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A South Africa-based threat actor known as Automated Libra has been observed employing CAPTCHA bypass techniques to create GitHub accounts in a programmatic fashion as part of a freejacking campaign dubbed PURPLEURCHIN. The group "primarily targets cloud platforms offering limited-time trials of cloud resources in order to perform their crypto mining operations," Palo Alto Networks Unit 42 researchers William Gamazo and Nathaniel Quist  said . PURPLEURCHIN first came to light in October 2022 when Sysdig  disclosed  that the adversary created as many as 30 GitHub accounts, 2,000 Heroku accounts, and 900 Buddy accounts to scale its operation. Now according to Unit 42, the cloud threat actor group created three to five GitHub accounts every minute at the height of its activity in November 2022, totally setting up over 130,000 bogus accounts across Heroku, Togglebox, and GitHub. More than 22,000 GitHub accounts are estimated to have been created between September and No...

Microsoft has shed light on four different ransomware families –  KeRanger , FileCoder, MacRansom, and EvilQuest – that are known to impact Apple macOS systems. "While these malware families are old, they exemplify the range of capabilities and malicious behavior possible on the platform," the tech giant's Security Threat Intelligence team  said  in a Thursday report. The initial vector for these ransomware families involves what the Windows maker calls "user-assisted methods," wherein the victim downloads and installs trojanized applications. Alternatively, it can also arrive as a second-stage payload that's dropped by an already existing malware on the infected host or as part of a supply chain attack. Irrespective of the modus operandi employed, the attacks proceed along similar lines, with the threat actors relying on legitimate operating system features and exploiting vulnerabilities to break into the systems and encrypt files of interest. This i...

A variant of the infamous Dridex banking malware has set its sights on Apple's macOS operating system using a previously undocumented infection method, according to latest research. It has "adopted a new technique to deliver documents embedded with malicious macros to users without having to pretend to be invoices or other business-related files," Trend Micro researcher Armando Nathaniel Pedragoza  said  in a technical report. Dridex , also called Bugat and Cridex, is an information stealer that's known to harvest sensitive data from infected machines and deliver and execute malicious modules. It's attributed to an e-crime group known as Evil Corp (aka Indrik Spider). The malware is also considered to be a successor of  Gameover Zeus , itself a follow-up to another banking trojan called Zeus. Previous Dridex campaigns targeting Windows have  leveraged  macro-enabled Microsoft Excel documents sent via phishing emails to deploy the payload. A law enforcement...

Cloud services provider Rackspace on Thursday confirmed that the ransomware gang known as Play was responsible for last month's breach. The security incident, which took place on December 2, 2022, leveraged a previously unknown security exploit to gain initial access to the Rackspace Hosted Exchange email environment. "This zero-day exploit is associated with  CVE-2022-41080 ," the Texas-based company  said . "Microsoft disclosed CVE-2022-41080 as a privilege escalation vulnerability and did not include notes for [it] being part of a remote code execution chain that was exploitable." Rackspace's forensic investigation found that the threat actor accessed the Personal Storage Table ( .PST ) of 27 customers out of a total of nearly 30,000 customers on the Hosted Exchange email environment. However, the company said there is no evidence the adversary viewed, misused, or distributed the customer's emails or data from those personal storage folders. It...

Popular instant messaging service WhatsApp has launched support for proxy servers in the latest version of its Android and iOS apps, letting users circumvent government-imposed censorship and internet shutdowns. "Choosing a proxy enables you to connect to WhatsApp through servers set up by volunteers and organizations around the world dedicated to helping people communicate freely," the Meta-owned company  said . Proxies act as an intermediary between end users and the service provider by routing requests originating from a client to the server and forwarding the response back to the device. Users can  access the option  by navigating to Settings > Storage and Data > Proxy > Use Proxy and entering a trusted proxy server address. WhatsApp, which is used by more than two billion users across the world, has also made available a  reference implementation  that can be used to set up a proxy server to help others connect to the service. The company em...

A financially motivated threat actor tracked as  Blind Eagle  has resurfaced with a refined toolset and an elaborate infection chain as part of its attacks targeting organizations in Colombia and Ecuador. Check Point's  latest research  offers new insights into the Spanish-speaking group's tactics and techniques, including the use of sophisticated tools and government-themed lures to activate the killchain. Also tracked under the name APT-C-36, Blind Eagle is notable for its narrow geographical focus and launching indiscriminate attacks against South American nations since at least 2018. Blind Eagle's operations have been  documented  by Trend Micro in September 2021, when it described a spear-phishing campaign primarily aimed at Colombian entities that's designed to deliver a commodity malware known as  BitRAT , with a lesser focus towards targets in Ecuador, Spain, and Panama. Attack chains commence with phishing emails containing a booby-trapp...

A cybercrime group dubbed Bluebottle has been linked to a set of targeted attacks against the financial sector in Francophone countries located in Africa from at least July 2022 to September 2022. "The group makes extensive use of living-off-the-land, dual use tools, and commodity malware, with no custom malware deployed in this campaign," Symantec, a division of Broadcom Software,  said  in a report shared with The Hacker News. The cybersecurity firm said the activity shares overlaps with a threat cluster tracked by Group-IB under the name  OPERA1ER , which has carried out dozens of attacks aimed at banks, financial services, and telecom companies in Africa, Asia, and Latin America between 2018 and 2022. The attribution stems from similarities in the toolset used, the attack infrastructure, the absence of bespoke malware, and the targeting of French-speaking nations in Africa. Three different unnamed financial institutions in three African nations were breached, alth...

Financial institutions are being targeted by a new version of Android malware called SpyNote at least since October 2022 that combines both spyware and banking trojan characteristics. "The reason behind this increase is that the developer of the spyware, who was previously selling it to other actors, made the source code public," ThreatFabric  said  in a report shared with The Hacker News. "This has helped other actors [in] developing and distributing the spyware, often also targeting banking institutions." Some of the notable institutions that are impersonated by the malware include Deutsche Bank, HSBC U.K., Kotak Mahindra Bank, and Nubank. SpyNote (aka SpyMax) is feature-rich and comes with a plethora of capabilities that allows it to install arbitrary; gather SMS messages, calls, videos, and audio recordings; track GPS locations; and even hinder efforts to uninstall the app. It also follows the modus operandi of other  banking   malware  by requesting f...

The latest breach announced by LastPass is a major cause for concern to security stakeholders. As often occurs, we are at a security limbo – on the one hand, as LastPass has noted, users who followed LastPass best practices would be exposed to practically zero to extremely low risk. However, to say that password best practices are not followed is a wild understatement. The reality is that there are very few organizations in which these practices are truly enforced. This puts security teams in the worst position, where exposure to compromise is almost certain, but pinpointing the users who created this exposure is almost impossible.  To assist them throughout this challenging time, Browser Security solution LayerX has launched a free offering of its platform, enabling security teams to gain visibility into all browsers on which the LastPass extension is installed and mitigate the potential impacts of the LastPass breach on their environments by informing vulnerable users and requi...

DevOps platform CircleCI on Wednesday urged its customers to rotate all their secrets following an unspecified security incident. The company said an investigation is currently ongoing, but emphasized that "there are no unauthorized actors active in our systems." Additional details are expected to be shared in the coming days. "Immediately rotate any and all secrets stored in CircleCI," CircleCI's chief technology officer, Rob Zuber,  said  in a terse advisory. "These may be stored in project environment variables or in contexts." CircleCI is also recommending users to review internal logs for signs of any unauthorized access starting from December 21, 2022, to January 4, 2023, or until when the secrets are rotated. The software development service did not disclose any further specifics about the breach, but said it has also invalidated all  Project API tokens  and that they need to be replaced. The disclosure comes weeks after the company anno...

The notorious information-stealer known as  Vidar  is continuing to leverage popular social media services such as TikTok, Telegram, Steam, and Mastodon as an intermediate command-and-control (C2) server. "When a user creates an account on an online platform, a unique account page that can be accessed by anyone is generated," AhnLab Security Emergency Response Center (ASEC) disclosed in a technical analysis  published  late last month. "Threat actors write identifying characters and the C2 address in parts of this page." In other words, the technique relies on actor-controlled throwaway accounts created on social media to retrieve the C2 address. An advantage to this approach is that should the C2 server be taken down or blocked, the adversary can trivially get around the restrictions by setting up a new server and editing the account pages to allow the previously distributed malware to communicate with the server. Vidar, first identified in 2018, is a  co...

Fortinet has warned of a high-severity flaw affecting multiple versions of FortiADC application delivery controller that could lead to the execution of arbitrary code. "An improper neutralization of special elements used in an OS command vulnerability in FortiADC may allow an authenticated attacker with access to the web GUI to execute unauthorized code or commands via specifically crafted HTTP requests," the company  said  in an advisory. The vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2022-39947 (CVSS score: 8.6) and internally discovered by its product security team, impacts the following versions - FortiADC version 7.0.0 through 7.0.2 FortiADC version 6.2.0 through 6.2.3 FortiADC version 6.1.0 through 6.1.6 FortiADC version 6.0.0 through 6.0.4 FortiADC version 5.4.0 through 5.4.5 Users are recommended to upgrade to FortiADC versions 6.2.4 and 7.0.2 as and when they become available. The  January 2023 patches  also address a number of command injection vulnerabilit...