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Threat actors have been discovered distributing a new credential stealer written in AutoHotkey (AHK) scripting language as part of an ongoing campaign that started early 2020. Customers of financial institutions in the US and Canada are among the primary targets for credential exfiltration, with a specific focus on banks such as Scotiabank, Royal Bank of Canada, HSBC, Alterna Bank, Capital One, Manulife, and EQ Bank. Also included in the list is an Indian banking firm ICICI Bank. AutoHotkey  is an open-source custom scripting language for Microsoft Windows aimed at providing easy hotkeys for macro-creation and software automation that allows users to automate repetitive tasks in any Windows application. The multi-stage infection chain commences with a malware-laced Excel file that's embedded with a Visual Basic for Applications (VBA)  AutoOpen  macro, which is subsequently used to drop and execute the downloader client script ("adb.ahk") via a legitimate portable AHK...

An authentication bypass vulnerability in the SolarWinds Orion software may have been leveraged by adversaries as a zero-day to deploy the SUPERNOVA malware in target environments. According to an  advisory  published yesterday by the CERT Coordination Center, the SolarWinds Orion API that's used to interface with all other Orion system monitoring and management products suffers from a security flaw (CVE-2020-10148) that could allow a remote attacker to execute unauthenticated API commands, thus resulting in a compromise of the SolarWinds instance. "The authentication of the API can be bypassed by including specific parameters in the  Request.PathInfo  portion of a URI request to the API, which could allow an attacker to execute unauthenticated API commands," the advisory states. "In particular, if an attacker appends a PathInfo parameter of 'WebResource.adx,' 'ScriptResource.adx,' 'i18n.ashx,' or 'Skipi18n' to a request to a Solar...

21 people have been arrested across the UK as part of a nationwide cyber crackdown targeting customers of WeLeakInfo[.]com, a now-defunct online service that had been previously selling access to data hacked from other websites. The suspects used stolen personal credentials to commit further cyber and fraud offences, the UK National Crime Agency (NCA)  said . Of the 21 arrested — all men aged between 18 and 38 — nine have been detained on suspicion of Computer Misuse Act offences, nine for Fraud offences, and three are under investigation for both. The NCA also seized over £41,000 in bitcoin from the arrested individuals. Earlier this  January , the US Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), the NCA, the Netherlands National Police Corps, the German Bundeskriminalamt, and the Police Service of Northern Ireland jointly  seized the domain  of WeLeakInfo.com. Launched in 2017, the service provided its users a search engine to access the personal i...

New evidence amidst the ongoing probe into the  espionage campaign  targeting SolarWinds has uncovered an unsuccessful attempt to compromise cybersecurity firm Crowdstrike and access the company's email. The hacking endeavor was reported to the company by Microsoft's Threat Intelligence Center on December 15, which identified a third-party reseller's Microsoft Azure account to be making "abnormal calls" to Microsoft cloud APIs during a 17-hour period several months ago. The undisclosed affected reseller's Azure account handles Microsoft Office licensing for its Azure customers, including CrowdStrike. Although there was an attempt by unidentified threat actors to read the emails, it was ultimately foiled as the firm does not use Microsoft's Office 365 email service, CrowdStrike  said . The incident comes in the wake of the  supply chain attack  of SolarWinds revealed earlier this month, resulting in the deployment of a covert backdoor (aka "Sunbu...

Citrix has issued an emergency advisory warning its customers of a security issue affecting its NetScaler application delivery controller (ADC) devices that attackers are abusing to launch amplified distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks against several targets . "An attacker or bots can overwhelm the Citrix ADC [Datagram Transport Layer Security] network throughput, potentially leading to outbound bandwidth exhaustion," the company  noted . "The effect of this attack appears to be more prominent on connections with limited bandwidth." ADCs are purpose-built  networking appliances  whose function is to improve the performance, security, and availability of applications delivered over the web to end-users. The desktop virtualization and networking service provider said it's monitoring the incident and is continuing to investigate its impact on Citrix ADC, adding "the attack is limited to a small number of customers around the world." The iss...

Google's Project Zero team has made public details of an improperly patched zero-day security vulnerability in Windows print spooler API that could be leveraged by a bad actor to execute arbitrary code. Details of the unpatched flaw were revealed publicly after Microsoft failed to rectify it within 90 days of responsible disclosure on September 24. Originally tracked as  CVE-2020-0986 , the flaw concerns an elevation of privilege exploit in the GDI Print /  Print Spooler  API ("splwow64.exe") that was reported to Microsoft by an anonymous user working with Trend Micro's Zero Day Initiative (ZDI) back in late December 2019. But with no patch in sight for about six months, ZDI ended up posting a public  advisory  as a zero-day on May 19 earlier this year, after which it was  exploited  in the wild in a campaign dubbed " Operation PowerFall " against an unnamed South Korean company. "splwow64.exe" is a Windows core system binary that allows 32-b...

Threat actors such as the notorious Lazarus group are continuing to tap into the ongoing COVID-19 vaccine research to steal sensitive information to speed up their countries' vaccine-development efforts. Cybersecurity firm Kaspersky  detailed  two incidents at a pharmaceutical company and a government ministry in September and October leveraging different tools and techniques but exhibiting similarities in the post-exploitation process, leading the researchers to connect the two attacks to the North Korean government-linked hackers. "These two incidents reveal the Lazarus group's interest in intelligence related to COVID-19," Seongsu Park, a senior security researcher at Kaspersky, said. "While the group is mostly known for its financial activities, it is a good reminder that it can go after strategic research as well." Kaspersky did not name the targeted entities but said the pharmaceutical firm was breached on September 25, 2020, with the attack again...

As if the exponential rise in phishing scams and malware attacks in the last five years wasn't enough, the COVID-19 crisis has worsened it further. The current scenario has given a viable opportunity to cybercriminals to find a way to target individuals, small and large enterprises, government corporations. According to Interpol's  COVID-19 Cybercrime Analysis Report , based on the feedback of 194 countries, phishing/scam/fraud, malware/ransomware, malicious domains, and fake news have emerged as the biggest digital threats across the world in the wake of the pandemic. Image source: interpol.int There are primarily two reasons for emerging cyber threats in 2020: Most of the population is working, learning, shopping, or running their business from home, where they're using personal devices from the home/public internet connection, which are usually unsafe and hence highly vulnerable to cybercrimes. The cybercriminals are using the COVID-19 theme to exploit people and...

The US Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and Interpol have allegedly seized proxy servers used in connection with Blockchain-based domains belonging to Joker's Stash, a notorious fraud bazaar known for selling compromised payment card data in underground forums. The takedown  happened  last week on December 17. The operators of Joker's Stash operate several versions of the platform, including  Blockchain proxy server domains  — .bazar, .lib, .emc, and .coin — that are responsible for redirecting users to the actual website and two other Tor (.onion) variants. Joker's Stash implemented the use of  Blockchain DNS  via a  Chrome browser extension  in 2017. These Blockchain websites make use of a decentralized DNS where the top-level domains (e.g., .bazar) are not owned by a single central authority, with the lookup records shared over a peer-to-peer network as opposed to a DNS provider, thus bringing in significant advantages like  bul...

The US Cybersecurity Infrastructure and Security Agency (CISA) has  warned  of critical vulnerabilities in a low-level TCP/IP software library developed by Treck that, if weaponized, could allow remote attackers to run arbitrary commands and mount denial-of-service (DoS) attacks. The four flaws affect Treck TCP/IP stack version 6.0.1.67 and earlier and were reported to the company by Intel. Two of these are rated critical in severity. Treck's embedded TCP/IP stack is deployed worldwide in manufacturing, information technology, healthcare, and transportation systems. The most severe of them is a heap-based buffer overflow vulnerability ( CVE-2020-25066 ) in the Treck HTTP Server component that could permit an adversary to crash or reset the target device and even execute remote code. It has a CVSS score of 9.8 out of a maximum of 10. The second flaw is an out-of-bounds write in the IPv6 component ( CVE-2020-27337 , CVSS score 9.1) that could be exploited by an unauthentic...

Law enforcement agencies from the US, Germany, Netherlands, Switzerland, France, along with Europol's European Cybercrime Centre (EC3), announced today the coordinated takedown of Safe-Inet, a popular virtual private network (VPN) service that was used to facilitate criminal activity. The three domains in question — insorg[.]org, safe-inet[.]com, and safe-inet[.]net — were shut down, and their infrastructure seized as part of a joint investigation called "Operation Nova." Europol called Safe-Inet a cybercriminals' " favorite ." A crucial reason for the domains' seizure has been their central role in facilitating ransomware, carrying out web-skimming, spear-phishing, and account takeover attacks. The service, which comes with support for Russian and English languages and has been active for over a decade, offered " bulletproof hosting services " to website visitors, often at a steep price to the criminal underworld. As of December 1, the ...

As the probe into the  SolarWinds supply chain attack  continues, new digital forensic evidence has brought to light that a separate threat actor may have been abusing the IT infrastructure provider's Orion software to drop a similar persistent backdoor on target systems. "The investigation of the whole SolarWinds compromise led to the discovery of an additional malware that also affects the SolarWinds Orion product but has been determined to be likely unrelated to this compromise and used by a different threat actor," Microsoft 365 research team  said  on Friday in a post detailing the Sunburst malware. What makes the newly revealed malware, dubbed "Supernova," different is that unlike the Sunburst DLL,  Supernova  ("app_web_logoimagehandler.ashx.b6031896.dll") is not signed with a legitimate SolarWinds digital certificate, signaling that the compromise may be unrelated to the previously disclosed supply chain attack. In a  standalone write-up , ...

A team of researchers today unveiled two critical security vulnerabilities in Dell Wyse Thin clients that could have potentially allowed attackers to remotely execute malicious code and access arbitrary files on affected devices. The flaws, which were uncovered by healthcare cybersecurity provider CyberMDX and reported to Dell in June 2020, affects all devices running ThinOS versions 8.6 and below. Dell has addressed both the vulnerabilities in an  update  released today. The flaws also have a CVSS score of 10 out of 10, making them critical in severity. Thin clients are typically computers that run from resources stored on a central server instead of a localized hard drive. They work by establishing a remote connection to the server, which takes care of launching and running applications and storing relevant data. Tracked as CVE-2020-29491 and CVE-2020-29492 , the security shortcomings in Wyse's thin clients stem from the fact that the FTP sessions used to pull firmwar...

Everyone makes mistakes. That one sentence was drummed into me in my very first job in tech, and it has held true since then. In the cybersecurity world, misconfigurations can create exploitable issues that can haunt us later - so let's look at a few common security misconfigurations. The first one is development permissions that don't get changed when something goes live. For example, AWS S3 buckets are often assigned permissive access while development is going on. The issues arise when security reviews aren't carefully performed prior to pushing the code live, no matter if that push is for the initial launch of a platform or for updates. The result is straight-forward; a bucket goes live with the ability for anyone to read and write to and from it. This particular misconfiguration is dangerous; since the application is working and the site is loading for users, there's no visible indication that something is wrong until a threat actor hunting for open buckets stum...

Three dozen journalists working for Al Jazeera had their iPhones stealthily compromised via a zero-click exploit to install spyware as part of a Middle East cyberespionage campaign. In a new  report  published yesterday by University of Toronto's Citizen Lab, researchers said personal phones of 36 journalists, producers, anchors, and executives at Al Jazeera, and a journalist at London-based Al Araby TV were infected with Pegasus malware via a now-fixed flaw in Apple's iMessage. Pegasus is developed by Israeli private intelligence firm NSO Group and allows an attacker to  access sensitive data  stored on a target device — all without the victim's knowledge. "The shift towards zero-click attacks by an industry and customers already steeped in secrecy increases the likelihood of abuse going undetected," the researchers said. "It is more challenging [...] to track these zero-click attacks because targets may not notice anything suspicious on their phone. E...

The massive state-sponsored  espionage campaign  that compromised software maker SolarWinds also targeted Microsoft, as the unfolding investigation into the hacking spree reveals the incident may have been far more wider in scope, sophistication, and impact than previously thought. News of Microsoft's compromise was first reported by Reuters , which also said the company's own products were then used to strike other victims by leveraging its cloud offerings, citing people familiar with the matter. The Windows maker, however, denied the threat actor had infiltrated its production systems to stage further attacks against its customers. In a statement to The Hacker News via email, the company said — "Like other SolarWinds customers, we have been actively looking for indicators of this actor and can confirm that we detected malicious SolarWinds binaries in our environment, which we isolated and removed. We have not found evidence of access to production services or custom...