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An "extremely sophisticated" Chinese-speaking advanced persistent threat (APT) actor dubbed  LuoYu  has been observed using a malicious Windows tool called WinDealer that's delivered by means of man-on-the-side attacks. "This groundbreaking development allows the actor to modify network traffic in-transit to insert malicious payloads," Russian cybersecurity company Kaspersky  said  in a new report. "Such attacks are especially dangerous and devastating because they do not require any interaction with the target to lead to a successful infection." Known to be active since 2008, organizations targeted by LuoYu are predominantly foreign diplomatic organizations established in China and members of the academic community as well as financial, defense, logistics, and telecommunications companies. LuoYu's use of  WinDealer  was first documented by Taiwanese cybersecurity firm  TeamT5  at the Japan Security Analyst Conference (JSAC) in January 2021. ...

The Parrot traffic direction system (TDS) that came to light earlier this year has had a larger impact than previously thought, according to new research. Sucuri, which has been tracking the same campaign since February 2019 under the name "NDSW/NDSX," said that "the malware was one of the top infections" detected in 2021, accounting for more than 61,000 websites. Parrot TDS was  documented  in April 2022 by Czech cybersecurity company Avast, noting that the PHP script had ensnared web servers hosting more than 16,500 websites to act as a gateway for further attack campaigns. This involves appending a piece of malicious code to all JavaScript files on compromised web servers hosting content management systems (CMS) such as WordPress that are in turn said to be breached by taking advantage of weak login credentials and vulnerable plugins. Besides using different obfuscation tactics to conceal the code, the "injected JavaScript may also be found well indent...

Microsoft on Thursday said it took steps to disable malicious activity stemming from abuse of OneDrive by a previously undocumented threat actor it tracks under the chemical element-themed moniker Polonium. In addition to removing the offending accounts created by the Lebanon-based activity group, the tech giant's Threat Intelligence Center (MSTIC) said it suspended over 20 malicious OneDrive applications created by Polonium andd that it notified affected organizations. "The observed activity was coordinated with other actors affiliated with Iran's Ministry of Intelligence and Security (MOIS), based primarily on victim overlap and commonality of tools and techniques," MSTIC  assessed  with "moderate confidence." The adversarial collective is believed to have breached more than 20 organizations based in Israel and one intergovernmental organization with operations in Lebanon since February 2022. Targets of interest included entities in the manufacturing...

Atlassian has warned of a critical unpatched remote code execution vulnerability impacting Confluence Server and Data Center products that it said is being actively exploited in the wild. The Australian software company credited cybersecurity firm Volexity for identifying the flaw, which is being tracked as  CVE-2022-26134 . "Atlassian has been made aware of current active exploitation of a critical severity unauthenticated remote code execution vulnerability in Confluence Data Center and Server," it  said  in an advisory. "There are currently no fixed versions of Confluence Server and Data Center available. Atlassian is working with the highest priority to issue a fix." Specifics of the security flaw have been withheld until a software patch is available. All supported versions of Confluence Server and Data Center are affected, although it's expected that all versions of the enterprise solution are potentially vulnerable. The earliest impacted version is ...

As the threat landscape evolves and multiplies with more advanced attacks than ever, defending against these modern cyber threats is a monumental challenge for almost any organization.  Threat detection is about an organization's ability to accurately identify threats, be it to the network, an endpoint, another asset or an application – including cloud infrastructure and assets. At scale, threat detection analyzes the entire security infrastructure to identify malicious activity that could compromise the ecosystem. Countless solutions support threat detection, but the key is to have as much data as possible available to bolster your security visibility. If you don't know what is happening on your systems, threat detection is impossible.  Deploying the right security software is critical for protecting you from threats. What do we mean by threat detection software? In the early days of threat detection, software was deployed to protect against different forms of malware. ...

An analysis of  leaked chats  from the notorious  Conti ransomware group  earlier this year has revealed that the syndicate has been working on a set of firmware attack techniques that could offer a path to accessing privileged code on compromised devices. "Control over firmware gives attackers virtually unmatched powers both to directly cause damage and to enable other long-term strategic goals," firmware and hardware security firm Eclypsium  said  in a report shared with The Hacker News. "Such level of access would allow an adversary to cause irreparable damage to a system or to establish ongoing persistence that is virtually invisible to the operating system." Specifically, this includes attacks aimed at embedded microcontrollers such as the Intel  Management Engine  ( ME ), a privileged component that's part of the company's processor chipsets and which can completely bypass the operating system. It's worth noting that the reason for thi...

As ransomware infections have evolved from purely encrypting data to schemes such as double and triple extortion, a new attack vector is likely to set the stage for future campaigns. Called Ransomware for IoT or  R4IoT  by Forescout, it's a "novel, proof-of-concept ransomware that exploits an IoT device to gain access and move laterally in an IT [information technology] network and impact the OT [operational technology] network." This potential pivot is based on the rapid growth in the number of IoT devices as well as the convergence of IT and OT networks in organizations. The ultimate goal of R4IoT is to leverage exposed and vulnerable IoT devices such as IP cameras to gain an initial foothold, followed by deploying ransomware in the IT network and taking advantage of poor operational security practices to hold mission-critical processes hostage. "By compromising IoT, IT, and OT assets, R4IoT goes beyond the usual encryption and data exfiltration to cause phys...

Virtual Private Network (VPN) provider ExpressVPN on Thursday announced that it's removing Indian-based VPN servers in response to a new cybersecurity directive issued by the Indian Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT-In). "Rest assured, our users will still be able to connect to VPN servers that will give them Indian IP addresses and allow them to access the internet as if they were located in India," the company  said . "These 'virtual' India servers will instead be physically located in Singapore and the U.K." The development comes as the CERT-In has enforced new  controversial   data retention requirements  that are set to come into effect on June 27, 2022, and mandate VPN service providers to store subscribers' real names, contact details, and IP addresses assigned to them for at least five years. The logged user data, CERT-In emphasized, will only be requested for the purposes of "cyber incident response, protective and preventive ...

A critical security flaw has been uncovered in UNISOC's smartphone chipset that could be potentially weaponized to disrupt a smartphone's radio communications through a malformed packet. "Left unpatched, a hacker or a military unit can leverage such a vulnerability to neutralize communications in a specific location," Israeli cybersecurity company Check Point said in a report shared with The Hacker News. "The vulnerability is in the modem firmware, not in the Android OS itself." UNISOC, a semiconductor company based in Shanghai, is the world's fourth-largest mobile processor manufacturer after Mediatek, Qualcomm, and Apple, accounting for 10% of all SoC shipments in Q3 2021, according to  Counterpoint Research . The now-patched issue has been assigned the identifier CVE-2022-20210 and is rated 9.4 out of 10 for severity on the CVSS vulnerability scoring system. In a nutshell, the vulnerability — discovered following a reverse-engineering of UNISOC...

The threat actor known as SideWinder has added a new custom tool to its arsenal of malware that's being used in phishing attacks against Pakistani public and private sector entities. "Phishing links in emails or posts that mimic legitimate notifications and services of government agencies and organizations in Pakistan are primary attack vectors of the gang," Singapore-headquartered cybersecurity company Group-IB  said  in a Wednesday report. SideWinder, also tracked under the monikers Hardcore Nationalist, Rattlesnake, Razor Tiger, and T-APT-04, has been active since at least 2012 with a primary focus on Pakistan and other Central Asian countries like Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Nepal, Singapore, and Sri Lanka. Last month, Kaspersky  attributed  to this group over 1,000 cyber attacks that took place in the past two years, while calling out its persistence and sophisticated obfuscation techniques. The threat actor's modus operandi involves the use of spear-phishing...

The U.S. Department of Justice (DoJ) on Wednesday  announced  the seizure of three domains used by cybercriminals to trade stolen personal information and facilitate distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks for hire. This includes weleakinfo[.]to, ipstress[.]in, and ovh-booter[.]com, the first of which allowed its users to traffic hacked personal data and offered a searchable database containing illegally amassed information obtained from over 10,000 data breaches. The database consisted of seven billion indexed records featuring names, email addresses, usernames, phone numbers, and passwords for online accounts that could be accessed through different subscription tiers. The shutdown of weleakinfo[.]to comes more than two years after a related internet domain named weleakinfo[.]com was  confiscated in January 2020 , with law enforcement officials arresting 21 individuals in connection to the operation later that year. Last May, one of its operators was  sen...

A new unpatched security vulnerability has been disclosed in the open-source Horde Webmail client that could be exploited to achieve remote code execution on the email server simply by sending a specially crafted email to a victim. "Once the email is viewed, the attacker can silently take over the complete mail server without any further user interaction," SonarSource said in a report shared with The Hacker News. "The vulnerability exists in the default configuration and can be exploited with no knowledge of a targeted Horde instance." The issue, which has been assigned the CVE identifier  CVE-2022-30287 , was reported to the vendor on February 2, 2022. The maintainers of the Horde Project did not immediately respond to a request for comment regarding the unresolved vulnerability. At its core, the issue makes it possible for an authenticated user of a Horde instance to run malicious code on the underlying server by taking advantage of a quirk in how the client...

An international law enforcement operation involving 11 countries has culminated in the takedown of a notorious mobile malware threat called  FluBot . "This Android malware has been spreading aggressively through SMS, stealing passwords, online banking details and other sensitive information from infected smartphones across the world," Europol  said  in a statement. The "complex investigation" included authorities from Australia, Belgium, Finland, Hungary, Ireland, Romania, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, the Netherlands, and the U.S. FluBot , also called Cabassous, emerged in the wild in December 2020, masking its insidious intent behind the veneer of seemingly innocuous package tracking applications such as FedEx, DHL, and Correos.  It primarily spreads via smishing (aka SMS-based phishing) messages that trick unsuspecting recipients into clicking on a link to download the malware-laced apps. Once launched, the app would proceed to request access to Android...