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WordPress sites are being hacked to display fraudulent Cloudflare DDoS protection pages that lead to the delivery of malware such as NetSupport RAT and Raccoon Stealer. "A recent surge in JavaScript injections targeting WordPress sites has resulted in fake DDoS prevent prompts which lead victims to download remote access trojan malware," Sucuri's Ben Martin  said  in a write-up published last week. Distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) protection pages are essential browser verification checks designed to deter bot-driven unwanted and malicious traffic from eating up bandwidth and taking down websites. The new attack vector involves hijacking WordPress sites to display fake DDoS protection pop-ups that, when clicked, ultimately lead to the download of a malicious ISO file ("security_install.iso") to the victim's systems. This is achieved by injecting three lines of code into a JavaScript file ("jquery.min.js"), or alternatively into the active...

The threat actors behind a large-scale adversary-in-the-middle (AiTM)  phishing campaign  targeting enterprise users of Microsoft email services have also set their sights on Google Workspace users. "This campaign specifically targeted chief executives and other senior members of various organizations which use [Google Workspace]," Zscaler researchers Sudeep Singh and Jagadeeswar Ramanukolanu  detailed  in a report published this month. The AiTM phishing attacks are said to have commenced in mid-July 2022, following a similar modus operandi as that of a  social engineering campaign  designed to siphon users' Microsoft credentials and even bypass multi-factor authentication. The low-volume Gmail AiTM phishing campaign also entails using the compromised emails of chief executives to conduct further social engineering, with the attacks also utilizing several compromised domains as an intermediate URL redirector to take the victims to the final landing pag...

DevOps platform GitLab this week issued patches to address a critical security flaw in its software that could lead to arbitrary code execution on affected systems. Tracked as  CVE-2022-2884 , the issue is rated 9.9 on the CVSS vulnerability scoring system and impacts all versions of GitLab Community Edition (CE) and Enterprise Edition (EE) starting from 11.3.4 before 15.1.5, 15.2 before 15.2.3, and 15.3 before 15.3.1. At its core, the security weakness is a case of authenticated remote code execution that can be triggered via the GitHub import API. GitLab credited  yvvdwf  with discovering and reporting the flaw. A successful exploitation of the critical flaw could enable a malicious actor to run malicious code on the target machine, inject malware and backdoors, and seize complete control of the susceptible devices. While the issue has been resolved in versions 15.3.1, 15.2.3, 15.1.5, users also have the option of securing against the flaw by temporarily disabling...

The Iranian government-backed actor known as Charming Kitten has added a new tool to its malware arsenal that allows it to retrieve user data from Gmail, Yahoo!, and Microsoft Outlook accounts. Dubbed  HYPERSCRAPE  by Google Threat Analysis Group (TAG), the actively in-development malicious software is said to have been used against less than two dozen accounts in Iran, with the oldest known sample dating back to 2020. The tool was first discovered in December 2021. Charming Kitten, a prolific advanced persistent threat (APT), is believed to be  associated  with Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) and has a history of conducting espionage aligned with the interests of the government. Tracked as APT35, Cobalt Illusion, ITG18, Phosphorus, TA453, and Yellow Garuda, elements of the group have also carried out ransomware attacks, suggesting that the threat actor's motives are both espionage and financially driven. "HYPERSCRAPE requires the victim's accou...

The operators of the XCSSET macOS malware have upped the stakes by making iterative improvements that add support for macOS Monterey by upgrading its source code components to Python 3. "The malware authors have changed from hiding the primary executable in a fake Xcode.app in the initial versions in 2020 to a fake Mail.app in 2021 and now to a fake Notes.app in 2022," SentinelOne researchers Phil Stokes and Dinesh Devadoss  said  in a report. XCSSET, first  documented  by Trend Micro in 2020, has many moving parts that allow it to  harvest sensitive information  from Apple Notes, WeChat, Skype, and Telegram; inject malicious JavaScript code into various websites; and dump cookies from Safari web browser. Infection chains entail using a dropper to compromise users' Xcode projects with the backdoor, with the latter also taking steps to evade detection by masquerading as either system software or the Google Chrome web browser application. The primary ex...

Ransomware is the de facto threat organizations have faced over the past few years. Threat actors were making easy money by exploiting the high valuation of cryptocurrencies and their victims' lack of adequate preparation.  Think about bad security policies, untested backups, patch management practices not up-to-par, and so forth. It resulted in easy growth for ransomware extortion, a crime that multiple threat actors around the world perpetrate.  Something's changed, though. Crypto valuations have dropped, reducing the monetary appeal of ransomware attacks due to organizations mounting a formidable defense against ransomware. Threat actors have been searching for another opportunity – and found one. It's called data exfiltration, or exfil, a type of espionage causing headaches at organizations worldwide. Let's take a look. The threat to reveal confidential information Information exfiltration is rapidly becoming more prevalent. Earlier this year, incidents at Nvi...

A suspected Iranian threat activity cluster has been linked to attacks aimed at Israeli shipping, government, energy, and healthcare organizations as part of an espionage-focused campaign that commenced in late 2020. Cybersecurity firm Mandiant is tracking the group under its uncategorized moniker  UNC3890 , which is believed to conduct operations that align with Iranian interests. "The collected data may be leveraged to support various activities, from hack-and-leak, to enabling kinetic warfare attacks like those that have plagued the shipping industry in recent years," the company's Israel Research Team  noted . Intrusions mounted by the group lead to the deployment of two proprietary pieces of malware: a "small but efficient" backdoor named SUGARUSH and a browser credential stealer called SUGARDUMP that exfiltrates password information to an email address associated with Gmail, ProtonMail, Yahoo, and Yandex. Also employed is a network of command-and-con...

A novel data exfiltration technique has been found to leverage a covert ultrasonic channel to leak sensitive information from isolated, air-gapped computers to a nearby smartphone that doesn't even require a microphone to pick up the sound waves. Dubbed  GAIROSCOPE , the adversarial model is the latest addition to a long list of  acoustic, electromagnetic, optical, and thermal approaches  devised by Dr. Mordechai Guri , the head of R&D in the Cyber Security Research Center in the Ben Gurion University of the Negev in Israel. "Our malware generates ultrasonic tones in the resonance frequencies of the  MEMS gyroscope ," Dr. Guri said in a  new paper  published this week. "These inaudible frequencies produce tiny mechanical oscillations within the smartphone's gyroscope, which can be demodulated into binary information." Air-gapping is seen as an  essential security countermeasure  that involves isolating a computer or network and preventing...

The U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) on Monday  added  a security flaw impacting Palo Alto Networks PAN-OS to its  Known Exploited Vulnerabilities Catalog , based on evidence of active exploitation. The high-severity vulnerability, tracked as  CVE-2022-0028  (CVSS score: 8.6), is a URL filtering policy misconfiguration that could allow an unauthenticated, remote attacker to carry out reflected and amplified TCP denial-of-service (DoS) attacks. "If exploited, this issue would not impact the confidentiality, integrity, or availability of our products," Palo Alto Networks said in an alert. "However, the resulting denial-of-service (DoS) attack may help obfuscate the identity of the attacker and implicate the firewall as the source of the attack. The weakness impacts the following product versions and has been addressed as part of updates released this month - PAN-OS 10.2 (version < 10.2.2-h2) PAN-OS 10.1 (version < 10.1.6-h...

Budget Android device models that are counterfeit versions associated with popular smartphone brands are harboring multiple trojans designed to target WhatsApp and WhatsApp Business messaging apps. The malware, which Doctor Web first came across in July 2022, were discovered in the system partition of at least four different smartphones: P48pro, radmi note 8, Note30u, and Mate40, was "These incidents are united by the fact that the attacked devices were copycats of famous brand-name models," the cybersecurity firm  said  in a report published today. "Moreover, instead of having one of the latest OS versions installed on them with the corresponding information displayed in the device details (for example, Android 10), they had the long outdated 4.4.2 version." Specifically, the tampering concerns two files "/system/lib/libcutils.so" and "/system/lib/libmtd.so" that are modified in such a manner that when the libcutils.so system library is us...

Details of an eight-year-old security vulnerability in the Linux kernel have emerged that the researchers say is "as nasty as Dirty Pipe." Dubbed  DirtyCred  by a group of academics from Northwestern University, the security weakness exploits a previously unknown flaw ( CVE-2022-2588 ) to escalate privileges to the maximum level. "DirtyCred is a kernel exploitation concept that swaps unprivileged  kernel credentials  with privileged ones to escalate privilege," researchers Zhenpeng Lin, Yuhang Wu, and Xinyu Xing noted. "Instead of overwriting any critical data fields on kernel heap, DirtyCred abuses the heap memory reuse mechanism to get privileged." This entails three steps - Free an in-use unprivileged credential with the vulnerability Allocate privileged credentials in the freed memory slot by triggering a privileged userspace process such as su, mount, or sshd Operate as a privileged user The novel exploitation method, according to the resea...

Atlanta-based cyber risk intelligence company, Cyble discovered a new Remote Access Trojan (RAT) malware. What makes this particular RAT malware distinct enough to be named after the  comic creation of Sacha Baron Cohen ? RAT malware typically helps cybercriminals gain complete control of a victim's system, permitting them to access network resources, files, and power to toggle the mouse and keyboard. Borat RAT malware goes beyond the standard features and enables threat actors to deploy ransomware and  DDoS attacks . It also increases the number of threat actors who can launch attacks, sometimes appealing to the lowest common denominator. The added functionality of carrying out DDoS attacks makes it insidious and a risk to today's digital organizations. Ransomware has been the most common top attack type for over  three years . According to an IBM report, REvil was the most common ransomware strain, consisting of about  37%  of all ransomware attacks. Borat ...

Researchers have disclosed multiple vulnerabilities impacting Ultra-wideband (UWB) Real-time Locating Systems ( RTLS ), enabling threat actors to launch adversary-in-the-middle (AitM) attacks and tamper with location data. "The zero-days found specifically pose a security risk for workers in industrial environments," cybersecurity firm Nozomi Networks  disclosed  in a technical write-up last week. "If a threat actor exploits these vulnerabilities, they have the ability to tamper with safety zones designated by RTLS to protect workers in hazardous areas." RTLS is used to automatically identify and track the location of objects or people in real-time, usually within a confined indoor area. This is achieved by making use of tags that are attached to assets, which broadcast USB signals to fixed reference points called anchors that then determine their location. But flaws identified in RTLS solutions –  Sewio Indoor Tracking RTLS UWB Wi-Fi Kit  and  Avalue Renit...

Bitcoin ATM manufacturer General Bytes confirmed that it was a victim of a cyberattack that exploited a previously unknown flaw in its software to plunder cryptocurrency from its users. "The attacker was able to create an admin user remotely via CAS administrative interface via a URL call on the page that is used for the default installation on the server and creating the first administration user," the company  said  in an advisory last week. "This vulnerability has been present in CAS software since version 2020-12-08." It's not immediately clear how many servers were breached using this flaw and how much cryptocurrency was stolen. CAS is short for  Crypto Application Server , a self-hosted product from General Bytes that enables companies to manage Bitcoin ATM ( BATM ) machines from a central location via a web browser on a desktop or a mobile device. The zero-day flaw, which concerned a bug in the CAS admin interface, has been mitigated in two server p...