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Operators of the GootLoader campaign are setting their sights on employees of accounting and law firms as part of a fresh onslaught of widespread cyberattacks to deploy malware on infected systems, an indication that the adversary is expanding its focus to other high-value targets. "GootLoader is a stealthy initial access malware, which after getting a foothold into the victim's computer system, infects the system with ransomware or other lethal malware," researchers from eSentire  said  in a report shared with The Hacker News. The cybersecurity services provider said it intercepted and dismantled intrusions aimed at three law firms and an accounting enterprise. The names of the victims were not disclosed. Malware can be delivered on targets' systems via many methods, including poisoned search results, fake updates, and trojanized applications downloaded from sites linking to pirated software. GootLoader resorts to the first technique. In March 2021,  details em...

Cybersecurity researchers have decoded the mechanism by which the versatile Qakbot banking trojan handles the insertion of encrypted configuration data into the  Windows Registry . Qakbot, also known as QBot, QuackBot and Pinkslipbot, has been  observed   in the wild  since 2007. Although mainly fashioned as an information-stealing malware, Qakbot has since shifted its goals and acquired new functionality to deliver post-compromise attack platforms such as Cobalt Strike Beacon, with the final objective of loading ransomware on infected machines. "It has been continually developed, with new capabilities introduced such as lateral movement, the ability to exfiltrate email and browser data, and to install additional malware," Trustwave researchers Lloyd Macrohon and Rodel Mendrez said in a report shared with The Hacker News. In recent months, phishing campaigns have culminated in the distribution of a  new loader  called  SQUIRRELWAFFLE , which acts ...

An Iranian state-sponsored actor has been observed scanning and attempting to abuse the Log4Shell flaw in publicly-exposed Java applications to deploy a hitherto undocumented PowerShell-based modular backdoor dubbed " CharmPower " for follow-on post-exploitation. "The actor's attack setup was obviously rushed, as they used the basic open-source tool for the exploitation and based their operations on previous infrastructure, which made the attack easier to detect and attribute," researchers from Check Point  said  in a report published this week. The Israeli cybersecurity company linked the attack to a group known as  APT35 , which is also tracked using the codenames Charming Kitten, Phosphorus, and TA453, citing overlaps with toolsets previously identified as infrastructure used by the threat actor. Log4Shell  aka CVE-2021-44228 (CVSS score: 10.0) concerns a critical security vulnerability in the popular Log4j logging library that, if successfully exploite...

Cybersecurity teams have many demands competing for limited resources. Restricted budgets are a problem, and restricted staff resources are also a bottleneck. There is also the need to maintain business continuity at all times. It's a frustrating mix of challenges – with resources behind tasks such as patching rarely sufficient to meet security prerogatives or compliance deadlines. The multitude of different security-related standards have ever stringent deadlines, and it is often the case that business needs don't necessarily align with those requirements. At the core of what TuxCare does is automated live patching – a way to consistently keep critical services safe from security threats, without the need to expend significant resources in doing so, or the need to live with business disruption. In this article, we'll outline how  TuxCare  helps organizations such as yours deal better with security challenges including patching, and the support of end-of-life operating s...

The U.S. Cyber Command (USCYBERCOM) on Wednesday officially confirmed MuddyWater's ties to the Iranian intelligence apparatus, while simultaneously detailing the various tools and tactics adopted by the espionage actor to burrow into victim networks. "MuddyWater has been seen using a variety of techniques to maintain access to victim networks," USCYBERCOM's Cyber National Mission Force (CNMF)  said  in a statement. "These include side-loading  DLLs  in order to trick legitimate programs into running malware and obfuscating PowerShell scripts to hide command and control functions." The agency characterized the hacking efforts as a subordinate element within the Iranian Ministry of Intelligence and Security (MOIS), corroborating earlier reports about the nation-state actor's provenance. Also tracked under the monikers Static Kitten, Seedworm, Mercury and TEMP.Zagros,  MuddyWater  is known for its  attacks  primarily directed against a wide gamu...

Apple on Wednesday rolled out software updates for iOS and iPadOS to remediate a persistent  denial-of-service (DoS) issue  affecting the HomeKit smart home framework that could be potentially exploited to launch ransomware-like attacks targeting the devices. The iPhone maker, in its  release notes  for iOS and iPadOS 15.2.1, termed it as a "resource exhaustion issue" that could be triggered when processing a maliciously crafted HomeKit accessory name, adding it addressed the bug with improved validation. The so-called "doorLock" vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2022-22588, affects HomeKit, the software API for connecting smart home devices to iOS applications. Should it be successfully exploited, iPhones and iPads can be sent into a crash spiral simply by changing the name of a HomeKit device to a string larger than 500,000 characters and tricking the target into accepting a malicious Home invitation. Even worse, since HomeKit device names are backed up to iClou...

Threat actors are actively incorporating public cloud services from Amazon and Microsoft into their malicious campaigns to deliver commodity remote access trojans (RATs) such as  Nanocore ,  Netwire , and  AsyncRAT  to siphon sensitive information from compromised systems. The spear-phishing attacks, which commenced in October 2021, have primarily targeted entities located in the U.S., Canada, Italy, and Singapore, researchers from Cisco Talos said in a report shared with The Hacker News. Using existing legitimate infrastructure to facilitate intrusions is increasingly becoming part of an attacker's playbook as it obviates the need to host their own servers, not to mention be used as a cloaking mechanism to evade detection by security solutions. In recent months, collaboration and communication tools like  Discord, Slack, and Telegram  have found a place in many an infection chain to  commandeer and exfiltrate data  from the victim machines....

A new  cross-platform backdoor  called " SysJoker " has been observed targeting machines running Windows, Linux, and macOS operating systems as part of an ongoing espionage campaign that's believed to have been initiated during the second half of 2021. "SysJoker masquerades as a system update and generates its [command-and-control server] by decoding a string retrieved from a text file hosted on Google Drive," Intezer researchers Avigayil Mechtinger, Ryan Robinson, and Nicole Fishbein  noted  in a technical write-up publicizing their findings. "Based on victimology and malware's behavior, we assess that SysJoker is after specific targets." The Israeli cybersecurity company, attributing the work to an advanced threat actor, said it first discovered evidence of the implant in December 2021 during an active attack against a Linux-based web server belonging to an unnamed educational institution. A C++-based malware, SysJoker is delivered via a dr...

SMBs and SMEs are increasingly turning to MSSPs to secure their businesses because they simply do not have the resources to manage an effective security technology stack. However, it's also challenging for MSSPs to piece together an effective but manageable security technology stack to protect their clients, especially at an affordable price point. This is where Extended Detection and Response (XDR) comes in and can help MSSPs boost their profitability from SMB and SME and improve their protections. XDR is heating up within the MSSP market as these security service providers stand to gain tremendous financial and operational benefits from this nascent technology. XDR promises far better security outcomes at a lower cost than the current security stack approaches most MSSPs currently have in place. One sticky point that keeps arising in the XDR discussion has to do with the different technology approaches XDR providers rely upon to deliver platform capabilities. Most of us have heard...

Amid renewed tensions between the U.S. and Russia over  Ukraine  and  Kazakhstan , American cybersecurity and intelligence agencies on Tuesday released a joint advisory on how to detect, respond to, and mitigate cyberattacks orchestrated by Russian state-sponsored actors. To that end, the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), and National Security Agency (NSA) have laid bare the tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs) adopted by the adversaries, including spear-phishing, brute-force, and  exploiting known vulnerabilities  to gain initial access to target networks. The list of flaws exploited by Russian hacking groups to gain an initial foothold, which the agencies said are "common but effective," are below — CVE-2018-13379  (FortiGate VPNs) CVE-2019-1653  (Cisco router) CVE-2019-2725  (Oracle WebLogic Server) CVE-2019-7609  (Kibana) CVE-2019-9670  (Zimbra software) C...

Microsoft on Tuesday kicked off its first set of updates for 2022 by  plugging 96 security holes  across its software ecosystem, while urging customers to prioritize patching for what it calls a critical "wormable" vulnerability. Of the 96 vulnerabilities, nine are rated Critical and 89 are rated Important in severity, with six zero-day publicly known at the time of the release. This is in addition to  29 issues  patched in Microsoft Edge on January 6, 2022. None of the disclosed bugs are listed as under attack. The patches cover a swath of the computing giant's portfolio, including Microsoft Windows and Windows Components, Exchange Server, Microsoft Office and Office Components, SharePoint Server, .NET Framework, Microsoft Dynamics, Open-Source Software, Windows Hyper-V, Windows Defender, and Windows Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP). Chief among them is  CVE-2022-21907  (CVSS score: 9.8), a remote code execution vulnerability rooted in the HTTP Protocol S...

With the last month of 2021 dominated by the log4J vulnerabilities discovery, publication, and patches popping up in rapid succession, odds are you have patched your system against Log4J exploitation attempts. At least some systems, if not all. You might even have installed the latest patch – at the time of writing, that is 2.17.1, but, if the last rapid patching cycle persists, it might have changed by the time this is published. In the meantime, defenders might have been working overtime to plug Log4J born security gaps, but so did cyber-attackers. Log4J's well-deserved fame also alerted cyber-attackers to a potential entry pathway into their target. And, while log4J will hopefully vanish from the headlines,  cyber-attackers are likely to continue trying to exploit it  in the hope of finding unpatched or incompletely patched targets. As human error still accounts  for 95% of all security breaches , cyber-attackers actively rely on these human errors to exploit them a...

Cybersecurity researchers have detailed a high severity flaw in KCodes NetUSB component that's integrated into millions of end-user router devices from Netgear, TP-Link, Tenda, EDiMAX, D-Link, and Western Digital, among others. KCodes  NetUSB  is a Linux kernel module that enables devices on a local network to provide USB-based services over IP. Printers, external hard drives, and flash drives plugged into a Linux-based embedded system (e.g., a router) are made available via the network using the driver. CVE-2021-45608  (CVSS score: 9.8), as the security flaw is tracked as, relates to a  buffer overflow vulnerability  that, if successfully exploited, can allow attackers to execute code remotely in the kernel and perform malicious activities of their choice, according to a  report  shared by SentinelOne with The Hacker News. This is the latest in a string of NetUSB vulnerabilities that has been patched in recent years. In May 2015, researchers from...

Moxie Marlinspike, the founder of the popular encrypted instant messaging service Signal, has announced that he is stepping down as the chief executive of the non-profit in a move that has been underway over the last few months. "In other words, after a decade or more, it's difficult to overstate how important Signal is to me, but I now feel very comfortable replacing myself as CEO based on the team we have, and also believe that it is an important step for expanding on Signal's success," Marlinspike  said  in a blog post on Monday. Executive chairman and WhatsApp co-founder Brian Acton, who famously urged users to #DeleteFacebook in March 2018 and founded the Signal Foundation along with Marlinspike after he walked away from the social media giant in 2017 over a conflict with Facebook's plans to monetize WhatsApp, will serve as the interim CEO while the search for a replacement is on. Founded in July 2014, Signal has more than 40 million monthly users, in ...

Lookout , an endpoint-to-cloud cyber security company, have put together their cyber security predictions for 2022.  1  —  Cloud connectivity and cloud-to-cloud connectivity will amplify supply-chain breaches One area organizations need to continue to monitor in 2022 is the software supply chain. We tend to think of cloud apps as disparate islands used as destinations by endpoints and end-users to collect and process data. The reality is that these apps constantly communicate with different entities and systems like software-update infrastructure and with each other — interactions that are often not monitored. In late 2020, the cybersecurity community uncovered one of the worst breaches in recent memory when the  SolarWinds  software-publishing infrastructure was infiltrated. More than 100 organizations, including nine U.S. federal agencies, were compromised by trojanized updates that opened backdoors to their infrastructure. This is a prime example of how a...

Microsoft on Monday disclosed details of a recently patched security vulnerability in Apple's macOS operating system that could be weaponized by a threat actor to expose users' personal information. Tracked as CVE-2021-30970, the flaw concerns a logic issue in the Transparency, Consent and Control (TCC) security framework, which enables users to configure the privacy settings of their apps and provide access to protected files and app data. The  Security & Privacy pane  in the macOS System Preferences app serves as the front end of TCC. Microsoft 365 Defender Research Team, which reported the vulnerability to Apple on July 15, 2021, dubbed the flaw " powerdir ." Apple  addressed  the issue as part of macOS 11.6 and 12.1 updates released in December 2021 with improved state management. While Apple does enforce a policy that limits access to TCC to only apps with full disk access, it's possible to orchestrate an attack wherein a malicious application could ...

The European Union's data protection watchdog on Monday ordered Europol to delete a vast trove of personal data it obtained pertaining to individuals with no proven links to criminal activity. "Datasets older than six months that have not undergone this Data Subject Categorisation must be erased," the European Data Protection Supervisor ( EDPS )  said  in a press statement. "This means that Europol will no longer be permitted to retain data about people who have not been linked to a crime or a criminal activity for long periods with no set deadline." EDPS' investigation into Europol's handling of sensitive data commenced in April 2019, with the authority noting that the storage of large volumes of data with no Data Subject Categorisation poses a risk to individuals' fundamental rights and amounts to mass surveillance. The cache is said to contain at least four petabytes,  according  to The Guardian. In addition, the ruling also imposed a six-mon...