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

Most mobile app users tend to blindly trust that the apps they download from app stores are safe and secure. But that isn't always the case. To demonstrate the pitfalls and identify vulnerabilities on a large scale, cybersecurity and machine intelligence company CloudSEK recently provided a platform called  BeVigil  where individuals can search and check app security ratings and other security issues before installing an app. A latest  report  shared with The Hacker News detailed how the BeVigil search engine identified over 40 apps - with more than a cumulative 100 million downloads - that had hardcoded private Amazon Web Services (AWS) keys embedded within them, putting their internal networks and their users' data at risk of cyberattacks. BeVigil finds popular apps leaking AWS keys The AWS key leakage was spotted in some of the major apps such as Adobe Photoshop Fix, Adobe Comp, Hootsuite, IBM's Weather Channel, and online shopping services Club Factory and W...

Cybersecurity researchers on Monday disclosed a new malspam campaign distributing a fresh variant of a malware loader called "Buer" written in Rust, illustrating how adversaries are constantly honing their malware toolsets to evade analysis. Dubbed "RustyBuer," the malware is propagated via emails masquerading as shipping notices from DHL Support, and is said to have affected no fewer than 200 organizations across more than 50 verticals since early April. "The new Buer variant is written in Rust, an efficient and easy-to-use programming language that is becoming increasingly popular," Proofpoint researchers  said  in a report shared with The Hacker News. "Rewriting the malware in Rust enables the threat actor to better evade existing Buer detection capabilities." First introduced in August of 2019,  Buer  is a modular malware-as-a-service offering that's sold on underground forums and used as a first-stage downloader to deliver additiona...

Iran has been linked to yet another state-sponsored ransomware operation through a contracting company based in the country, according to new analysis. "Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps ( IRGC ) was operating a state-sponsored ransomware campaign through an Iranian contracting company called 'Emen Net Pasargard' (ENP)," cybersecurity firm Flashpoint  said  in its findings summarizing three documents leaked by an anonymous entity named Read My Lips or Lab Dookhtegan between March 19 and April 1 via its Telegram channel. Dubbed "Project Signal," the initiative is said to have kickstarted sometime between late July 2020 and early September 2020, with ENP's internal research organization, named the "Studies Center," putting together a list of unspecified target websites. A second spreadsheet validated by Flashpoint explicitly spelled out the project's financial motivations, with plans to launch the ransomware operations in late...

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 -...

A threat actor believed to be working on behalf of Chinese state-sponsored interests was recently observed targeting a Russia-based defense contractor involved in designing nuclear submarines for the naval arm of the Russian Armed Forces. The phishing attack, which singled out a general director working at the Rubin Design Bureau, leveraged the infamous "Royal Road" Rich Text Format (RTF) weaponizer to deliver a previously undocumented Windows backdoor dubbed " PortDoor ," according to Cybereason's Nocturnus threat intelligence team. "Portdoor has multiple functionalities, including the ability to do reconnaissance, target profiling, delivery of additional payloads, privilege escalation, process manipulation static detection antivirus evasion, one-byte XOR encryption, AES-encrypted data exfiltration and more," the researchers  said  in a write-up on Friday. Rubin Design Bureau is a submarine design center located in Saint Petersburg, accounting fo...

An "aggressive" financially motivated threat group tapped into a zero-day flaw in SonicWall VPN appliances prior to it being patched by the company to deploy a new strain of ransomware called FIVEHANDS. The group, tracked by cybersecurity firm Mandiant as UNC2447, took advantage of an "improper SQL command neutralization" flaw in the SSL-VPN SMA100 product ( CVE-2021-20016 , CVSS score 9.8) that allows an unauthenticated attacker to achieve remote code execution. "UNC2447 monetizes intrusions by extorting their victims first with FIVEHANDS ransomware followed by aggressively applying pressure through threats of media attention and offering victim data for sale on hacker forums," Mandiant researchers  said . "UNC2447 has been observed targeting organizations in Europe and North America and has consistently displayed advanced capabilities to evade detection and minimize post-intrusion forensics." CVE-2021-20016 is the same  zero-day  that the ...

Microsoft researchers on Thursday disclosed two dozen vulnerabilities affecting a wide range of Internet of Things (IoT) and Operational Technology (OT) devices used in industrial, medical, and enterprise networks that could be abused by adversaries to execute arbitrary code and even cause critical systems to crash. "These remote code execution (RCE) vulnerabilities cover more than 25 CVEs and potentially affect a wide range of domains, from consumer and medical IoT to Industrial IoT, Operational Technology, and industrial control systems,"  said  Microsoft's 'Section 52' Azure Defender for IoT research group. The flaws have been collectively named " BadAlloc ," for they are rooted in standard  memory allocation functions  spanning widely used real-time operating systems (RTOS), embedded software development kits (SDKs), and C standard library (libc) implementations. A lack of proper input validations associated with these memory allocation functions ...

Perhaps due to the nature of the position, the InfoSec leadership roles tend to be solitary ones. CISOs, or their equivalent decision-makers in organizations without the role, have so many constant drains on their attention – keeping their knowledge fresh, building plans to secure their organizations further – that they often find themselves on an island. It's even more challenging for organizations outside the Fortune 2000 that are resource-constrained. Security leaders are expected to know everything and often don't have anyone inside their organization with whom to bounce ideas or even go to for advice. When a crisis arises, they must often go with their gut or guess at the best solution based on their own experiences. Security leaders could often use advice but don't have an outlet for it. Chris Roberts, Chief Security Strategist at Cynet Security, offers a new Slack-based community for InfoSec leaders ( register here ) as a solution. The new InfoSec Leaders Community will fea...

Click Studios, the Australian software firm which confirmed a  supply chain attack  affecting its Passwordstate password management application, has warned customers of an ongoing phishing attack by an unknown threat actor. "We have been advised a bad actor has commenced a phishing attack with a small number of customers having received emails requesting urgent action," the company  said  in an updated advisory released on Wednesday. "These emails are not sent by Click Studios." Last week, Click Studios said attackers had employed sophisticated techniques to compromise Passwordstate's update mechanism, using it to drop malware on user computers. Only customers who performed In-Place Upgrades between April 20, 8:33 PM UTC, and April 22, 0:30 AM UTC are said to be affected. While Passwordstate serves about 29,000 customers, the Adelaide-based firm maintained that the total number of impacted customers is very low. It's also urging users to refrain from po...

The maintainers of Composer, a package manager for PHP, have shipped an update to address a critical vulnerability that could have allowed an attacker to execute arbitrary commands and "backdoor every PHP package," resulting in a supply-chain attack. Tracked as CVE-2021-29472, the security issue was discovered and reported on April 22 by researchers from  SonarSource , following which a hotfix was deployed less than 12 hours later. "Fixed command injection vulnerability in HgDriver/HgDownloader and hardened other VCS drivers and downloaders," Composer  said  its  release notes  for versions 2.0.13 and 1.10.22 published on Wednesday. "To the best of our knowledge the vulnerability has not been exploited." Composer  is billed as a tool for dependency management in PHP, enabling easy installation of packages relevant to a project. It also allows users to install PHP applications that are available on  Packagist , a repository that aggregates all publ...

An adversary known for its  watering hole attacks  against government entities has been linked to a slew of newly detected intrusions targeting various organizations in Central Asia and the Middle East. The malicious activity, collectively named "EmissarySoldier," has been attributed to a threat actor called LuckyMouse, and is said to have happened in 2020 with the goal of obtaining geopolitical insights in the region. The attacks involved deploying a toolkit dubbed SysUpdate (aka Soldier) in a number of breached organizations, including government and diplomatic agencies, telecom providers, a TV media company, and a commercial bank. LuckyMouse , also referred to as APT27 and Emissary Panda, is a sophisticated cyberespionage group that has a history of breaching multiple government networks in Central Asia and the Middle East. The actor has also been linked to cyberattacks aimed at transnational organizations such as the International Civil Aviation Organization ( ICAO )...

Hackers are scanning the internet for weaknesses all the time, and if you don't want your organization to fall victim, you need to be the first to find these weak spots. In other words, you have to adopt a proactive approach to managing your vulnerabilities, and a crucial first step in achieving this is performing a vulnerability assessment. Read this guide to learn how to perform vulnerability assessments in your organization and stay ahead of the hackers. Vulnerability assessment tools Vulnerability assessments are automated processes performed by scanners. This makes them accessible to a wide audience. Many of the scanners are geared towards cybersecurity experts, but there are solutions tailored for IT managers and developers in organizations without dedicated security teams.  Vulnerability scanners come in various types: some excel at network scanning, others at web applications, IoT devices, or container security. If you're a small business, you're likely to find...

Bad actors with suspected ties to China have been behind a wide-ranging cyberespionage campaign targeting military organizations in Southeast Asia for nearly two years, according to new research. Attributing the attacks to a threat actor dubbed " Naikon APT ," cybersecurity firm Bitdefender laid out the ever-changing tactics, techniques, and procedures adopted by the group, including weaving new backdoors named "Nebulae" and "RainyDay" into their data-stealing missions. The malicious activity is said to have been conducted between June 2019 and March 2021. "In the beginning of the operation the threat actors used Aria-Body loader and Nebulae as the first stage of the attack," the researchers  said . "Starting with September 2020, the threat actors included the RainyDay backdoor in their toolkit. The purpose of this operation was cyberespionage and data theft." Naikon (aka Override Panda, Lotus Panda, or Hellsing) has a track recor...

A previously undocumented Linux malware with backdoor capabilities has managed to stay under the radar for about three years, allowing the threat actor behind the operation to harvest and exfiltrate sensitive information from infected systems. Dubbed " RotaJakiro " by researchers from Qihoo 360 NETLAB, the backdoor targets Linux X64 machines, and is so named after the fact that "the family uses rotate encryption and behaves differently for root/non-root accounts when executing." The findings come from an analysis of a  malware sample  it detected on March 25, although early versions appear to have been uploaded to VirusTotal as early as May 2018. A  total  of  four   samples  have been found to date on the database, all of which remain undetected by most anti-malware engines. As of writing, only seven security vendors flag the latest version of the malware as malicious. "At the functional level, RotaJakiro first determines whether the user is roo...

Threat actors are increasingly adopting  Excel 4.0 documents  as an initial stage vector to distribute malware such as  ZLoader  and Quakbot, according to new research. The findings come from an analysis of 160,000 Excel 4.0 documents between November 2020 and March 2021, out of which more than 90% were classified as malicious or suspicious. "The biggest risk for the targeted companies and individuals is the fact that security solutions still have a lot of problems with detecting malicious Excel 4.0 documents, making most of these slip by conventional signature based detections and analyst written YARA rules," researchers from ReversingLabs said in a report  published today . Excel 4.0 macros (XLM), the precursor to Visual Basic for Applications (VBA), is a legacy feature incorporated in Microsoft Excel for backward compatibility reasons. Microsoft warns in its  support document  that enabling all macros can cause "potentially dangerous code" to ...

Cybersecurity researchers on Wednesday disclosed a new bypass vulnerability (CVE-2021-23008) in the Kerberos Key Distribution Center (KDC) security feature impacting F5 Big-IP application delivery services. "The KDC Spoofing vulnerability allows an attacker to bypass the Kerberos authentication to Big-IP Access Policy Manager (APM), bypass security policies and gain unfettered access to sensitive workloads," Silverfort researchers Yaron Kassner and Rotem Zach said in a report. "In some cases this can be used to bypass authentication to the Big-IP admin console as well." Coinciding with the public disclosure, F5 Networks has released patches to address the weakness (CVE-2021-23008, CVSS score 8.1), with fixes introduced in BIG-IP APM versions 12.1.6, 13.1.4, 14.1.4, and 15.1.3. A similar patch for version 16.x is expected at a future date. "We recommend customers running 16.x check the security advisory to assess their exposure and get details on mitigati...

Attention, Android users! A banking malware capable of stealing sensitive information is "spreading rapidly" across Europe, with the U.S. likely to be the next target. According to a new analysis by  Proofpoint , the threat actors behind FluBot (aka  Cabassous ) have branched out beyond Spain to target the U.K., Germany, Hungary, Italy, and Poland. The English-language campaign alone has been observed to make use of more than 700 unique domains, infecting about 7,000 devices in the U.K. In addition, German and English-language SMS messages were found being sent to U.S. users from Europe, which Proofpoint suspects could be the result of malware propagating via contact lists stored on compromised phones. A concerted campaign aimed at the U.S. is yet to be detected. FluBot, a nascent entry in the banking trojan landscape, began its operations late last year, with campaigns leveraging the malware infecting more than 60,000 users in Spain, according to an analysis published b...

The Metropolitan Police Department (MPD) of the District of Columbia has become the latest high-profile government agency to fall victim to a ransomware attack. The Babuk Locker gang claimed in a post on the dark web that they had compromised the DC Police's networks and stolen 250 GB of unencrypted files. Screenshots shared by the group, and seen by The Hacker News, include various folders containing what appears to be investigation reports, arrests, disciplinary actions, and other intelligence briefings. Also called the DC Police, the MPD is the primary law enforcement agency for the District of Columbia in the U.S. The ransomware gang has given the department three days to heed to their ransom demand or risk leaking sensitive files that could expose police informants to criminal gangs. "Hello! Even an institution such as DC can be threatened, we have downloaded a sufficient amount of information from your internal networks, and we advise you to contact us as soon as p...

The release of MITRE Engenuity's Carbanak+Fin7 ATT&CK evaluations every year is a benchmark for the cybersecurity industry. The organization's tests measure how well security vendors can detect and respond to threats and offers an independent metric for customers and security leaders to understand how well vendors perform on a variety of tasks. However, for the uninitiated, the results can be hard to decipher and contextualize properly. Unlike many benchmarks that compare participants in a competitive manner, MITRE's framework evaluates companies exclusively on how they respond to the tests. This means that customers must really know what they're looking for. A new webinar ( register here ) aims to provide some clarity on what to look for and how to interpret the results.  Cynet's new live webinar will dig a little deeper into the MITRE ATT&CK evaluation. The company's research team will break down how the evaluations work, what the results mean, an...