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The U.S. Department of Justice (DoJ) on Thursday indicted two North Korean nationals, a Mexican national, and two of its own citizens for their alleged involvement in the ongoing fraudulent information technology (IT) worker scheme that seeks to generate revenue for the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK) in violation of international sanctions. The action targets Jin Sung-Il (진성일), Pak Jin-Song (박진성), Pedro Ernesto Alonso De Los Reyes, Erick Ntekereze Prince, and Emanuel Ashtor. Alonso, who resides in Sweden, was arrested in the Netherlands on January 10, 2025, after a warrant was issued. All five defendants have been charged with conspiracy to cause damage to a protected computer, conspiracy to commit wire fraud and mail fraud, conspiracy to commit money laundering, and conspiracy to transfer false identification documents. Jin and Pak have also been charged with conspiracy to violate the International Emergency Economic Powers Act. If convicted, each of them faces a ...

Google has launched a new feature called Identity Check for supported Android devices that locks sensitive settings behind biometric authentication when outside of trusted locations. "When you turn on Identity Check, your device will require explicit biometric authentication to access certain sensitive resources when you're outside of trusted locations," Google said in a post announcing the move. In doing so, biometric authentication will be required for the following actions - Access saved passwords and passkeys with Google Password Manager Autofill passwords in apps from Google Password Manager, except in Chrome Change screen lock, like PIN, pattern, and password Change biometrics, like Fingerprint or Face Unlock Run a factory reset Turn off Find My Device Turn off any theft protection features View trusted places Turn off Identity Check Set up a new device with your current device Add or remove a Google Account Access Developer options Identity C...

The U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) on Thursday placed a now-patched security flaw impacting the popular jQuery JavaScript library to its Known Exploited Vulnerabilities ( KEV ) catalog, based on evidence of active exploitation. The medium-severity vulnerability is CVE-2020-11023 (CVSS score: 6.1/6.9), a nearly five-year-old cross-site scripting (XSS) bug that could be exploited to achieve arbitrary code execution. "Passing HTML containing <option> elements from untrusted sources - even after sanitizing them - to one of jQuery's DOM manipulation methods (i.e. .html(), .append(), and others) may execute untrusted code," according to a GitHub advisory released for the flaw. The problem was addressed in jQuery version 3.5.0 released in April 2020. A workaround for CVE-2020-11023 involves using DOMPurify with the SAFE_FOR_JQUERY flag set to sanitize the HTML string before passing it to a jQuery method. As is typically the case, t...

An exhaustive evaluation of three firewall models from Palo Alto Networks has uncovered a host of known security flaws impacting the devices' firmware as well as misconfigured security features. "These weren't obscure, corner-case vulnerabilities," security vendor Eclypsium said in a report shared with The Hacker News. "Instead these were very well-known issues that we wouldn't expect to see even on a consumer-grade laptop. These issues could allow attackers to evade even the most basic integrity protections, such as Secure Boot, and modify device firmware if exploited." The company said it analyzed three firewall appliances from Palo Alto Networks, PA-3260, PA-1410, and PA-415, the first of which officially reached end-of-sale on August 31, 2023. The other two models are fully supported firewall platforms. The list of identified flaws, collectively named PANdora's Box , is as follows - CVE-2020-10713 aka BootHole (Affects PA-3260, PA-14...

Cybersecurity researchers are calling attention to a new malware campaign that leverages fake CAPTCHA verification checks to deliver the infamous Lumma information stealer. "The campaign is global, with Netskope Threat Labs tracking victims targeted in Argentina, Colombia, the United States, the Philippines, and other countries around the world," Leandro Fróes, senior threat research engineer at Netskope Threat Labs, said in a report shared with The Hacker News. "The campaign also spans multiple industries, including healthcare, banking, and marketing, with the telecom industry having the highest number of organizations targeted." The attack chain begins when a victim visits a compromised website, which directs them to a bogus CAPTCHA page that specifically instructs the site visitor to copy and paste a command into the Run prompt in Windows that uses the native mshta.exe binary to download and execute an HTA file from a remote server. It's worth noting...

Are your websites leaking sensitive data? New research reveals that 45% of third-party apps access user info without proper authorization, and 53% of risk exposures in Retail are due to the excessive use of tracking tools. Learn how to uncover and mitigate these hidden threats and risks—download the full report here . New research by web exposure management specialist Reflectiz reveals several alarming findings about the high number of website vulnerabilities organizations across many industries are needlessly exposing themselves to. For instance, one standout statistic from the report is that 45% of third-party applications access sensitive user information without good reason . Although third-party apps may be essential for marketing and functionality purposes, not all of them need access to the kind of personal and financial user information that cybercriminals are hunting for. It's safer to limit apps' access to it on a need-to-know basis. For the report, Reflectiz gathere...

Enterprise-grade Juniper Networks routers have become the target of a custom backdoor as part of a campaign dubbed J-magic . According to the Black Lotus Labs team at Lumen Technologies, the activity is so named for the fact that the backdoor continuously monitors for a "magic packet" sent by the threat actor in TCP traffic.  "J-magic campaign marks the rare occasion of malware designed specifically for Junos OS, which serves a similar market but relies on a different operating system, a variant of FreeBSD," the company said in a report shared with The Hacker News. Evidence gathered by the company shows that the earliest sample of the backdoor dates back to September 2023, with the activity ongoing between mid-2023 and mid-2024. Semiconductor, energy, manufacturing, and information technology (IT) sectors were the most targeted. Infections have been reported across Europe, Asia, and South America, including Argentina, Armenia, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Indone...

An analysis of HellCat and Morpheus ransomware operations has revealed that affiliates associated with the respective cybercrime entities are using identical code for their ransomware payloads. The findings come from SentinelOne, which analyzed artifacts uploaded to the VirusTotal malware scanning platform by the same submitter towards the end of December 2024. "These two payload samples are identical except for victim specific data and the attacker contact details," security researcher Jim Walter said in a new report shared with The Hacker News. Both HellCat and Morpheus are nascent entrants to the ransomware ecosystem, having emerged in October and December 2024, respectively. A deeper examination of the Morpheus/HellCat payload, a 64-bit portable executable, has revealed that both samples require a path to be specified as an input argument. They are both configured to exclude the \Windows\System32 folder, as well as a hard-coded list of extensions from the encryp...

Despite significant investments in advanced technologies and employee training programs, credential and user-based attacks remain alarmingly prevalent, accounting for 50-80% of enterprise breaches [1] , [2] . While identity-based attacks continue to dominate as the leading cause of security incidents, the common approach to identity security threats is still threat reduction, implementing layers of controls to reduce risk while accepting that some attacks will succeed. This methodology relies on detection, response, and recovery capabilities to minimize damage after a breach has already occurred, but it does not prevent the possibility of successful attacks.  The good news? Finally, there's a solution that marks a true paradigm shift: with modern authentication technologies, the complete elimination of identity-based threats is now within reach. This groundbreaking advancement moves us beyond the traditional focus on risk reduction, offering organizations a way to fully neutraliz...

SonicWall is alerting customers of a critical security flaw impacting its Secure Mobile Access (SMA) 1000 Series appliances that it said has been likely exploited in the wild as a zero-day. The vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2025-23006 , is rated 9.8 out of a maximum of 10.0 on the CVSS scoring system. "Pre-authentication deserialization of untrusted data vulnerability has been identified in the SMA1000 Appliance Management Console (AMC) and Central Management Console (CMC), which in specific conditions could potentially enable a remote unauthenticated attacker to execute arbitrary OS commands," the company said in an advisory. It's worth noting that CVE-2025-23006 does not affect its Firewall and SMA 100 series products. The flaw has been addressed in version 12.4.3-02854 (platform-hotfix). SonicWall also said that it has been notified of "possible active exploitation" by unspecified threat actors, necessitating that customers apply the fixes as soon as p...

Cybersecurity researchers have disclosed details of a new BackConnect (BC) malware that has been developed by threat actors linked to the infamous QakBot loader. "BackConnect is a common feature or module utilized by threat actors to maintain persistence and perform tasks," Walmart's Cyber Intelligence team told The Hacker News. "The BackConnect(s) in use were 'DarkVNC' alongside the IcedID BackConnect ( KeyHole )." The company noted that the BC module was found on the same infrastructure that was observed distributing another malware loader called ZLoader, which was recently updated to incorporate a Domain Name System (DNS) tunnel for command-and-control (C2) communications. QakBot, also called QBot and Pinkslipbot, suffered a major operational setback in 2023 after its infrastructure was seized as part of a coordinated law enforcement effort named Duck Hunt. Since then, sporadic campaigns have been uncovered propagating the malware. Origina...

Cisco has released software updates to address a critical security flaw impacting Meeting Management that could permit a remote, authenticated attacker to gain administrator privileges on susceptible instances. The vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2025-20156, carries a CVSS score of 9.9 out 10.0. It has been described as a privilege escalation flaw in the REST API of Cisco Meeting Management. "This vulnerability exists because proper authorization is not enforced upon REST API users," the company said in a Wednesday advisory. "An attacker could exploit this vulnerability by sending API requests to a specific endpoint." "A successful exploit could allow the attacker to gain administrator-level control over edge nodes that are managed by Cisco Meeting Management." The networking equipment major credited Ben Leonard-Lagarde of Modux for reporting the security shortcoming. It affects the following versions of the product irrespective of device configuratio...