The Hacker News | #1 Trusted Source for Cybersecurity News — Index Page

Cybersecurity researchers have shared the inner workings of an Android malware family called  Fluhorse . The malware "represents a significant shift as it incorporates the malicious components directly within the Flutter code," Fortinet FortiGuard Labs researcher Axelle Apvrille  said  in a report published last week. Fluhorse was  first documented  by Check Point in early May 2023, detailing its attacks on users located in East Asia through rogue apps masquerading as ETC and VPBank Neo, which are popular in Taiwan and Vietnam. The initial intrusion vector for the malware is phishing. The ultimate goal of the app is to steal credentials, credit card details, and two-factor authentication (2FA) codes received as SMS to a remote server under the control of the threat actors. The latest findings from Fortinet, which reverse-engineered a  Fluhorse sample  uploaded to VirusTotal on June 11, 2023, suggest that the malware has evolved, incorporating add...

Cyber threat intelligence is an effective weapon in the ongoing battle to protect digital assets and infrastructure - especially when combined with AI. But AI is only as good as the data feeding it. Access to unique, underground sources is key. Threat Intelligence offers tremendous value to people and companies. At the same time, its ability to address organizations' cybersecurity needs and the benefits it offers vary by company, industry, and other factors. A common challenge with cyber threat intelligence (CTI) is that the data it produces can be vast and overwhelming, creating confusion and inefficiencies among security teams' threat exposure management efforts. Additionally, organizations have different levels of security maturity, which can make access to and understanding of CTI data difficult. Enter generative AI. Many cybersecurity companies – and more specifically, threat intelligence companies – are bringing generative AI to market to simplify threat intelligence a...

The North Korea-aligned threat actor known as Andariel leveraged a previously undocumented malware called EarlyRat in phishing attacks, adding another piece to the group's wide-ranging toolset. "Andariel infects machines by executing a Log4j exploit, which, in turn, downloads further malware from the command-and-control (C2) server," Kaspersky  said  in a new report. Also called Silent Chollima and Stonefly, Andariel is associated with North Korea's Lab 110, a primary hacking unit that also houses  APT38  (aka BlueNoroff ) and other subordinate elements collectively tracked under the umbrella name  Lazarus Group .  The threat actor, besides conducting espionage attacks against foreign government and military entities that are of strategic interest, is known to  carry out cyber crime  as an extra source of income to the sanctions-hit nation. Some of the key cyber weapons in its arsenal include a ransomware strain referred to as  Maui ...

SaaS Adoption is Skyrocketing, Resilience Hasn't Kept Pace SaaS platforms have revolutionized how businesses operate. They simplify collaboration, accelerate deployment, and reduce the overhead of managing infrastructure. But with their rise comes a subtle, dangerous assumption: that the convenience of SaaS extends to resilience. It doesn't. These platforms weren't built with full-scale data protection in mind . Most follow a shared responsibility model — wherein the provider ensures uptime and application security, but the data inside is your responsibility. In a world of hybrid architectures, global teams, and relentless cyber threats, that responsibility is harder than ever to manage. Modern organizations are being stretched across: Hybrid and multi-cloud environments with decentralized data sprawl Complex integration layers between IaaS, SaaS, and legacy systems Expanding regulatory pressure with steeper penalties for noncompliance Escalating ransomware threats and inside...

A critical security flaw has been disclosed in miniOrange's  Social Login and Register plugin  for WordPress that could enable a malicious actor to log in as any user-provided information about email address is already known. Tracked as CVE-2023-2982 (CVSS score: 9.8), the authentication bypass flaw impacts all versions of the plugin, including and prior to 7.6.4. It was addressed on June 14, 2023, with the release of version 7.6.5 following responsible disclosure on June 2, 2023. "The vulnerability makes it possible for an unauthenticated attacker to gain access to any account on a site including accounts used to administer the site, if the attacker knows, or can find, the associated email address," Wordfence researcher István Márton  said . The issue is rooted in the fact that the encryption key used to secure the information during login using social media accounts is hard-coded, thus leading to a scenario where attackers could create a valid request with a properl...

A previously undocumented Windows-based information stealer called  ThirdEye  has been discovered in the wild with capabilities to harvest sensitive data from infected hosts. Fortinet FortiGuard Labs, which  made the discovery , said it found the malware in an executable that masqueraded as a  PDF file  with a Russian name "CMK Правила оформления больничных листов.pdf.exe," which translates to "CMK Rules for issuing sick leaves.pdf.exe." The arrival vector for the malware is presently unknown, although the nature of the lure points to it being used in a phishing campaign. The very  first ThirdEye sample  was uploaded to VirusTotal on April 4, 2023, with relatively fewer features. The evolving stealer, like  other malware families  of its kind, is equipped to gather system metadata, including BIOS release date and vendor, total/free disk space on the C drive, currently running processes, register usernames, and volume information. The amas...

Drones that don't have any known security weaknesses could be the target of electromagnetic fault injection (EMFI) attacks, potentially enabling a threat actor to achieve arbitrary code execution and compromise their functionality and safety. The research comes from IOActive, which  found  that it is "feasible to compromise the targeted device by injecting a specific EM glitch at the right time during a firmware update." "This would allow an attacker to gain code execution on the main processor, gaining access to the Android OS that implements the core functionality of the drone," Gabriel Gonzalez, director of hardware security at the company, said in a report published this month. The  study , which was undertaken to determine the current security posture of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs), was carried out on  Mavic Pro , a popular quadcopter drone manufactured by DJI that employs various security features like signed and encrypted firmware, Trusted Executi...

Cybersecurity researchers have exposed the workings of a scam ring called CryptosLabs that's estimated to have made €480 million in illegal profits by targeting users in French-speaking individuals in France, Belgium, and Luxembourg since April 2018. The syndicate's massive fake investment schemes primarily involve impersonating 40 well-known banks, fin-techs, asset management firms, and crypto platforms, setting up a scam infrastructure spanning over 350 domains hosted on more than 80 servers, Group-IB  said  in a deep-dive report. The Singapore-headquartered company described the criminal outfit as "operated by a hierarchy of kingpins, sales agents, developers, and call center operators" who are recruited to ensnare potential victims by promising high returns on their capital. "CryptoLabs made their scam schemes more convincing through region-focused tactics, such as hiring French-speaking callers as 'managers' and creating fake landing pages, socia...

For too long the cybersecurity world focused exclusively on information technology (IT), leaving operational technology (OT) to fend for itself. Traditionally, few industrial enterprises had dedicated cybersecurity leaders. Any security decisions that arose fell to the plant and factory managers, who are highly skilled technical experts in other areas but often lack cybersecurity training or knowledge. In more recent years, an uptick in cyberattacks against industrial facilities and the trend of IT/OT convergence driven by Industry 4.0 have highlighted the vacuum of ownership around OT security.  According to a new Fortinet report , most organizations are looking to Chief Information Security Officers (CISOs) to solve the problem. Fortunately, CISOs are no strangers to change or difficult challenges. The position itself is less than 20 years old, yet in those two decades CISOs have navigated some of the most disruptive cybersecurity events that were truly watershed moments in te...

A ransomware threat called 8Base that has been operating under the radar for over a year has been attributed to a "massive spike in activity" in May and June 2023. "The group utilizes encryption paired with 'name-and-shame' techniques to compel their victims to pay their ransoms," VMware Carbon Black researchers Deborah Snyder and Fae Carlisle  said  in a report shared with The Hacker News. "8Base has an opportunistic pattern of compromise with recent victims spanning across varied industries." 8Base, according to statistics gathered by  Malwarebytes  and  NCC Group , has been linked to 67 attacks as of May 2023, with about 50% of the victims  operating  in the business services, manufacturing, and construction sectors. A majority of the targeted companies are located in the U.S. and Brazil. With very little known about the operators of the ransomware, its origins remain something of a cipher. What's evident is that it has been active sinc...

Multiple SQL injection vulnerabilities have been disclosed in Gentoo Soko that could lead to remote code execution (RCE) on vulnerable systems. "These SQL injections happened despite the use of an Object-Relational Mapping (ORM) library and prepared statements," SonarSource researcher Thomas Chauchefoin  said , adding they could result in RCE on Soko because of a "misconfiguration of the database." The  two   issues , which were discovered in the search feature of Soko, have been collectively tracked as CVE-2023-28424 (CVSS score: 9.1). They were addressed within 24 hours of responsible disclosure on March 17, 2023. Soko is a Go software module that powers  packages.gentoo.org , offering users an easy way to search through different Portage packages that are available for Gentoo Linux distribution. But the shortcomings identified in the service meant that it could have been possible for a malicious actor to  inject specially crafted code , resulting in the ...

A new process injection technique dubbed Mockingjay could be exploited by threat actors to bypass security solutions to execute malicious code on compromised systems. "The injection is executed without space allocation, setting permissions or even starting a thread," Security Joes researchers Thiago Peixoto, Felipe Duarte, and Ido Naor  said  in a report shared with The Hacker News. "The uniqueness of this technique is that it requires a vulnerable DLL and copying code to the right section." Process injection is an  attack method  that allows adversaries to inject code into processes in order to evade process-based defenses and elevate privileges. In doing so, it could allow for the execution of arbitrary code in the memory space of a separate live process. Some of the well-known process injection techniques include dynamic link library (DLL) injection, portable executable injection, thread execution hijacking, process hollowing, and process doppelgänging, amon...

Cybersecurity researchers have discovered a new ongoing campaign aimed at the npm ecosystem that leverages a unique execution chain to deliver an unknown payload to targeted systems. "The packages in question seem to be published in pairs, each pair working in unison to fetch additional resources which are subsequently decoded and/or executed," software supply chain security firm Phylum  said  in a report released last week. To that end, the order in which the pair of packages are installed is paramount to pulling off a successful attack, as the first of the two modules is designed to store locally a token retrieved from a remote server. The campaign was first discovered on June 11, 2023. The second package subsequently passes this token as a parameter alongside the operating system type to an  HTTP GET request  to acquire a second script from the remote server. A successful execution returns a Base64-encoded string that is immediately executed but only if t...