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

It's one thing for hackers to target websites and proudly announce it on social media platforms for all to see. It's, however, an entirely different thing to leave a digital trail that leads cybersecurity researchers right to their doorsteps. That's exactly what happened in the case of a hacktivist under the name of VandaTheGod, who has been attributed to a series of attacks on government websites since July 2019. In a report shared with The Hacker News, researchers from Check Point said they were able to map VandaTheGod's activity over the years, and eventually zero down the attacker's real identity to a Brazilian individual from the city of Uberlândia. The cybersecurity firm said it notified concerned law enforcement of its findings for further action, adding the social media activities on profiles associated with VandaTheGod came to a halt towards the end of 2019. A Long Social Media Trail VandaTheGod has a long history of going after government we...

Chinese security firm Qihoo 360 Netlab said it partnered with tech giant Baidu to disrupt a malware botnet infecting over hundreds of thousands of systems. The botnet was traced back to a group it calls ShuangQiang (also called Double Gun ), which has been behind several attacks since 2017 aimed at compromising Windows computers with MBR and VBR bootkits , and installing malicious drivers for financial gain and hijack web traffic to e-commerce sites. In addition to using images uploaded to Baidu Tieba to distribute configuration files and malware — a technique called steganography — the group has begun using Alibaba Cloud storage to host configuration files and Baidu's analytics platform Tongji to manage the activity of its infected hosts, the researchers said. The initial compromise relies on luring unsuspecting users to install game launching software from sketchy game portals that contain malicious code under the guise of a patch. Once the user downloads and inst...

Remember Strandhogg? A security vulnerability affecting Android that malicious apps can exploit to masquerade as any other app installed on a targeted device to display fake interfaces to the users, tricking them into giving away sensitive information. Late last year, at the time of its public disclosure, researchers also confirmed that some attackers were already exploiting the flaw in the wild to steal users' banking and other login credentials, as well as to spy on their activities. The same team of Norwegian cybersecurity researchers today unveiled details of a new critical vulnerability (CVE-2020-0096) affecting the Android operating system that could allow attackers to carry out a much more sophisticated version of Strandhogg attack. Dubbed ' Strandhogg 2.0 ,' the new vulnerability affects all Android devices, except those running the latest version, Android Q / 10, of the mobile operating system—which, unfortunately, is running on only 15-20% of the total...

SaaS Adoption is Skyrocketing, Resilience Hasn't Kept Pace SaaS platforms have revolutionized how businesses operate. They simplify collaboration, accelerate deployment, and reduce the overhead of managing infrastructure. But with their rise comes a subtle, dangerous assumption: that the convenience of SaaS extends to resilience. It doesn't. These platforms weren't built with full-scale data protection in mind . Most follow a shared responsibility model — wherein the provider ensures uptime and application security, but the data inside is your responsibility. In a world of hybrid architectures, global teams, and relentless cyber threats, that responsibility is harder than ever to manage. Modern organizations are being stretched across: Hybrid and multi-cloud environments with decentralized data sprawl Complex integration layers between IaaS, SaaS, and legacy systems Expanding regulatory pressure with steeper penalties for noncompliance Escalating ransomware threats and inside...

Cybersecurity researchers today uncovered a new advanced version of ComRAT backdoor, one of the earliest known backdoors used by the Turla APT group, that leverages Gmail's web interface to covertly receive commands and exfiltrate sensitive data. "ComRAT v4 was first seen in 2017 and known still to be in use as recently as January 2020," cybersecurity firm ESET said in a report shared with The Hacker News. "We identified at least three targets: two Ministries of Foreign Affairs in Eastern Europe and a national parliament in the Caucasus region." Turla , also known as Snake, has been active for over a decade with a long history of the watering hole and spear-phishing campaigns against embassies and military organizations at least since 2004. The group's espionage platform started off as Agent.BTZ , in 2007, before it evolved to ComRAT , in addition to gaining additional capabilities to achieve persistence and to steal data from a local network. It...

The hacking team behind the "unc0ver" jailbreaking tool has released a new version of the software that can unlock every single iPhone, including those running the latest iOS 13.5 version. Calling it the first zero-day jailbreak to be released since iOS 8, unc0ver's lead developer Pwn20wnd said "every other jailbreak released since iOS 9 used 1day exploits that were either patched in the next beta version or the hardware." The group did not specify which vulnerability in iOS was exploited to develop the latest version. The unc0ver website also highlighted the extensive testing that went behind the scenes to ensure compatibility across a broad range of devices, from iPhone 6S to the new iPhone 11 Pro Max models, spanning versions iOS 11.0 through iOS 13.5, but excluding versions 12.3 to 12.3.2 and 12.4.2 to 12.4.5. "Utilizing native system sandbox exceptions, security remains intact while enabling access to jailbreak files," according to un...

The advent of the Covid-19 pandemic and the impact on our society has resulted in many dramatic changes to how people are traveling, interacting with each other, and collaborating at work. There are several trends taking place as a consequence of the outbreak, which has only continued to heighten the need for the tightest possible cybersecurity. Tools for Collaboration There has been a massive spike in the adoption of Tools for Collaboration as a consequence of COVID-19. Concerns about the coronavirus have caused an enormous increase in remote working, with many organizations requiring or at least encouraging their workers to stay at home—especially when cities, states, and even some entire nations are ultimately into lock down in a bid to spread the stem of the disease. Meanwhile, with millions working from home for many weeks now, there has been a spike in the video conferencing and online collaboration software, many of which are fortunately entirely free, allowing orga...

Today, cybersecurity researchers shed light on an Iranian cyber espionage campaign directed against critical infrastructures in Kuwait and Saudi Arabia. Bitdefender said the intelligence-gathering operations were conducted by Chafer APT (also known as APT39 or Remix Kitten), a threat actor known for its attacks on telecommunication and travel industries in the Middle East to collect personal information that serves the country's geopolitical interests. "Victims of the analyzed campaigns fit into the pattern preferred by this actor, such as air transport and government sectors in the Middle East," the researchers said in a report (PDF) shared with The Hacker News, adding at least one of the attacks went undiscovered for more than a year and a half since 2018. "The campaigns were based on several tools, including 'living off the land' tools, which makes attribution difficult, as well as different hacking tools and a custom-built backdoor." Kn...

As cyberattacks continue to proliferate in volume and increase in sophistication, many organizations acknowledge that some part of their breach protection must be outsourced, introducing a million-dollar question of what type of service to choose form. Today, Cynet releases the Security Outsourcing Guide ( download here ), providing IT Security executives with clear and actionable guidance on the pros and cons of each outsourcing alternative. The reason for security outsourcing increasing momentum is that unlike traditional IT, cyber threats evolve at a much faster pace. While relatively not long ago, AV and firewall covered most of the standard organization's cybersecurity needs, today no security posture can be considered complete without a certain level of incident response capabilities, alert prioritization, root cause analysis and forensic investigation – and security professional that are sufficiently qualified in this domain both are hard to find as well as costly t...

Israeli cybersecurity researchers have disclosed details about a new flaw impacting DNS protocol that can be exploited to launch amplified, large-scale distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks to takedown targeted websites. Called NXNSAttack , the flaw hinges on the DNS delegation mechanism to force DNS resolvers to generate more DNS queries to authoritative servers of attacker's choice, potentially causing a botnet-scale disruption to online services. "We show that the number of DNS messages exchanged in a typical resolution process might be much higher in practice than what is expected in theory, mainly due to a proactive resolution of name-servers' IP addresses," the researchers said in the paper. "We show how this inefficiency becomes a bottleneck and might be used to mount a devastating attack against either or both, recursive resolvers and authoritative servers." Following responsible disclosure of NXNSAttack, several of the companies i...

The Ukrainian police have arrested a hacker who made headlines in January last year by posting a massive database containing some 773 million stolen email addresses and 21 million unique plaintext passwords for sale on various underground hacking forums. In an official statement released on Tuesday, the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU) said it identified the hacker behind the pseudonym "Sanix," who is a resident of the Ivano-Frankivsk region of Ukraine, but it did not reveal his actual identity to the media. In January last year, the hacker tried to sell the massive 87-gigabyte database labeled as "the largest array of stolen data in history," which, according to security experts, was just a fraction of the stolen data Sanix collected. According to the authorities, Sanix had at least 6 more similar databases of stolen and broken passwords, totaling in terabytes in size, which also included billions of phone numbers, payment card details, and Social Secu...

Brazil's biggest cosmetics company Natura accidentally left hundreds of gigabytes of its customers' personal and payment-related information publicly accessible online that could have been accessed by anyone without authentication. SafetyDetective researcher Anurag Sen last month discovered two unprotected Amazon-hosted servers—with 272GB and 1.3TB in size—belonging to Natura that consisted of more than 192 million records. According to the report Anurag shared with The Hacker News, the exposed data includes personally identifiable information on 250,000 Natura customers, their account login cookies, along with the archives containing logs from the servers and users. Worryingly, the leaked information also includes Moip payment account details with access tokens for nearly 40,000 wirecard.com.br users who integrated it with their Natura accounts. "Around 90% of users were Brazilian customers, although other nationalities were also present, including customers ...

British low-cost airline EasyJet today admitted that the company has fallen victim to a cyber-attack, which it labeled "highly sophisticated," exposing email addresses and travel details of around 9 million of its customers. In an official statement released today, EasyJet confirmed that of the 9 million affected users, a small subset of customers, i.e., 2,208 customers, have also had their credit card details stolen, though no passport details were accessed. The airline did not disclose precisely how the breach happened, when it happened, when the company discovered it, how the sophisticated attackers unauthorizedly managed to gain access to the private information of its customers, and for how long they had that access to the airline's systems. However, EasyJet assured its users that the company had closed off the unauthorized access following the discovery and that it found "no evidence that any personal information of any nature has been misused" b...

Academics from École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) disclosed a security vulnerability in Bluetooth that could potentially allow an attacker to spoof a remotely paired device, exposing over a billion of modern devices to hackers. The attacks, dubbed Bluetooth Impersonation AttackS or BIAS, concern Bluetooth Classic, which supports Basic Rate (BR) and Enhanced Data Rate (EDR) for wireless data transfer between devices. "The Bluetooth specification contains vulnerabilities enabling to perform impersonation attacks during secure connection establishment," the researchers outlined in the paper. "Such vulnerabilities include the lack of mandatory mutual authentication, overly permissive role switching, and an authentication procedure downgrade." Given the widespread impact of the vulnerability, the researchers said they responsibly disclosed the findings to the Bluetooth Special Interest Group (SIG), the organization that oversees the development o...

A new version of COMpfun remote access trojan (RAT) has been discovered in the wild that uses HTTP status codes to control compromised systems targeted in a recent campaign against diplomatic entities in Europe. The cyberespionage malware—traced to Turla APT with "medium-to-low level of confidence" based on the history of compromised victims—spread via an initial dropper that masks itself as a visa application, the Global Research and Analysis Team at Kaspersky discovered. The Turla APT , a Russian-based threat group, has a long history of carrying out espionage and watering hole attacks spanning various sectors, including governments, embassies, military, education, research, and pharmaceutical companies. First documented by G-Data in 2014, COMpfun received a significant upgrade last year (called "Reductor") after Kaspersky found that the malware was used to spy on a victim's browser activity by staging man-in-the-middle ( MitM ) attacks on encrypte...

As more businesses leverage remote, mobile, and temporary workforces, the elements of business continuity planning are evolving and requiring that IT professionals look deep into the nuts and bolts of connectivity. CISOs and their team members are facing new challenges each and every day, many of which have been driven by digital transformation, as well as the adoption of other productivity-enhancing technologies. A case in point is the rapidly evolving need to support remote and mobile users as businesses change how they interact with staffers. For example, the recent COVID-19 crisis has forced the majority of businesses worldwide to support employees that work from home or other remote locations. Many businesses are encountering numerous problems with connection reliability, as well as the challenges presented by rapidly scaling connectivity to meet a growing number of remote workers. Add to that security and privacy issues, and it becomes evident that CISOs may very wel...

Remember the Reverse RDP Attack —wherein a client system vulnerable to a path traversal vulnerability could get compromised when remotely accessing a server over Microsoft's Remote Desktop Protocol? Though Microsoft had patched the vulnerability (CVE-2019-0887) as part of its July 2019 Patch Tuesday update, it turns out researchers were able to bypass the patch just by replacing the backward slashes in paths with forward slashes. Microsoft acknowledged the improper fix and re-patched the flaw in its February 2020 Patch Tuesday update earlier this year, now tracked as CVE-2020-0655. In the latest report shared with The Hacker News, Check Point researcher disclosed that Microsoft addressed the issue by adding a separate workaround in Windows while leaving the root of the bypass issue, an API function "PathCchCanonicalize," unchanged. Apparently, the workaround works fine for the built-in RDP client in Windows operating systems, but the patch is not fool-proof en...