleged reports of a hack that surfaced on the Breach Forums message board on September 3, with the threat actor noting that the server holds 2.05 billion records in a humongous 790GB database. "Who would have thought that TikTok would decide to store all their internal backend source code on one Alibaba Cloud instance using a trashy password?," the hacking group known as BlueHornet (aka  AgainstTheWest )  tweeted  over the weekend. Bob Diachenko, threat intelligence researcher at Security Discovery,  said  the breach is "real" and that the data i...

Not all security teams are born equal. Each organization has a different objective. In cybersecurity, adopting a proactive approach is not just a buzzword. It actually is what makes the difference between staying behind attackers and getting ahead of them. And the solutions to do that do exist! Most attacks succeed by taking advantage of common failures in their target's systems. Whether new or not, known, unknown, or even unknown, attacks leverage security gaps such as  unpatched or uncharted vulnerabilities, misconfigurations, out-of-date systems, expired certificates, human errors, etc. As attackers rely on a range of automated offensive testing tools to scan their targets' attack surfaces and propagate inside their network, a purely reactive defensive stance based on detection and response is increasingly likely to be overwhelmed by an attack. The logical tactical move is to emulate attackers' TTPs and behaviors beforehand by integrating attack simulation tools to...

A vulnerable anti-cheat driver for the Genshin Impact video game has been leveraged by a cybercrime actor to disable antivirus programs to facilitate the deployment of ransomware, according to findings from Trend Micro. The ransomware infection, which was triggered in the last week of July 2022, banked on the fact that the driver in question ("mhyprot2.sys") is signed with a valid certificate, thereby making it possible to circumvent privileges and terminate services associated with endpoint protection applications. Genshin Impact is a popular action role-playing game that was developed and published by Shanghai-based developer miHoYo in September 2020. The driver used in the attack chain is said to have been built in August 2020, with the existence of the flaw in the module  discussed  after the release of the game, and leading to  exploits   demonstrating  the ability to kill any arbitrary process and escalate to kernel mode. The idea, in a nutshell, is ...

The notorious Android banking trojan known as  SharkBot  has once again made an appearance on the Google Play Store by masquerading as antivirus and cleaner apps. "This new dropper doesn't rely on Accessibility permissions to automatically perform the installation of the dropper Sharkbot malware," NCC Group's Fox-IT  said  in a report. "Instead, this new version asks the victim to install the malware as a fake update for the antivirus to stay protected against threats." The apps in question, Mister Phone Cleaner and Kylhavy Mobile Security, have over 60,000 installations between them and are designed to target users in Spain, Australia, Poland, Germany, the U.S., and Austria - Mister Phone Cleaner (com.mbkristine8.cleanmaster, 50,000+ downloads) Kylhavy Mobile Security (com.kylhavy.antivirus, 10,000+ downloads) The  droppers  are designed to drop a new version of SharkBot,  dubbed V2  by Dutch security firm ThreatFabric, which features an...

South Korean chaebol Samsung on Friday said it experienced a cybersecurity incident that resulted in the unauthorized access of some customer information, the second time this year it has reported such a breach. "In late July 2022, an unauthorized third-party acquired information from some of Samsung's U.S. systems," the company  disclosed  in a notice. "On or around August 4, 2022, we determined through our ongoing investigation that personal information of certain customers was affected." Samsung said the infiltration enabled hackers to access certain data such as names, contact and demographic information, dates of birth, and product registration details. It stressed that the incident did not affect users' Social Security numbers or credit and debit card numbers, but noted the information leaked for each relevant customer may vary. The collected information is necessary to help the company deliver the best experience with its products and services, ...

Google on Friday shipped emergency fixes to address a security vulnerability in the Chrome web browser that it said is being actively exploited in the wild. The issue, assigned the identifier  CVE-2022-3075 , concerns a case of insufficient data validation in  Mojo , which refers to a collection of runtime libraries that provide a platform-agnostic mechanism for inter-process communication (IPC). An anonymous researcher has been credited with reporting the high-severity flaw on August 30, 2022. "Google is aware of reports that an exploit for CVE-2022-3075 exists in the wild," the internet giant  said , without delving into additional specifics about the nature of the attacks to prevent additional threat actors from taking advantage of the flaw. The latest update makes it the sixth zero-day vulnerability in Chrome that Google has resolved since the start of the year - CVE-2022-0609  - Use-after-free in Animation CVE-2022-1096  - Type confusion in V8 CVE...