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An investigation into data safety labels for Android apps available on the Google Play Store has uncovered "serious loopholes" that allow apps to provide misleading or outright false information. The  study , conducted by the Mozilla Foundation as part of its  *Privacy Not Included  initiative, compared the privacy policies and labels of the 20 most popular paid apps and the 20 most popular free apps on the app marketplace. It  found  that, in roughly 80% of the apps reviewed, "the labels were false or misleading based on discrepancies between the apps' privacy policies and the information apps self-reported on Google's  Data safety form ." "The apps aren't self-reporting accurately enough to give the public any meaningful reassurance about the safety and privacy of their data," Mozilla further said, adding consumers are being led to "believe these apps are doing a better job protecting their privacy than they are." Three of the...

Trojanized versions of legitimate applications are being used to deploy evasive cryptocurrency mining malware on macOS systems. Jamf Threat Labs, which made the discovery, said the XMRig coin miner was executed by means of an unauthorized modification in Final Cut Pro, a video editing software from Apple. "This malware makes use of the Invisible Internet Project (i2p) [...] to download malicious components and send mined currency to the attacker's wallet," Jamf researchers Matt Benyo, Ferdous Saljooki, and Jaron Bradley  said  in a report shared with The Hacker News. An earlier iteration of the campaign was  documented  exactly a year ago by Trend Micro, which pointed out the malware's use of i2p to conceal network traffic and speculated that it may have been delivered as a DMG file for Adobe Photoshop CC 2019.  The Apple device management company said the source of the cryptojacking apps can be traced to Pirate Bay, with the earliest uploads dating all th...

Multiple threat actors have been observed opportunistically weaponizing a now-patched critical security vulnerability impacting several Zoho ManageEngine products since January 20, 2023. Tracked as  CVE-2022-47966  (CVSS score: 9.8), the  remote code execution flaw  allows a complete takeover of the susceptible systems by unauthenticated attackers. As many as  24 different products , including Access Manager Plus, ADManager Plus, ADSelfService Plus, Password Manager Pro, Remote Access Plus, and Remote Monitoring and Management (RMM), are affected by the issue. The shortcoming "allows unauthenticated remote code execution due to usage of an outdated third-party dependency for XML signature validation, Apache Santuario," Bitdefender's Martin Zugec  said  in a technical advisory shared with The Hacker News. According to the Romanian cybersecurity firm, the exploitation efforts are said to have commenced the day after penetration testing firm Horizon...

The (Other) Risk in Finance A few years ago, a Washington-based real estate developer received a document link from First American – a financial services company in the real estate industry – relating to a deal he was working on. Everything about the document was perfectly fine and normal. The odd part, he  told  a reporter, was that if he changed a single digit in the URL, suddenly, he could see somebody else's document. Change it again, a different document. With no technical tools or expertise, the developer could retrieve FirstAm records dating back to 2003 – 885  million  in total, many containing the kinds of sensitive data disclosed in real estate dealings, like bank details, social security numbers, and of course, names and addresses. That nearly a billion records could leak from so simple a web vulnerability seemed shocking. Yet even more severe consequences befall financial services companies every week. Verizon, in its most recent  Data Breach Inv...

Materials research organizations in Asia have been targeted by a previously unknown threat actor using a distinct set of tools. Symantec, by Broadcom Software, is tracking the cluster under the moniker  Clasiopa . The origins of the hacking group and its affiliations are currently unknown, but there are hints that suggest the adversary could have ties to India. This includes references to "SAPTARISHI-ATHARVAN-101" in a custom backdoor and the use of the password "iloveindea1998^_^" for a ZIP archive. It's worth noting that  Saptarishi , meaning "Seven sages" in Sanskrit, refers to a group of seers who are revered in Hindu literature.  Atharvan  was an ancient Hindu priest and is believed to have co-authored one of the four  Vedas , a collection of religious scriptures in Hinduism. "While these details could suggest that the group is based in India, it is also quite likely that the information was planted as false flags, with the password in ...

A new backdoor associated with a malware downloader named  Wslink  has been discovered, with the tool likely used by the notorious North Korea-aligned Lazarus Group, new findings reveal. The payload, dubbed  WinorDLL64  by ESET, is a fully-featured implant that can exfiltrate, overwrite, and delete files; execute PowerShell commands; and obtain comprehensive information about the underlying machine. Its other features comprise listing active sessions, creating and terminating processes, enumerating drives, and compressing directories. Wslink was  first documented  by the Slovak cybersecurity firm in October 2021, describing it as a "simple yet remarkable" malware loader that's capable of executing received modules in memory. "The Wslink payload can be leveraged later for lateral movement, due to its specific interest in network sessions," ESET researcher Vladislav Hrčka  said . "The Wslink loader listens on a port specified in the configuration an...

An active malware campaign has set its sights on Facebook and YouTube users by leveraging a new information stealer to hijack the accounts and abuse the systems' resources to mine cryptocurrency. Bitdefender is calling the malware  S1deload Stealer  for its use of  DLL side-loading techniques  to get past security defenses and execute its malicious components. "Once infected, S1deload Stealer steals user credentials, emulates human behavior to artificially boost videos and other content engagement, assesses the value of individual accounts (such as identifying corporate social media admins), mines for BEAM cryptocurrency, and propagates the malicious link to the user's followers," Bitdefender researcher Dávid ÁCS  said . Put differently, the goal of the campaign is to take control of the users' Facebook and YouTube accounts and rent out access to raise view counts and likes for videos and posts shared on the platforms. More than 600 unique users are estima...

Cybersecurity researchers are warning of "imposter packages" mimicking popular libraries available on the Python Package Index (PyPI) repository. The 41 malicious PyPI packages have been found to pose as typosquatted variants of legitimate modules such as HTTP, AIOHTTP, requests, urllib, and urllib3. The names of the packages are as follows: aio5, aio6, htps1, httiop, httops, httplat, httpscolor, httpsing, httpslib, httpsos, httpsp, httpssp, httpssus, httpsus, httpxgetter, httpxmodifier, httpxrequester, httpxrequesterv2, httpxv2, httpxv3, libhttps, piphttps, pohttp, requestsd, requestse, requestst, ulrlib3, urelib3, urklib3, urlkib3, urllb, urllib33, urolib3, xhttpsp "The descriptions for these packages, for the most part, don't hint at their malicious intent," ReversingLabs researcher Lucija Valentić  said  in a new writeup. "Some are disguised as real libraries and make flattering comparisons between their capabilities and those of known, legitimate ...

Apple has revised the  security advisories  it released last month to include three new vulnerabilities impacting  iOS, iPadOS , and  macOS . The first flaw is a  race condition  in the Crash Reporter component (CVE-2023-23520) that could enable a malicious actor to read arbitrary files as root. The iPhone maker said it addressed the issue with additional validation. The two other vulnerabilities, credited to Trellix researcher Austin Emmitt, reside in the  Foundation framework  (CVE-2023-23530 and CVE-2023-23531) and could be weaponized to achieve code execution. "An app may be able to execute arbitrary code out of its sandbox or with certain elevated privileges," Apple said, adding it patched the issues with "improved memory handling." The medium to high-severity vulnerabilities have been patched in iOS 16.3, iPadOS 16.3, and macOS Ventura 13.2 that were shipped on January 23, 2023. Trellix, in its own report on Tuesday,  classified...

In what's a continuing assault on the open source ecosystem,  over 15,000 spam packages  have flooded the npm repository in an attempt to distribute phishing links. "The packages were created using automated processes, with project descriptions and auto-generated names that closely resembled one another," Checkmarx researcher Yehuda Gelb  said  in a Tuesday report. "The attackers referred to retail websites using referral IDs, thus profiting from the referral rewards they earned." The modus operandi involves poisoning the registry with rogue packages that include links to phishing campaigns in their README.md files, evocative of a  similar campaign  the software supply chain security firm exposed in December 2022. The fake modules masqueraded as cheats and free resources, with some packages named as "free-tiktok-followers," "free-xbox-codes," and "instagram-followers-free." The ultimate goal of the operation is to entice user...

If you Google "third-party data breaches" you will find many recent reports of data breaches that were either caused by an attack at a third party or sensitive information stored at a third-party location was exposed. Third-party data breaches don't discriminate by industry because almost every company is operating with some sort of vendor relationship – whether it be a business partner, contractor or reseller, or the use of IT software or platform, or another service provider. Organizations are now sharing data with an average of 730 third-party vendors, according to a  report by Osano , and with the acceleration of digital transformation, that number will only grow. The Importance of Third-Party Risk Management With more organizations sharing data with more third-party vendors, it shouldn't be surprising that more than 50% of security incidents in the past two years have stemmed from a third-party with access privileges, according to a  CyberRisk Alliance report....

Shipping companies and medical laboratories in Asia have been the subject of a suspected espionage campaign carried out by a never-before-seen threat actor dubbed Hydrochasma . The activity, which has been ongoing since October 2022, "relies exclusively on publicly available and living-off-the-land tools," Symantec, by Broadcom Software,  said  in a report shared with The Hacker News. There is no evidence available as yet to determine its origin or affiliation with known threat actors, but the cybersecurity company said the group may be having an interest in industry verticals that are involved in COVID-19-related treatments or vaccines. The standout aspects of the campaign is the absence of data exfiltration and custom malware, with the threat actor employing open source tools for intelligence gathering. By using already available tools, the goal, it appears, is to not only confuse attribution efforts, but also to make the attacks stealthier. The start of the infection...