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

A new campaign leveraging an exploit kit has been observed abusing an Internet Explorer flaw patched by Microsoft last year to deliver the RedLine Stealer trojan. "When executed, RedLine Stealer performs recon against the target system (including username, hardware, browsers installed, anti-virus software) and then exfiltrates data (including passwords, saved credit cards, crypto wallets, VPN logins) to a remote command and control server," Bitdefender  said  in a new report shared with The Hacker News. Most of the infections are located in Brazil and Germany, followed by the U.S., Egypt, Canada, China, and Poland, among others. Exploit kits or exploit packs are comprehensive tools that contain a collection of exploits designed to take advantage of vulnerabilities in commonly-used software by scanning infected systems for different kinds of flaws and deploying additional malware. The primary infection method used by attackers to distribute exploit kits, in this case the...

Log4Shell ,  ProxyShell ,  ProxyLogon ,  ZeroLogon , and flaws in  Zoho ManageEngine AD SelfService Plus ,  Atlassian Confluence , and  VMware vSphere Client  emerged as some of the top exploited security vulnerabilities in 2021. That's according to a " Top Routinely Exploited Vulnerabilities " report released by cybersecurity authorities from the Five Eyes nations Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the U.K., and the U.S. Other frequently weaponized flaws included a remote code execution bug in Microsoft Exchange Server ( CVE-2020-0688 ), an arbitrary file read vulnerability in Pulse Secure Pulse Connect Secure ( CVE-2019-11510 ), and a path traversal defect in Fortinet FortiOS and FortiProxy ( CVE-2018-13379 ). Nine of the top 15 routinely exploited flaws were remote code execution vulnerabilities, followed by two privilege escalation weaknesses, and one each of security feature bypass, arbitrary code execution, arbitrary file read, and path traver...

Cloudflare on Wednesday disclosed that it acted to mitigate a 15.3 million request-per-second (RPS) distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack. The web infrastructure and website security company called it one of the "largest HTTPS DDoS attacks on record."  "HTTPS DDoS attacks are more expensive in terms of required computational resources because of the higher cost of establishing a secure TLS encrypted connection," Cloudflare's Omer Yoachimik and Julien Desgats  said . "Therefore it costs the attacker more to launch the attack, and for the victim to mitigate it." The volumetric DDoS attack is said to have lasted less than 15 seconds and targeted an unnamed Cloudflare customer operating a crypto launchpad.  Volumetric DDoS attacks are designed to overwhelm a target network/service with significantly high volumes of malicious traffic, which typically originate from a botnet under a threat actor's control. Cloudflare said the latest attack w...

Network-attached storage (NAS) appliance maker QNAP on Wednesday  said  it's working on updating its QTS and QuTS operating systems after Netatalk last month released patches to contain seven security flaws in its software. Netatalk  is an open-source implementation of the Apple Filing Protocol ( AFP ), allowing Unix-like operating systems to serve as file servers for Apple macOS computers. On March 22, 2022, its maintainers released  version 3.1.13  of the software to resolve major security issues — CVE-2021-31439 ,  CVE-2022-23121 ,  CVE-2022-23122 ,  CVE-2022-23123 ,  CVE-2022-23124 ,  CVE-2022-23125 , and  CVE-2022-0194  — that could be exploited to achieve arbitrary code execution. "This vulnerability [CVE-2022-23121] can be exploited remotely and does not need authentication," NCC Group researchers  noted  last month. "It allows an attacker to get remote code execution as the 'nobody' user on the NAS. This...

Bad actors continuously evolve their tactics and are becoming more sophisticated. Within the past couple of years, we've seen supply chain attacks that quickly create widespread damage throughout entire industries. But the attackers aren't just focusing their efforts on supply chains. For example, businesses are becoming increasingly more reliant on SaaS apps and the cloud – creating a new avenue for attackers to steal critical data and assets. The looming threat of ransomware attacks, phishing scams, and destructive BEC campaigns has businesses wondering: do I need to increase my security? As a result, many managed service providers (MSP) are fielding questions about the level of security they can provide for their customers. In this new environment, MSPs are finding they can no longer avoid offering cybersecurity services. Fortunately,  there's an eBook  for MSPs who are expanding into the security space as managed security service providers (MSSP).  It's vital for M...

A China-linked government-sponsored threat actor observed striking European diplomatic entities in March may have been targeting Russian government officials with an updated version of a remote access trojan called  PlugX . Secureworks attributed the attempted intrusions to a threat actor it tracks as Bronze President, and by the wider cybersecurity community under the monikers Mustang Panda, TA416, HoneyMyte, RedDelta, and PKPLUG. "The war in Ukraine has prompted many countries to deploy their cyber capabilities to gain insight about global events, political machinations, and motivations," the cybersecurity firm  said  in a report shared with The Hacker News. "This desire for situational awareness often extends to collecting intelligence from allies and 'friends.'" Bronze President, active since at least July 2018, has a history of conducting espionage operations by leveraging custom and publicly available tools to compromise, maintain long-term access,...

Google on Tuesday officially began rolling out a new "Data safety" section for Android apps on the Play Store to highlight the type of data being collected and shared with third-parties. "Users want to know for what purpose their data is being collected and whether the developer is sharing user data with third parties," Suzanne Frey, Vice President of product for Android security and privacy,  said . "In addition, users want to understand how app developers are securing user data after an app is downloaded." The transparency measure, which is built along the lines of Apple's " Privacy Nutrition Labels ," was  first announced  by Google nearly a year ago in May 2021. The Data safety section, which will show up against every app listing on the digital storefront, presents a unified view of what data is being collected, for what purpose it's being used, and how it's handled, while also highlighting what data is being shared with thi...

The U.S. government on Tuesday  announced  up to $10 million in rewards for information on six hackers associated with the Russian military intelligence service. "These individuals participated in malicious cyber activities on behalf of the Russian government against U.S. critical infrastructure in violation of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act," the State Department's Rewards for Justice Program  said . All the six Russian officers are members of an advanced persistent threat group called Sandworm (aka Voodoo Bear or Iron Viking), which is known to be operating since at least 2008 with a specific focus on targeting entities in Ukraine with the goal of establishing an illicit, long-term presence in order to mine highly sensitive data. The hackers, who are officers of the Main Intelligence Directorate of the General Staff of the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation ( GRU ), are as follows - Artem Valeryevich Ochichenko , who has been linked to technical reconnaissa...

A "logical flaw" has been disclosed in NPM, the default package manager for the Node.js JavaScript runtime environment, that enables malicious actors to pass off rogue libraries as legitimate and trick unsuspecting developers into installing them. The supply chain threat has been dubbed "Package Planting" by researchers from cloud security firm Aqua. Following responsible disclosure on February 10, the underlying issue was remediated by NPM on April 26. "Up until recently, NPM allowed adding anyone as a maintainer of the package without notifying these users or getting their consent," Aqua's Yakir Kadkoda  said  in a report published Tuesday. This effectively meant that an adversary could create malware-laced packages and assign them to trusted, popular maintainers without their knowledge. The idea here is to add credible owners associated with other popular NPM libraries to the attacker-controlled poisoned package in hopes that doing so would a...

Microsoft on Tuesday disclosed a set of two privilege escalation vulnerabilities in the Linux operating system that could potentially allow threat actors to carry out an array of nefarious activities. Collectively called " Nimbuspwn ," the flaws "can be chained together to gain root privileges on Linux systems, allowing attackers to deploy payloads, like a root backdoor, and perform other malicious actions via arbitrary root code execution," Jonathan Bar Or of the Microsoft 365 Defender Research Team  said  in a report. On top of that, the defects — tracked as  CVE-2022-29799 and CVE-2022-29800  — could also be weaponized as a vector for root access to deploy more sophisticated threats such as ransomware. The vulnerabilities are rooted in a  systemd  component called  networkd-dispatcher , a  daemon program  for the network manager system service that's designed to dispatch network status changes. Specifically, they relate to a combina...

The threat actor behind the prolific Emotet botnet is testing new attack methods on a small scale before co-opting them into their larger volume malspam campaigns, potentially in response to Microsoft's move to disable Visual Basic for Applications (VBA) macros by default across its products. Calling the new activity a "departure" from the group's typical behavior, Proofpoint alternatively  raised the possibility  that the latest set of phishing emails distributing the malware show that the operators are now "engaged in more selective and limited attacks in parallel to the typical massive scale email campaigns." Emotet, the handiwork of a cybercrime group tracked as  TA542  (aka Mummy Spider or  Gold Crestwood ), staged a  revival of sorts  late last year after a 10-month-long hiatus following a coordinated law enforcement operation to take down its attack infrastructure. Since then, Emotet  campaigns  have targeted thousands of custome...

The infamous ransomware group known as Conti has  continued  its onslaught against entities despite suffering a massive data leak of its own earlier this year, according to new research. Conti, attributed to a Russia-based threat actor known as Gold Ulrick , is the second most prevalent malware strain in the ransomware landscape, accounting for  19% of all attacks  during the three-month-period between October and December 2021. One of the most prolific ransomware groups of the last year along the likes of LockBit 2.0, PYSA, and Hive, Conti has locked the networks of hospitals, businesses, and government agencies, while receiving a ransom payment in exchange for sharing the decryption key as part of its name-and-shame scheme. But after the cybercriminal cartel came out in support of Russia over its invasion of Ukraine in February, an anonymous Ukrainian security researcher under the Twitter handle  ContiLeaks  began leaking the source code as well as pr...

A state-backed threat actor with ties to the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DRPK) has been attributed to a spear-phishing campaign targeting journalists covering the country with the ultimate goal of deploying a backdoor on infected Windows systems. The intrusions, said to be the work of Ricochet Chollima, resulted in the deployment of a novel malware strain called GOLDBACKDOOR, an artifact that shares technical overlaps with another malware named BLUELIGHT, which has been previously linked to the group. "Journalists are high-value targets for hostile governments," cybersecurity firm Stairwell  said  in a report published last week. "Compromising a journalist can provide access to highly-sensitive information and enable additional attacks against their sources." Ricochet Chollima, also known as  APT37 , InkySquid, and ScarCruft, is a North Korean-nexus targeted intrusion adversary that has been involved in espionage attacks since at least 2016. The ...