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The threat actors behind the  BlackCat ransomware  have shut down their darknet website and likely pulled an exit scam after uploading a bogus law enforcement seizure banner. "ALPHV/BlackCat did not get seized. They are exit scamming their affiliates," security researcher Fabian Wosar  said . "It is blatantly obvious when you check the source code of the new takedown notice." "There is absolutely zero reason why law enforcement would just put a saved version of the takedown notice up during a seizure instead of the original takedown notice." The U.K.'s National Crime Agency (NCA)  told  Reuters that it had no connection to any disruptions to the BlackCat infrastructure. Recorded Future security researcher Dmitry Smilyanets  posted  screenshots on the social media platform X in which the BlackCat actors claimed that the "feds screwed us over" and that they intended to sell the ransomware's source code for $5 million. The disappearing...

An in-depth look into a proactive website security solution that continuously detects, prioritizes, and validates web threats, helping to mitigate security, privacy, and compliance risks.  Reflectiz  shields websites from client-side attacks, supply chain risks, data breaches, privacy violations, and compliance issues. You Can't Protect What You Can't See Today's websites are connected to dozens of third-party web apps, trackers, and open-source tools like pixels, tag managers, and JavaScript frameworks. Some of these elements are stored on public CDNs, while others are loaded from third-party web servers that may be unfamiliar. These external web components and data items are not always visible to standard security controls, and they often expose you to security threats such as supply chain risks, client-side attacks, and vulnerabilities in your online software. This means that these serious challenges will frequently go unnoticed. Moreover, security and privacy regulatio...

Every Google Workspace administrator knows how quickly Google Drive becomes a messy sprawl of loosely shared confidential information. This isn't anyone's fault; it's inevitable as your productivity suite is purposefully designed to enable real-time collaboration – both internally and externally.  For Security & Risk Management teams, the untenable risk of any Google Drive footprint lies in the toxic combinations of sensitive data, excessive permissions, and improper sharing. However, it can be challenging to differentiate between typical business practices and potential risks without fully understanding the context and intent.  Material Security, a company renowned for its innovative method of protecting sensitive data within employee mailboxes, has recently launched  Data Protection for Google Drive  to safeguard the sprawl of confidential information scattered throughout Google Drive with a powerful discovery and remediation toolkit. How Material Security ...

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 -...

The U.S. Department of Treasury's Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) sanctioned two individuals and five entities associated with the Intellexa Alliance for their role in "developing, operating, and distributing" commercial spyware designed to target government officials, journalists, and policy experts in the country. "The proliferation of commercial spyware poses distinct and growing security risks to the United States and has been misused by foreign actors to enable human rights abuses and the targeting of dissidents around the world for repression and reprisal," the agency  said . "The Intellexa Consortium, which has a global customer base, has enabled the proliferation of commercial spyware and surveillance technologies around the world, including to authoritarian regimes." The Intellexa Alliance is a consortium of several companies, including Cytrox, linked to a mercenary spyware solution called Predator . In July 2023, the U.S. government  added  Cytrox an...

VMware has released patches to address four security flaws impacting ESXi, Workstation, and Fusion, including two critical flaws that could lead to code execution. Tracked as  CVE-2024-22252 and CVE-2024-22253 , the vulnerabilities have been described as use-after-free bugs in the XHCI USB controller. They carry a CVSS score of 9.3 for Workstation and Fusion, and 8.4 for ESXi systems. "A malicious actor with local administrative privileges on a virtual machine may exploit this issue to execute code as the virtual machine's VMX process running on the host," the company  said  in a new advisory. "On ESXi, the exploitation is contained within the VMX sandbox whereas, on Workstation and Fusion, this may lead to code execution on the machine where Workstation or Fusion is installed." Multiple security researchers associated with the Ant Group Light-Year Security Lab and QiAnXin have been credited with independently discovering and reporting CVE-2024-22252. Secur...

The cybercrime group called GhostSec has been linked to a Golang variant of a ransomware family called  GhostLocker . "TheGhostSec and Stormous ransomware groups are jointly conducting double extortion ransomware attacks on various business verticals in multiple countries," Cisco Talos researcher Chetan Raghuprasad  said  in a report shared with The Hacker News. "GhostLocker and Stormous ransomware have started a new ransomware-as-a-service (RaaS) program STMX_GhostLocker, providing various options for their affiliates." Attacks mounted by the group have targeted victims in Cuba, Argentina, Poland, China, Lebanon, Israel, Uzbekistan, India, South Africa, Brazil, Morocco, Qatar, Turkiye, Egypt, Vietnam, Thailand, and Indonesia. Some of the most impacted business verticals include technology, education, manufacturing, government, transportation, energy, medicolegal, real estate, and telecom. GhostSec – not to be confused with  Ghost Security Group  (which i...

A financial entity in Vietnam was the target of a previously undocumented threat actor called  Lotus Bane  as part of a cyber attack that was first detected in March 2023. Singapore-headquartered Group-IB described the hacking outfit as an advanced persistent threat group that's believed to have been active since at least 2022. The exact specifics of the infection chain remain unknown as yet, but it involves the use of various malicious artifacts that serve as the stepping stone for the next-stage. "The cybercriminals used methods such as DLL side-loading and data exchange via named pipes to run malicious executables and create remote scheduled tasks for lateral movement," the company  said . Group-IB told The Hacker News that the techniques used by Lotus Bane overlap with that of  OceanLotus , a Vietnam-aligned threat actor also known as APT32, Canvas Cyclone (formerly Bismuth), and Cobalt Kitty. This stems from the use of malware like PIPEDANCE for named pip...

Apple has released security updates to address several security flaws, including two vulnerabilities that it said have been actively exploited in the wild. The shortcomings are listed below - CVE-2024-23225  - A memory corruption issue in Kernel that an attacker with arbitrary kernel read and write capability can exploit to bypass kernel memory protections CVE-2024-23296  - A memory corruption issue in the RTKit real-time operating system (RTOS) that an attacker with arbitrary kernel read and write capability can exploit to bypass kernel memory protections It's currently not clear how the flaws are being weaponized in the wild. Apple said both the vulnerabilities were addressed with improved validation in iOS 17.4, iPadOS 17.4, iOS 16.7.6, and iPadOS 16.7.6. The updates are available for the following devices - iOS 16.7.6 and iPadOS 16.7.6  - iPhone 8, iPhone 8 Plus, iPhone X, iPad 5th generation, iPad Pro 9.7-inch, and iPad Pro 12.9-inch 1st generation i...

North Korean threat actors have exploited the recently disclosed security flaws in ConnectWise ScreenConnect to deploy a new malware called  TODDLERSHARK . According to a report shared by Kroll with The Hacker News, TODDLERSHARK overlaps with known Kimsuky malware such as BabyShark and ReconShark. "The threat actor gained access to the victim workstation by exploiting the exposed setup wizard of the ScreenConnect application," security researchers Keith Wojcieszek, George Glass, and Dave Truman said . "They then leveraged their now 'hands on keyboard' access to use cmd.exe to execute mshta.exe with a URL to the Visual Basic (VB) based malware." The ConnectWise flaws in question are  CVE-2024-1708 and CVE-2024-1709 , which came to light last month and have since come under heavy exploitation by multiple threat actors to deliver cryptocurrency miners, ransomware, remote access trojans, and stealer malware. Kimsuky, also known as APT43, ARCHIPELAGO, Black Banshee, Emerald ...

Startups and scales-ups are often cloud-first organizations and rarely have sprawling legacy on-prem environments. Likewise, knowing the agility and flexibility that cloud environments provide, the mid-market is predominantly running in a hybrid state, partly in the cloud but with some on-prem assets. While there has been a bit of a backswing against the pricing and lock-in presented when using cloud infrastructure, cloud is still the preferred provider for the majority of SMBs. As a result, external attack surfaces are increasingly complex and distributed and, therefore, harder to monitor and secure. This expanded attack surface gives hackers plenty of blind spots and gaps to exploit. Security teams are on the back, reacting, often too slowly, to changes in their own attack surface as engineering teams continuously spin up and expose new systems, services, and data to the internet. This is compounded by the fact that the threat landscape is always changing. Thousands of new vulne...

A new DNS threat actor dubbed  Savvy Seahorse  is leveraging sophisticated techniques to entice targets into fake investment platforms and steal funds. "Savvy Seahorse is a DNS threat actor who convinces victims to create accounts on fake investment platforms, make deposits to a personal account, and then transfers those deposits to a bank in Russia," Infoblox  said  in a report published last week. Targets of the campaigns include Russian, Polish, Italian, German, Czech, Turkish, French, Spanish, and English speakers, indicating that the threat actors are casting a wide net in their attacks. Users are lured via ads on social media platforms like Facebook, while also tricking them into parting with their personal information in return for alleged high-return investment opportunities through fake ChatGPT and WhatsApp bots. The financial scam campaigns are notable for using DNS canonical name (CNAME) records to create a traffic distribution system ( TDS ), thereb...

More than 225,000 logs containing compromised OpenAI ChatGPT credentials were made available for sale on underground markets between January and October 2023, new findings from Group-IB show. These credentials were found within  information stealer logs  associated with LummaC2, Raccoon, and RedLine stealer malware. "The number of infected devices decreased slightly in mid- and late summer but grew significantly between August and September," the Singapore-headquartered cybersecurity company  said  in its Hi-Tech Crime Trends 2023/2024 report published last week. Between June and October 2023, more than 130,000 unique hosts with access to OpenAI ChatGPT were infiltrated, a 36% increase over what was observed during the first five months of 2023. The breakdown by the top three stealer families is below - LummaC2 - 70,484 hosts Raccoon - 22,468 hosts RedLine - 15,970 hosts "The sharp increase in the number of ChatGPT credentials for sale is due to the overal...

The threat actor known as  TA577  has been observed using ZIP archive attachments in phishing emails with an aim to steal NT LAN Manager ( NTLM ) hashes. The new attack chain "can be used for sensitive information gathering purposes and to enable follow-on activity," enterprise security firm Proofpoint  said  in a Monday report. At least two campaigns taking advantage of this approach were observed on February 26 and 27, 2024, the company added. The phishing waves disseminated thousands of messages and targeted hundreds of organizations across the world. The messages themselves appeared as responses to previous emails, a known technique called thread hijacking, in a bid to increase the likelihood of the attacks' success. The ZIP attachments – which are the most common delivery mechanism – come with an HTML file that's designed to contact an actor-controlled Server Message Block (SMB) server. "TA577's objective is to capture NTLMv2 Challenge/Response pairs fro...