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The banking trojan known as  Mispadu  has expanded its focus beyond Latin America (LATAM) and Spanish-speaking individuals to target users in Italy, Poland, and Sweden. Targets of the ongoing campaign include entities spanning finance, services, motor vehicle manufacturing, law firms, and commercial facilities, according to Morphisec. "Despite the geographic expansion, Mexico remains the primary target," security researcher Arnold Osipov  said  in a report published last week. "The campaign has resulted in thousands of stolen credentials, with records dating back to April 2023. The threat actor leverages these credentials to orchestrate malicious phishing emails, posing a significant threat to recipients." Mispadu, also called URSA,  came to light  in 2019, when it was observed carrying out credential theft activities aimed at financial institutions in Brazil and Mexico by displaying fake pop-up windows. The Delphi-based malware is also capable of taki...

A critical security flaw impacting the LayerSlider plugin for WordPress could be abused to extract sensitive information from databases, such as password hashes. The flaw, designated as  CVE-2024-2879 , carries a CVSS score of 9.8 out of a maximum of 10.0. It has been described as a case of SQL injection impacting versions from 7.9.11 through 7.10.0. The issue has been addressed in version 7.10.1 released on March 27, 2024, following responsible disclosure on March 25. "This update includes important security fixes," the maintainers of LayerSlider  said  in their release notes. LayerSlider is a visual web content editor, a graphic design software, and a digital visual effects that allows users to create animations and rich content for their websites. According to its own site, the plugin is  used  by "millions of users worldwide." The flaw discovered in the tool stems from a case of insufficient escaping of user supplied parameters and the absence of ...

The malicious code inserted into the open-source library XZ Utils, a widely used package present in major Linux distributions, is also capable of facilitating remote code execution, a new analysis has revealed. The audacious supply chain compromise, tracked as  CVE-2024-3094  (CVSS score: 10.0), came to light last week when Microsoft engineer and PostgreSQL developer Andres Freund alerted to the  presence  of a  backdoor  in the data compression utility that gives remote attackers a way to sidestep secure shell authentication and gain complete access to an affected system. "I was doing some micro-benchmarking at the time, needed to quiesce the system to reduce noise," Freund said in a post shared on Mastodon. "Saw sshd processes were using a surprising amount of CPU, despite immediately failing because of wrong usernames etc." "Profiled sshd, showing lots of cpu time in liblzma, with perf unable to attribute it to a symbol. Got suspicious. Recalled tha...

I had the honor of hosting the first episode of the Xposure Podcast live from Xposure Summit 2025. And I couldn't have asked for a better kickoff panel: three cybersecurity leaders who don't just talk security, they live it. Let me introduce them. Alex Delay , CISO at IDB Bank, knows what it means to defend a highly regulated environment. Ben Mead , Director of Cybersecurity at Avidity Biosciences, brings a forward-thinking security perspective that reflects the innovation behind Avidity's targeted RNA therapeutics. Last but not least, Michael Francess , Director of Cybersecurity Advanced Threat at Wyndham Hotels and Resorts, leads the charge in protecting the franchise. Each brought a unique vantage point to a common challenge: applying Continuous Threat Exposure Management (CTEM) to complex production environments. Gartner made waves in 2023 with a bold prediction: organizations that prioritize CTEM will be three times less likely to be breached by 2026. But here's the kicker -...

Cloud solutions are more mainstream – and therefore more exposed – than ever before. In 2023 alone, a staggering 82% of data breaches were against public, private, or hybrid cloud environments. What's more, nearly 40% of breaches spanned multiple cloud environments. The average cost of a cloud breach was above the overall average, at $4.75 million. In a time where cloud has become the de facto standard – with 65% of IT decision-makers confirming that cloud-based services are their first choice when upgrading or purchasing new solutions – despite its overwhelming prominence, cloud security still faces multiple challenges.  Security Challenges in the Cloud  One major hurdle is the lack of visibility. Unlike physical servers you can see and touch, cloud resources are often spread across vast networks, making it difficult to monitor for suspicious activity and leaving vulnerabilities undetected. Another challenge is the inconsistency across cloud vendor permission management s...

A threat activity cluster tracked as  Earth Freybug  has been observed using a new malware called UNAPIMON to fly under the radar. "Earth Freybug is a cyberthreat group that has been active since at least 2012 that focuses on espionage and financially motivated activities," Trend Micro security researcher Christopher So  said  in a report published today. "It has been observed to target organizations from various sectors across different countries." The cybersecurity firm has described Earth Freybug as a subset within  APT41 , a China-linked cyber espionage group that's also tracked as Axiom, Brass Typhoon (formerly Barium), Bronze Atlas, HOODOO, Wicked Panda, and Winnti. The adversarial collective is known to rely on a combination of living-off-the-land binaries (LOLBins) and custom malware to realize its goals. Also adopted are techniques like dynamic-link library (DLL) hijacking and application programming interface (API) unhooking. Trend Micro said th...

Google has agreed to purge billions of data records reflecting users' browsing activities to settle a class action lawsuit that claimed the search giant tracked them without their knowledge or consent in its Chrome browser. The  class action , filed in 2020, alleged the company misled users by tracking their internet browsing activity who thought that it remained private when using the "incognito" or "private" mode on web browsers like Chrome. In late December 2023, it  emerged  that the company had consented to settle the lawsuit. The deal is currently pending approval by the U.S. District Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers. "The settlement provides broad relief regardless of any challenges presented by Google's limited record keeping," a court filing on April 1, 2024, said. "Much of the private browsing data in these logs will be deleted in their entirety, including billions of event level data records that reflect class members' private ...

The threat actor known as  TA558  has been attributed to a new massive phishing campaign that targets a wide range of sectors in Latin America with the goal of deploying Venom RAT. The attacks primarily singled out hotel, travel, trading, financial, manufacturing, industrial, and government verticals in Spain, Mexico, the United States, Colombia, Portugal, Brazil, Dominican Republic, and Argentina. Active since at least 2018, TA558 has a  history  of  targeting entities  in the LATAM region to deliver a variety of malware such as Loda RAT, Vjw0rm, and Revenge RAT. The latest infection chain, according to Perception Point researcher  Idan Tarab , leverages phishing emails as an initial access vector to drop  Venom RAT , a fork of Quasar RAT that comes with  capabilities  to harvest sensitive data and commandeer systems remotely. The disclosure comes as threat actors have been increasingly observed using the  DarkGate  malw...

The Indian government said it has rescued and repatriated about 250 citizens in Cambodia who were held captive and coerced into running cyber scams. The Indian nationals "were lured with employment opportunities to that country but were forced to undertake illegal cyber work," the Ministry of External Affairs (MEA)  said  in a statement, adding it had rescued 75 people in the past three months. It also said it's working with "with Cambodian authorities and with agencies in India to crack down on those responsible for these fraudulent schemes." The development comes in the wake of a  report  from the Indian Express that said more than 5,000 Indians stuck in Cambodia were forced into "cyber slavery" by organized crime rackets to scam people in India and extort money by masquerading as law enforcement authorities in some cases. The report also tracks with an earlier disclosure from INTERPOL, which characterized the situation as  human trafficking-fu...

Despite a plethora of available security solutions, more and more organizations fall victim to Ransomware and other threats. These continued threats aren't just an inconvenience that hurt businesses and end users - they damage the economy, endanger lives, destroy businesses and put national security at risk. But if that wasn't enough – North Korea appears to be  using revenue from cyber attacks to funds its nuclear weapons program . Small and mid-size businesses are increasingly caught in the dragnet of ongoing malware attacks - often due to underfunded IT departments. Exacerbating the problem are complex enterprise security solutions that are often out of reach for many companies - especially when multiple products are seemingly needed to establish a solid defense. Volume-based products that incentivize users to collect less data in order to conserve funds work backward, dampening the anticipated benefits. But what if you could detect many malware attacks holistically with ...

Several malicious Android apps that turn mobile devices running the operating system into residential proxies (RESIPs) for other threat actors have been observed on the Google Play Store. The findings come from HUMAN's Satori Threat Intelligence team, which said the cluster of VPN apps came fitted with a Golang library that transformed the user's device into a proxy node without their knowledge. The operation has been codenamed  PROXYLIB  by the company. The 29 apps in question have since been removed by Google. Residential proxies are a network of proxy servers sourced from real IP addresses provided by internet service providers (ISPs), helping users hide their actual IP addresses by routing their internet traffic through an intermediary server. The anonymity benefits aside, they are ripe for abuse by threat actors to not only obfuscate their origins, but also to conduct a wide range of attacks. "When a threat actor uses a residential proxy, the traffic from these...

The Android banking trojan known as Vultur has resurfaced with a suite of new features and improved anti-analysis and detection evasion techniques, enabling its operators to remotely interact with a mobile device and harvest sensitive data. "Vultur has also started masquerading more of its malicious activity by encrypting its C2 communication, using multiple encrypted payloads that are decrypted on the fly, and using the guise of legitimate applications to carry out its malicious actions," NCC Group researcher Joshua Kamp  said  in a report published last week. Vultur was  first disclosed  in early 2021, with the malware capable of leveraging Android's accessibility services APIs to execute its malicious actions. The malware has been observed to be  distributed via trojanized dropper apps  on the Google Play Store, masquerading as authenticator and productivity apps to trick unwitting users into installing them. These dropper apps are offered as part of...