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A Russian national has been charged and indicted by the U.S. Department of Justice (DoJ) for launching ransomware attacks against "thousands of victims" in the country and across the world. Mikhail Pavlovich Matveev  (aka  Wazawaka , m1x, Boriselcin, and Uhodiransomwar), the 30-year-old individual in question, is alleged to be a "central figure" in the development and deployment of  LockBit ,  Babuk , and  Hive  ransomware variants since at least June 2020. "These victims include law enforcement and other government agencies, hospitals, and schools," DoJ  said . "Total ransom demands allegedly made by the members of these three global ransomware campaigns to their victims amount to as much as $400 million, while total victim ransom payments amount to as much as $200 million." LockBit, Babuk, and Hive operate alike, leveraging unlawfully obtained access to exfiltrate valuable data and deploy ransomware on compromised networks. The threat actor...

The Chinese nation-state actor known as  Mustang Panda  has been linked to a new set of sophisticated and targeted attacks aimed at European foreign affairs entities since January 2023. An analysis of these intrusions, per Check Point researchers Itay Cohen and Radoslaw Madej, has revealed a custom firmware implant designed explicitly for TP-Link routers. "The implant features several malicious components, including a custom backdoor named 'Horse Shell' that enables the attackers to maintain persistent access, build anonymous infrastructure, and enable lateral movement into compromised networks," the company said . "Due to its firmware-agnostic design, the implant's components can be integrated into various firmware by different vendors." The Israeli cybersecurity firm is tracking the threat group under the mythical creature name Camaro Dragon,  which  is  also known as  BASIN, Bronze President, Earth Preta, HoneyMyte, RedDelta, and Red Lich. The ...

Ransomware affiliates associated with the Qilin ransomware-as-a-service (RaaS) scheme earn anywhere between 80% to 85% of each ransom payment, according to new findings from Group-IB. The cybersecurity firm said it was able to infiltrate the group in March 2023, uncovering details about the affiliates' payment structure and the inner workings of the RaaS program following a private conversation with a Qilin recruiter who goes by the online alias Haise. "Many Qilin ransomware attacks are customized for each victim to maximize their impact," the Singapore-headquartered company  said  in an exhaustive report. "To do this, the threat actors can leverage such tactics as changing the filename extensions of encrypted files and terminating specific processes and services." Qilin, also known as Agenda, was  first documented  by Trend Micro in August 2022, starting off as a Go-based ransomware before  switching to Rust  in December 2022. The adoption of Rust is...

Operational technology (OT) cybersecurity is a challenging but critical aspect of protecting organizations' essential systems and resources. Cybercriminals no longer break into systems, but instead log in – making access security more complex and also more important to manage and control than ever before. In an effort to solve the access-related challenges facing OT and critical infrastructure operators, the team at Cyolo built a zero-trust access platform designed to meet the unique safety, security, and uptime requirements of OT and industrial control systems (ICS) environments. Let's look under the hood:  The Cyolo solution is a high-powered combination of Zero Trust Network Access (ZTNA), Identity Provider (IdP), and Privileged Access Management (PAM). What makes this approach stand out from the pack is that other ZTNA solutions do not offer IdP or PAM capabilities, while Identity and Access Management tools (IdPs and PAMs) do not extend connectivity. And unlike other pl...

The threat actors behind the CopperStealer malware resurfaced with two new campaigns in March and April 2023 that are designed to deliver two novel payloads dubbed CopperStealth and CopperPhish. Trend Micro is tracking the financially motivated group under the name  Water Orthrus . The adversary is also assessed to be  behind   another campaign  known as  Scranos , which was detailed by Bitdefender in 2019. Active since at least 2021, Water Orthrus has a track record of leveraging pay-per-install (PPI) networks to redirect victims landing on  cracked   software download sites  to drop an information stealer codenamed  CopperStealer . Another campaign spotted in August 2022 entailed the use of CopperStealer to distribute  Chromium-based web browser extensions  that are capable of performing unauthorized transactions and transferring cryptocurrency from victims' wallets to ones under attackers' control. The latest attack sequenc...

A Golang implementation of Cobalt Strike called Geacon is likely to garner the attention of threat actors looking to target Apple macOS systems. That's according to findings from SentinelOne, which observed an increase in the number of Geacon payloads appearing on VirusTotal in recent months. "While some of these are likely red-team operations, others bear the characteristics of genuine malicious attacks," security researchers Phil Stokes and Dinesh Devadoss  said  in a report. Cobalt Strike  is a well-known red teaming and adversary simulation tool developed by Fortra. Owing to its myriad capabilities, illegally cracked versions of the software have been abused by threat actors over the years. While post-exploitation activity associated with Cobalt Strike has primarily singled out Windows, such attacks against macOS are something of a rarity. In May 2022, software supply chain firm Sonatype  disclosed  details of a rogue Python package called " pymafka "...

Several security vulnerabilities have been disclosed in cloud management platforms associated with three industrial cellular router vendors that could expose operational technology (OT) networks to external attacks. The findings were presented by Israeli industrial cybersecurity firm OTORIO at the Black Hat Asia 2023 conference last week. "Industrial cellular routers and gateways are essential IIoT devices that provide connectivity for industrial applications, facilitating remote monitoring, control, and data exchange across various industries," OTORIO said. With gateways widely deployed in critical infrastructure sectors such as substations, water utilities, oil fields, and pipelines, weaknesses in these devices could have severe consequences, impacting availability and process safety. The 11 vulnerabilities discovered by the company allow "remote code execution and full control over hundreds of thousands of devices and OT networks - in some cases, even those not...

A new ransomware group known as  RA Group  has become the latest threat actor to leverage the leaked Babuk ransomware source code to spawn its own locker variant. The cybercriminal gang, which is said to have been operating since at least April 22, 2023, is rapidly expanding its operations, according to cybersecurity firm Cisco Talos. "To date, the group has compromised three organizations in the U.S. and one in South Korea across several business verticals, including manufacturing, wealth management, insurance providers and pharmaceuticals," security researcher Chetan Raghuprasad said in a report shared with The Hacker News. RA Group is no different from other ransomware gangs in that it launches double extortion attacks and runs a date leak site to apply additional pressure on victims into paying ransoms. The Windows-based binary employs  intermittent encryption  to speed up the process and evade detection, not to mention delete volume shadow copies and cont...

It's easy to think high-tech companies have a security advantage over other older, more mature industries. Most are unburdened by 40 years of legacy systems and software. They draw some of the world's youngest, brightest digital natives to their ranks, all of whom consider cybersecurity issues their entire lives. Perhaps it is due to their familiarity with technology that causes them to overlook SaaS security configurations. During the last Christmas holiday season, Slack had some private code stolen from its GitHub repository. According to Slack, the stolen code didn't impact production, and no customer data was taken. Still, the breach should serve as a warning sign to other tech companies. Stolen tokens allowed threat actors to access the GitHub instance and download the code. If this type of attack can happen to Slack on GitHub, it can happen to any high-tech company. Tech companies must take SaaS security seriously to prevent resources from leaking or being stolen. App Bre...

Government, aviation, education, and telecom sectors located in South and Southeast Asia have come under the radar of a new hacking group as part of a highly-targeted campaign that commenced in mid-2022 and continued into the first quarter of 2023. Symantec, by Broadcom Software, is tracking the activity under its insect-themed moniker  Lancefly , with the attacks making use of a "powerful" backdoor called Merdoor. Evidence gathered so far points to the custom implant being utilized as far back as 2018. The ultimate goal of the campaign, based on the tools and the victimology pattern, is assessed to be intelligence gathering. "The backdoor is used very selectively, appearing on just a handful of networks and a small number of machines over the years, with its use appearing to be highly targeted," Symantec  said  in an analysis shared with The Hacker News. "The attackers in this campaign also have access to an updated version of the ZXShell rootkit." ...

A new ransomware-as-service (RaaS) operation called MichaelKors has become the latest file-encrypting malware to target Linux and  VMware ESXi systems  as of April 2023. The development points to cybercriminal actors increasingly setting their eyes on the ESXi, cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike said in a report shared with The Hacker News. "This trend is especially noteworthy given the fact that ESXi, by design, does not support third-party agents or AV software," the company said. "In fact, VMware goes as far as to claim it's not required. This, combined with the popularity of ESXi as a widespread and popular virtualization and management system, makes the hypervisor a highly attractive target for modern adversaries." The  targeting of VMware ESXi hypervisors  with ransomware to scale such campaigns is a technique known as  hypervisor jackpotting . Over the years, the approach has been adopted by several ransomware groups, including Royal. What's more...

Poorly managed Microsoft SQL (MS SQL) servers are the target of a new campaign that's designed to propagate a category of malware called  CLR SqlShell  that ultimately facilitates the deployment of cryptocurrency miners and ransomware. "Similar to web shell, which can be installed on web servers, SqlShell is a malware strain that supports various features after being installed on an MS SQL server, such as executing commands from threat actors and carrying out all sorts of malicious behavior," AhnLab Security Emergency response Center (ASEC)  said  in a report published last week. A stored procedure is a subroutine that contains a set of Structured Query Language (SQL) statements for use across multiple programs in a relational database management system (RDBMS). CLR (short for common language runtime) stored procedures – available in SQL Server 2005 and later – refer to  stored procedures  that are written in a .NET language such as C# or Visual Basic. ...