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A week after the US government issued an advisory about a "global intelligence gathering mission" operated by North Korean  state-sponsored hackers , new findings have emerged about the threat group's spyware capabilities. The APT — dubbed " Kimsuky " (aka Black Banshee or Thallium) and believed to be active as early as 2012 — has been now linked to as many as three hitherto undocumented malware, including an information stealer, a tool equipped with malware anti-analysis features, and a new server infrastructure with significant overlaps to its older espionage framework. "The group has a rich and notorious history of offensive cyber operations around the world, including operations targeting South Korean think tanks, but over the past few years they have expanded their targeting to countries including the United States, Russia and various nations in Europe," Cybereason researchers said in an  analysis  yesterday. Last week, the FBI and department...

Google has patched a second actively exploited zero-day flaw in the Chrome browser in two weeks, along with addressing nine other security vulnerabilities in its latest update. The company  released  86.0.4240.183 for Windows, Mac, and Linux, which it said will be rolling out over the coming days/weeks to all users. The zero-day flaw, tracked as  CVE-2020-16009 , was reported by Clement Lecigne of Google's Threat Analysis Group (TAG) and Samuel Groß of Google Project Zero on October 29. The company also warned that it "is aware of reports that an exploit for CVE-2020-16009 exists in the wild." Google hasn't made any details about the bug or the exploit used by threat actors public so as to allow a majority of users to install the updates and prevent other adversaries from developing their own exploits leveraging the flaw. But Ben Hawkes, Google Project Zero's technical lead,  said  CVE-2020-16009 concerned an "inappropriate implementation" of its ...

Many businesses are currently looking at how to bolster security across their organization as the pandemic and remote work situation continues to progress towards the end of the year. As organizations continue to implement security measures to protect business-critical data, there is an extremely important area of security that often gets overlooked –  passwords . Weak passwords have long been a security nightmare for your business. This includes reused and  pwned  passwords. What are these? What tools are available to help protect against their use in your environment? Different types of dangerous passwords There are many different types of dangerous passwords that can expose your organization to tremendous risk. One way that cybercriminals compromise environments is by making use of breached password data. This allows launching  password spraying  attacks on your environment. Password spraying involves trying only a few passwords against a large number of...

A new research has demonstrated a technique that allows an attacker to bypass firewall protection and remotely access any TCP/UDP service on a victim machine. Called  NAT Slipstreaming , the method involves sending the target a link to a malicious site (or a legitimate site loaded with malicious ads) that, when visited, ultimately triggers the gateway to open any TCP/UDP port on the victim, thereby circumventing browser-based port restrictions. The findings were revealed by privacy and security researcher Samy Kamkar over the weekend. "NAT Slipstreaming exploits the user's browser in conjunction with the Application Level Gateway (ALG) connection tracking mechanism built into NATs, routers, and firewalls by chaining internal IP extraction via timing attack or WebRTC, automated remote MTU and IP fragmentation discovery, TCP packet size massaging, TURN authentication misuse, precise packet boundary control, and protocol confusion through browser abuse," Kamkar said in ...

Google has disclosed details of a new zero-day privilege escalation flaw in the Windows operating system that's being actively exploited in the wild. The elevation of privileges (EoP) vulnerability, tracked as  CVE-2020-17087 , concerns a buffer overflow present since at least Windows 7 in the Windows Kernel Cryptography Driver ("cng.sys") that can be exploited for a sandbox escape. "The bug resides in the cng!CfgAdtpFormatPropertyBlock function and is caused by a 16-bit integer truncation issue," Google's Project Zero researchers Mateusz Jurczyk and Sergei Glazunov noted in their technical write-up. The security team made the details public following a seven-day disclosure deadline because of evidence that it's under active exploit. Project Zero has shared a proof-of-concept exploit (PoC) that can be used to corrupt kernel data and crash vulnerable Windows devices even under default system configurations. What's notable is that the exploit ch...

Cybersecurity researchers have disclosed details about a new watering hole attack targeting the Korean diaspora that exploits vulnerabilities in web browsers such as Google Chrome and Internet Explorer to deploy malware for espionage purposes. Dubbed " Operation Earth Kitsune " by Trend Micro, the campaign involves the use of SLUB (for SLack and githUB) malware and two new backdoors —  dneSpy and agfSpy  — to exfiltrate system information and gain additional control of the compromised machine. The attacks were observed during the months of March, May, and September, according to the cybersecurity firm. Watering hole attacks allow a bad actor to compromise a targeted business by compromising a carefully selected website by inserting an exploit with an intention to gain access to the victim's device and infect it with malware. Operation Earth Kitsune is said to have deployed the spyware samples on websites associated with North Korea, although access to these websites...

An active botnet comprising hundreds of thousands of hijacked systems spread across 30 countries is exploiting "dozens of known vulnerabilities" to target widely-used content management systems (CMS). The "KashmirBlack" campaign, which is believed to have started around November 2019, aims for popular CMS platforms such as WordPress, Joomla!, PrestaShop, Magneto, Drupal, Vbulletin, OsCommerence, OpenCart, and Yeager. "Its well-designed infrastructure makes it easy to expand and add new exploits or payloads without much effort, and it uses sophisticated methods to camouflage itself, stay undetected, and protect its operation," Imperva researchers said in a  two-part   analysis . The cybersecurity firm's six-month-long investigation into the botnet reveals a complex operation managed by one command-and-control (C2) server and more than 60 surrogate servers that communicate with the bots to send new targets, allowing it to expand the size of the botn...

You've probably run into a major problem when trying to scrape Google search results. Web scraping tools allow you to extract information from a web page. Companies and coders from across the world use them to download Google's SERP data. And they work well – for a little while. After several scrapes, Google's automated security system kicks in. Then it kicks you out. The standard was to bypass the block is to use a proxy. However, each proxy only allows a limited number of scrapes. That's why Google SERP APIs are the perfect tool to overcome these limitations. This article examines how to overcome Google web scraping issues without changing proxy servers. Read on to learn more about web scraping. Discover the types of data you can extract. And how API web scraping tools can make your life a  lot  easier. What Is Web Scraping? Think of a website that you want to copy information from. How can you extract that data without entering the site on your browser and dow...

The US Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), Departments of Homeland Security, and Health and Human Services (HHS) issued a joint alert Wednesday warning of an "imminent" increase in ransomware and other cyberattacks against hospitals and healthcare providers. "Malicious cyber actors are targeting the [Healthcare and Public Health] Sector with TrickBot malware, often leading to ransomware attacks, data theft, and the disruption of healthcare services," the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency  said  in its advisory. The infamous botnet typically spreads via malicious spam email to unsuspecting recipients and can steal financial and personal data and drop other software, such as ransomware, onto infected systems. It's worth noting that cybercriminals have already used TrickBot against a major healthcare provider,  Universal Health Services , whose systems were crippled by Ryuk ransomware late last month. TrickBot has also seen a severe  disrupt...

Many companies rely on Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR) solutions as their primary security tool to protect their organizations against cyber threats. EDR was introduced around eight years ago, and analysts now peg the EDR market size as $1.5 to $2.0 billion in annual revenue globally, expecting it to quadruple over the next five years. The recent introduction of Extended Detection and Response (XDR) solutions, however, will certainly cut into a significant portion of that spend. A new provocative eBook: " 5 Questions to Determine: Is Your EDR Providing the Best Bang for Your Buck?"  ( Download here ) helps security executives who currently use an EDR solution determine if they're continuing to get their "bang for the buck" from their EDR provider when compared to newer, equally-priced technologies as XDR. It's also an excellent resource for companies who are in the steps of choosing an EDR solution to deploy. A live webinar around the same topic wi...

Efforts to disrupt TrickBot may have  shut down  most of its critical infrastructure, but the operators behind the notorious malware aren't sitting idle. According to new findings shared by cybersecurity firm  Netscout , TrickBot's authors have moved portions of their code to Linux in an attempt to widen the scope of victims that could be targeted. TrickBot, a financial Trojan first detected in 2016, has been traditionally a Windows-based crimeware solution, employing different modules to perform a wide range of malicious activities on target networks, including credential theft and perpetrate ransomware attacks. But over the past few weeks, twin efforts led by the US Cyber Command and Microsoft have helped to  eliminate 94%  of TrickBot's command-and-control (C2) servers that were in use and the new infrastructure the criminals operating TrickBot attempted to bring online to replace the previously disabled servers. Despite the steps taken to impede TrickB...

Google has stepped in to remove several Android applications from the official Play Store following the disclosure that the apps in question were found to serve intrusive ads. The findings were  reported  by the Czech cybersecurity firm Avast on Monday, which said the 21 malicious apps (list  here ) were downloaded nearly eight million times from Google's app marketplace. The apps masqueraded as harmless gaming apps and came packed with  HiddenAds  malware, a notorious Trojan known for its capabilities to serve intrusive ads outside of the app. The group behind the operation relies on social media channels to lure users into downloading the apps. Earlier this June, Avast discovered a  similar HiddenAds campaign  involving 47 gaming apps with over 15 million downloads that were leveraged to display device-wide intrusive ads. "Developers of adware are increasingly using social media channels, like regular marketers would," Avast's Jakub Vávra said....

Cybersecurity researchers over the weekend disclosed new security risks associated with link previews in popular messaging apps that cause the services to leak IP addresses, expose links sent via end-to-end encrypted chats, and even unnecessarily download gigabytes of data stealthily in the background. "Links shared in chats may contain private information intended only for the recipients," researchers Talal Haj Bakry and Tommy Mysk  said . "This could be bills, contracts, medical records, or anything that may be confidential." "Apps that rely on servers to generate link previews may be violating the privacy of their users by sending links shared in a private chat to their servers." Generating Link Previews at the Sender/Receiver Side Link previews are a common feature in most chat apps, making it easy to display a visual preview and a brief description of the shared link. Although apps like  Signal  and  Wire  give users the option to turn on/off l...

Microsoft, in collaboration with MITRE, IBM, NVIDIA, and Bosch, has released a  new open framework  that aims to help security analysts detect, respond to, and remediate adversarial attacks against machine learning (ML) systems. Called the  Adversarial ML Threat Matrix , the initiative is an attempt to organize the different techniques employed by malicious adversaries in subverting ML systems. Just as artificial intelligence (AI) and ML are being deployed in a wide variety of novel applications, threat actors can not only  abuse the technology  to power their malware but can also leverage it to  fool machine learning models  with poisoned datasets, thereby causing beneficial systems to make incorrect decisions, and pose a threat to stability and safety of AI applications. Indeed, ESET researchers last year found  Emotet  — a notorious  email-based malware  behind several botnet-driven spam campaigns and ransomware attacks — to...

Attention readers, if you are using Google Chrome browser on your Windows, Mac, or Linux computers, you need to update your web browsing software immediately to the latest version Google released earlier today. Google released Chrome version 86.0.4240.111 today to patch several security high-severity issues, including a zero-day vulnerability that has been exploited in the wild by attackers to hijack targeted computers. Tracked as CVE-2020-15999 , the actively exploited vulnerability is a type of memory-corruption flaw called heap buffer overflow in Freetype, a popular open source software development library for rendering fonts that comes packaged with Chrome. The vulnerability was discovered and reported by security researcher Sergei Glazunov of Google Project Zero on October 19 and is subject to a seven-day public disclosure deadline due to the flaw being under active exploitation. Glazunov also immediately reported the zero-day vulnerability to FreeType developers, who then ...

Graphic for illustration Cybersecurity researchers on Tuesday  disclosed details  about an address bar spoofing vulnerability affecting multiple mobile browsers, such as Apple Safari and Opera Touch, leaving the door open for spear-phishing attacks and delivering malware. Other impacted browsers include UCWeb, Yandex Browser, Bolt Browser, and RITS Browser. The flaws were discovered by Pakistani security researcher Rafay Baloch in the summer of 2020 and jointly reported by Baloch and cybersecurity firm  Rapid7  in August before they were addressed by the browser makers over the past few weeks. UCWeb and Bolt Browser remain unpatched as yet, while Opera Mini is expected to receive a fix on November 11, 2020. The issue stems from using malicious executable JavaScript code in an arbitrary website to force the browser to update the address bar while the page is still loading to another address of the attacker's choice. Original PoC demo "The vulnerability occurs ...

A Windows-based remote access Trojan believed to be designed by Pakistani hacker groups to infiltrate computers and steal users' data has resurfaced after a two-year span with retooled capabilities to target Android and macOS devices. According to cybersecurity firm Kaspersky, the malware — dubbed " GravityRAT " — now masquerades as legitimate Android and macOS apps to capture device data, contact lists, e-mail addresses, and call and text logs and transmit them to an attacker-controlled server. First documented by the Indian Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT-In) in August 2017 and subsequently by  Cisco Talos  in April 2018, GravityRAT has been known to target Indian entities and organizations via malware-laced Microsoft Office Word documents at least since 2015. Noting that the threat actor developed at least four different versions of the espionage tool, Cisco said, "the developer was clever enough to keep this infrastructure safe, and not have it blackl...