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A malicious toolset dubbed  Spacecolon  is being deployed as part of an ongoing campaign to spread variants of the Scarab ransomware across victim organizations globally. "It probably finds its way into victim organizations by its operators compromising vulnerable web servers or via brute forcing RDP credentials," ESET security researcher Jakub Souček  said  in a detailed technical write-up published Tuesday. The Slovak cybersecurity firm, which dubbed the threat actor CosmicBeetle, said the origins of the Spacecolon date back to May 2020. The highest concentration of victims has been detected in France, Mexico, Poland, Slovakia, Spain, and Turkey. While the exact provenance of the adversary is unclear, several Spacecolon variants are said to contain Turkish strings, likely pointing to the involvement of a Turkish-speaking developer. There is no evidence currently linking it to any other known threat actor group. Some of the targets include a hospital and a tou...

More than a dozen malicious packages have been discovered on the npm package repository since the start of August 2023 with capabilities to deploy an open-source information stealer called  Luna Token Grabber  on systems belonging to Roblox developers. The ongoing campaign, first detected on August 1 by ReversingLabs, employs modules that masquerade as the legitimate package  noblox.js , an API wrapper that's used to create scripts that interact with the Roblox gaming platform. The software supply chain security company described the activity as a "replay of an attack  uncovered  two years ago" in October 2021. "The malicious packages [...] reproduce code from the legitimate noblox.js package but add malicious, information-stealing functions," software threat researcher Lucija Valentić  said  in a Tuesday analysis. The packages were cumulatively downloaded 963 times before they were taken down. The names of the rogue packages are as follows - n...

A  new State of SaaS Security Posture Management Report  from SaaS cybersecurity provider  AppOmni  indicates that Cybersecurity, IT, and business leaders alike recognize SaaS cybersecurity as an increasingly important part of the cyber threat landscape. And at first glance, respondents appear generally optimistic about their SaaS cybersecurity. Over 600 IT, cybersecurity, and business leaders at companies between 500-2,500+ employees were surveyed and responded with confidence in their SaaS cybersecurity preparedness and capabilities. For example: When asked to rate the SaaS cybersecurity maturity level of their organizations, 71% noted that their organizations' SaaS cybersecurity maturity has achieved either a mid-high level (43%) or the highest level (28%). For the security levels of the SaaS applications authorized for use in their organization, sentiment was similarly high. Seventy-three percent rated SaaS application security as mid-high (41%) or the highe...

A previously undocumented threat cluster has been linked to a software supply chain attack targeting organizations primarily located in Hong Kong and other regions in Asia. The Symantec Threat Hunter Team, part of Broadcom, is tracking the activity under its insect-themed moniker Carderbee. The attacks, per the cybersecurity firm, leverage a trojanized version of a legitimate software called EsafeNet Cobra DocGuard Client to deliver a known backdoor known as  PlugX  (aka Korplug) on victim networks. "In the course of this attack, the attackers used malware signed with a legitimate Microsoft certificate," the company  said  in a report shared with The Hacker News. The use of Cobra DocGuard Client to pull off a supply chain attack was previously highlighted by ESET in its quarterly APT Activity Report this year, detailing a September 2022 intrusion in which an unnamed gambling company in Hong Kong was compromised via a malicious update pushed by the softwar...

A new variant of an  Apple macOS malware  called  XLoader  has surfaced in the wild, masquerading its malicious features under the guise of an office productivity app called "OfficeNote." "The new version of XLoader is bundled inside a standard Apple disk image with the name OfficeNote.dmg," SentinelOne security researchers Dinesh Devadoss and Phil Stokes  said  in a Monday analysis. "The application contained within is signed with the developer signature MAIT JAKHU (54YDV8NU9C)." XLoader , first detected in 2020, is  considered  a successor to Formbook and is an information stealer and keylogger offered under the malware-as-a-service (MaaS) model. A macOS variant of the malware emerged in July 2021, distributed as a Java program in the form of a compiled .JAR file. "Such files require the Java Runtime Environment, and for that reason the malicious .jar file will not execute on a macOS install out of the box, since Apple stopped shipping JRE ...

Software services provider Ivanti is  warning  of a new critical zero-day flaw impacting Ivanti Sentry (formerly MobileIron Sentry) that it said is being actively exploited in the wild, marking an escalation of its security woes. Tracked as  CVE-2023-38035  (CVSS score: 9.8), the issue has been described as a case of authentication bypass impacting versions 9.18 and prior due to what it called an due to an insufficiently restrictive Apache HTTPD configuration. "If exploited, this vulnerability enables an unauthenticated actor to access some sensitive APIs that are used to configure the Ivanti Sentry on the administrator portal (port 8443, commonly MICS)," the company  said . "While the issue has a high CVSS score, there is a low risk of exploitation for customers who do not expose port 8443 to the internet." Successful exploitation of the bug could allow an attacker to change configuration, run system commands, or write files onto the system. It's recommen...

The U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) has  added  a critical security flaw in Adobe ColdFusion to its Known Exploited Vulnerabilities ( KEV ) catalog, based on evidence of active exploitation. The vulnerability, cataloged as  CVE-2023-26359  (CVSS score: 9.8), relates to a deserialization flaw present in Adobe ColdFusion 2018 (Update 15 and earlier) and ColdFusion 2021 (Update 5 and earlier) that could result in arbitrary code execution in the context of the current user without requiring any interaction. Deserialization  (aka unmarshaling) refers to the process of reconstructing a data structure or an object from a byte stream. But when it's performed without validating its source or sanitizing its contents, it can lead to  unexpected consequences  such as code execution or denial-of-service (DoS). It was  patched  by Adobe as part of updates issued in March 2023. As of writing, it's immediately not clear how ...

A high-severity security flaw has been disclosed in the WinRAR utility that could be potentially exploited by a threat actor to achieve remote code execution on Windows systems. Tracked as  CVE-2023-40477  (CVSS score: 7.8), the vulnerability has been described as a case of improper validation while processing recovery volumes. "The issue results from the lack of proper validation of user-supplied data, which can result in a memory access past the end of an allocated buffer," the Zero Day Initiative (ZDI)  said  in an advisory. "An attacker can leverage this vulnerability to execute code in the context of the current process." Successful exploitation of the flaw requires user interaction in that the target must be lured into visiting a malicious page or by simply opening a booby-trapped archive file. A security researcher, who goes by the alias goodbyeselene, has been credited with discovering and reporting the flaw on June 8, 2023. The issue has been address...

From a user's perspective, OAuth works like magic. In just a few keystrokes, you can whisk through the account creation process and gain immediate access to whatever new app or integration you're seeking. Unfortunately, few users understand the implications of the permissions they allow when they create a new OAuth grant, making it easy for malicious actors to manipulate employees into giving away unintended access to corporate environments. In one of the  highest-profile examples , Pawn Storm's attacks against the Democratic National Convention and others leveraged OAuth to target victims through social engineering.  Security and IT teams would be wise to establish a practice of reviewing new and existing OAuth grants programmatically to catch risky activity or overly-permissive scopes. And, there are new solutions for  SaaS security  cropping up that can make this process easier. Let's take a look at some best practices for prioritizing and investigating your or...

Threat actors are leveraging access to malware-infected Windows and macOS machines to deliver a proxy server application and use them as exit nodes to reroute proxy requests. According to AT&T Alien Labs, the unnamed company that offers the proxy service operates more than 400,000 proxy exit nodes, although it's not immediately clear how many of them were co-opted by malware installed on infected machines without user knowledge and interaction. "Although the proxy website claims that its exit nodes come only from users who have been informed and agreed to the use of their device," the cybersecurity company  said  it found evidence where "malware writers are installing the proxy silently in infected systems." Multiple malware families have been observed delivering the proxy to users searching for cracked software and games. The proxy software, written in the Go programming language, is capable of targeting both Windows and macOS, with the former capable o...

The threat actors behind the HiatusRAT malware have returned from their hiatus with a new wave of reconnaissance and targeting activity aimed at Taiwan-based organizations and a U.S. military procurement system. Besides recompiling malware samples for different architectures, the artifacts are said to have been hosted on new virtual private servers (VPSs), Lumen Black Lotus Labs  said  in a report published last week. The cybersecurity firm described the activity cluster as "brazen" and "one of the most audacious," indicating no signs of slowing down. The identity and the origin of the threat actors are presently unknown. Targets included commercial firms, such as semiconductor and chemical manufacturers, and at least one municipal government organization in Taiwan as well as a U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) server associated with submitting and retrieving proposals for defense contracts. HiatusRAT was  first disclosed  by the cybersecurity company in March ...

Cybersecurity researchers have detailed an updated version of an advanced fingerprinting and redirection toolkit called  WoofLocker  that's engineered to conduct tech support scams. The sophisticated traffic redirection scheme was  first documented  by Malwarebytes in January 2020, leveraging JavaScript embedded in compromised websites to perform anti-bot and web traffic filtering checks to serve next-stage JavaScript that redirects users to a browser locker (aka browlock). This redirection mechanism, in turn, makes use of steganographic tricks to conceal the JavaScript code within a PNG image that's served only when the validation phase is successful. Should a user be detected as a bot or not interesting traffic, a decoy PNG file without the malicious code is delivered. WoofLocker is also known as 404Browlock due to the fact that visiting the browlock URL directly without the appropriate redirection or one-time session token results in a 404 error page. The cyb...