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A financially motivated campaign that targets Android devices and spreads mobile malware via SMS phishing techniques since at least 2018 has spread its tentacles to strike victims located in France and  Germany  for the first time. Dubbed  Roaming Mantis , the latest spate of activities observed in 2021 involve sending fake shipping-related texts containing a URL to a landing page from where Android users are infected with a banking trojan known as Wroba whereas iPhone users are redirected to a phishing page that masquerades as the official Apple website. The top affected countries, based on telemetry data gathered by Kaspersky between July 2021 and January 2022, are France, Japan, India, China, Germany, and Korea. Also tracked under the names  MoqHao  and XLoader (not to be confused with the info-stealer malware of the same name  targeting Windows and macOS ), the group's activity has continued to expand geographically even as the operators broadened ...

Two different Android banking Trojans, FluBot and Medusa, are relying on the same delivery vehicle as part of a simultaneous attack campaign, according to new research published by ThreatFabric. The ongoing side-by-side infections, facilitated through the same smishing (SMS phishing) infrastructure, involved the overlapping usage of "app names, package names, and similar icons," the Dutch mobile security firm said. Medusa, first discovered targeting Turkish financial organizations in July 2020, has undergone several iterations, chief among which is the ability to abuse accessibility permissions in Android to siphon funds from banking apps to an account controlled by the attacker. "Medusa sports other dangerous features like keylogging, accessibility event logging, and audio and video streaming — all these capabilities provide actors with almost full access to [a] victim's device," the researchers  said . The malware-ridden apps used in conjunction with Flu...

The wide-ranging adoption of cloud facilities and the subsequent mushrooming of organizations' networks, combined with the recent migration to remote work, had the direct consequence of a massive expansion of organizations' attack surface and led to a growing number of blind spots in connected architectures. The unforeseen  results of this expanded and attack surface  with fragmented monitoring has been a marked increase in the number of successful cyber-attacks, most notoriously, ransomware, but covering a range of other types of attacks as well. The main issues are unmonitored blind spots used by cyber-attackers to breach organizations' infrastructure and escalate their attack or move laterally, seeking valuable information.  The problem lies in discovery. Most organizations have evolved faster than their ability to keep track of all the moving parts involved and to catch up to catalog all past and present assets is often viewed as a complex and resource-heavy task w...

Microsoft on Monday said it's taking steps to disable Visual Basic for Applications (VBA) macros by default across its products, including Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Access, and Visio, for documents downloaded from the web in an attempt to eliminate an entire class of attack vector. "Bad actors send macros in Office files to end users who unknowingly enable them, malicious payloads are delivered, and the impact can be severe including malware, compromised identity, data loss, and remote access," Kellie Eickmeyer  said  in a post announcing the move. While the company does warn users about permitting macros in Office files, unsuspecting victims — e.g., recipients of phishing emails — can still be lured into enabling the feature, effectively granting the attackers the ability to gain an initial foothold into the system. As part of the new change, when a user opens an attachment or downloads from the internet an untrusted Office file containing macros, the app displays a ...

Microsoft last week announced that it's temporarily disabling the MSIX ms-appinstaller protocol handler in Windows following evidence that a security vulnerability in the installer component was exploited by threat actors to deliver malware such as Emotet, TrickBot, and Bazaloader. MSIX , based on a combination of .msi, .appx, App-V and ClickOnce installation technologies, is a universal Windows app package format that allows developers to distribute their applications for the desktop operating system and  other platforms . ms-appinstaller, specifically, is designed to help users  install a Windows app  by simply clicking a link on a website. But a spoofing vulnerability uncovered in Windows App Installer ( CVE-2021-43890 , CVSS score: 7.1) meant that it could be tricked into installing a rogue app that was never intended to be installed by the user via a malicious attachment used in phishing campaigns. Although Microsoft released initial patches to address this fla...

A politically motivated advanced persistent threat (APT) group has expanded its malware arsenal to include a new remote access trojan (RAT) in its espionage attacks aimed at Indian military and diplomatic entities. Called  CapraRAT  by Trend Micro, the implant is an Android RAT that exhibits a high "degree of crossover" with another Windows malware known as CrimsonRAT that's associated with Earth Karkaddan, a threat actor that's also tracked under the monikers APT36, Operation C-Major, PROJECTM, Mythic Leopard, and Transparent Tribe. The first concrete signs of APT36's existence  appeared  in  2016  as the group began distributing information-stealing malware through phishing emails with malicious PDF attachments targeting Indian military and government personnel. The group is believed to be of  Pakistani origin  and operational since at least 2013. The threat actor is also known to be consistent in its modus operandi, with the attacks predom...

Systems hosting content pertaining to the National Games of China were successfully breached last year by an unnamed Chinese-language-speaking hacking group. Cybersecurity firm Avast, which  dissected  the intrusion, said that the attackers gained access to a web server 12 days prior to the start of the event on September 3 to drop multiple reverse web shells for remote access and achieve permanent foothold in the network. The  National Games of China , a multi-sport event held every four years, took place in the Shaanxi Province between September 15 and 27, 2021. The Czech company said it was unable to determine the nature of the information stolen by the hackers, adding it has "reason to believe [the attackers] are either native Chinese-language speakers or show high fluency in Chinese." The breach is said to have been resolved ahead of the start of the games. The initial access was facilitated by exploiting a vulnerability in the webserver. But before dropping th...

Today's enterprise networks are complex environments with different types of wired and wireless devices being connected and disconnected. The current device discovery solutions have been mainly focused on identifying and monitoring servers, workstation PCs, laptops and infrastructure devices such as network firewalls, switches and routers, because the most valuable information assets of organizations are being stored, processed and transferred over those devices, hence making them the prime target of security breaches and intrusions. However, a new trend has been emerging in the past four years,  where attackers have been targeting purpose-built connected devices  such as network printers and video conferencing systems as an entry point and data exfiltration route. These devices cannot be identified properly by the current IT asset discovery solutions for the following main reasons: Proprietary protocols are often used for managing and monitoring such devices that are not...

A Chinese advanced persistent threat (APT) group has been targeting Taiwanese financial institutions as part of a "persistent campaign" that lasted for at least 18 months. The intrusions, whose primary intent was espionage, resulted in the deployment of a backdoor called xPack , granting the adversary extensive control over compromised machines, Broadcom-owned Symantec said in a  report  published last week. What's notable about this campaign is the amount of time the threat actor lurked on victim networks, affording the operators ample opportunity for detailed reconnaissance and exfiltrate potentially sensitive information pertaining to business contacts and investments without raising any red flags. In one of the unnamed financial organizations, the attackers spent close to 250 days between December 2020 and August 2021, while a manufacturing entity had its network under their watch for roughly 175 days. Although the initial access vector used to the breach the ta...

The U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) is urging federal agencies to secure their systems against an actively exploited security vulnerability in Windows that could be abused to gain elevated permissions on affected hosts. To that end, the agency has added  CVE-2022-21882  (CVSS score: 7.0) to the  Known Exploited Vulnerabilities Catalog , necessitating that Federal Civilian Executive Branch (FCEB) agencies patch all systems against this vulnerability by February 18, 2022. "These types of vulnerabilities are a frequent attack vector for malicious cyber actors of all types and pose significant risk to the federal enterprise," CISA  said  in an advisory published last week. CVE-2022-21882 , which has been tagged with an "Exploitation More Likely" exploitability index assessment, concerns a case of elevation of privilege vulnerability affecting the Win32k component. The bug was addressed by Microsoft as part of its January 2022 ...

Users of the Argo continuous deployment (CD) tool for Kubernetes are being urged to push through updates after a zero-day vulnerability was found that could allow an attacker to extract sensitive information such as passwords and API keys. The flaw, tagged as  CVE-2022-24348  (CVSS score: 7.7), affects all versions and has been addressed in versions 2.3.0, 2.2.4, and 2.1.9. Cloud security firm Apiiro has been credited with discovering and reporting the bug on January 30, 2022s. Continuous deployment, also called continuous delivery, refers to a process that automatically deploys all code changes to the testing and/or production environment after they are tested and merged to a shared repository. Argo CD is officially used by  191 organizations , including Alibaba Group, BMW Group, Deloitte, Gojek, IBM, Intuit, LexisNexis, Red Hat, Skyscanner, Swisscom, and Ticketmaster. The path-traversal vulnerability "allows malicious actors to load a Kubernetes  Helm Chart Y...

Microsoft on Friday shared more of the tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs) adopted by the Russia-based Gamaredon hacking group to facilitate a barrage of cyber espionage attacks aimed at several entities in Ukraine over the past six months. The attacks are said to have singled out government, military, non-government organizations (NGO), judiciary, law enforcement, and non-profit organizations with the main goal of exfiltrating sensitive information, maintaining access, and leveraging it to move laterally into related organizations. The Windows maker's Threat Intelligence Center (MSTIC) is tracking the cluster under the moniker ACTINIUM (previously as DEV-0157), sticking to its tradition of identifying nation-state activities by chemical element names. The Ukrainian government, in November 2021,  publicly attributed  Gamaredon to the Russian Federal Security Service (FSB) and connected its operations to the FSB Office of Russia in the Republic of Crimea and the city...

A now-patched security vulnerability in Apple iOS that was previously found to be exploited by Israeli company NSO Group was also separately weaponized by a different surveillance vendor named QuaDream to hack into the company's devices. The development was reported by  Reuters , citing unnamed sources, noting that "the two rival businesses gained the same ability last year to remotely break into iPhones [and] compromise Apple phones without an owner needing to open a malicious link." The zero-click exploit in question is  FORCEDENTRY , a flaw in iMessage that could be leveraged to  circumvent iOS security protections  and install spyware that allowed attackers to scoop up a wealth of information such as contacts, emails, files, messages, and photos, as well as access to the phone's camera and microphone. Google Project Zero, which studies zero-day vulnerabilities in hardware and software systems such as operating systems, web browsers, and open source libraries...

A number of India-based call centers and their directors have been indicted for their alleged role in placing tens of millions of scam calls aimed at defrauding thousands of American consumers. The indictment charged Manu Chawla, Sushil Sachdeva, Nitin Kumar Wadwani, Swarndeep Singh, Dinesh Manohar Sachdev, Gaje Singh Rathore, Sanket Modi, Rajiv Solanki and their respective call centers for conspiring with previously indicted VoIP provider E Sampark and its director, Guarav Gupta, to forward the calls to U.S. citizens. "Criminal India-based call centers defraud U.S. residents, including the elderly, by misleading victims over the telephone utilizing scams such as Social Security and IRS impersonation as well as loan fraud," the U.S. Justice Department  said  in a release. According to the  November 2020 indictment  issued against E Sampark and Gupta, the calls from India-based phone scammers led to reported losses of over $20 million from May 2015 to June 2020, w...

The Russia-linked Gamaredon hacking group attempted to compromise an unnamed Western government entity operating in Ukraine last month amidst ongoing geopolitical tensions between the two countries. Palo Alto Networks' Unit 42 threat intelligence team, in a  new report  publicized on February 3, said that the phishing attack took place on January 19, adding it "mapped out three large clusters of their infrastructure used to support different phishing and malware purposes." The threat actor, also known as Shuckworm, Armageddon, or Primitive Bear, has historically focused its offensive cyber attacks against Ukrainian government officials and organizations since 2013. Last year, Ukraine  disclosed  the collective's ties to Russia's Federal Security Service (FSB). To carry out the phishing attack, the operators behind the campaign leveraged a job search and employment platform within the country as a conduit to upload their malware downloader in the form of a res...

Most security practitioners are now aware of the Log4Shell vulnerability discovered toward the end of 2021. No one knows how long the vulnerability existed before it was discovered. The past couple of months have had security teams scrambling to patch the Log4Shell vulnerability found in Apache Log4j, a Java library widely used to log error messages in applications. Beyond patching, it's helpful and instructive for security practitioners to have a deeper understanding of this most recent critical vulnerability. Fortunately, Cynet Senior Security Researcher Igor Lahav is hosting a webinar [ Register here ] to provide "buzzword free" insights into Log4Shell. Based on a webinar preview provided by Cynet, the discussion will cover the software bugs in Apache Log4j that permitted the critical vulnerability, the exploits used to take advantage of the vulnerabilities and the remediation options available to protect your organization. This webinar will help make sense of the so...

The U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) on Thursday published an Industrial Controls Systems Advisory (ICSA) warning of multiple vulnerabilities in the Airspan Networks Mimosa equipment that could be abused to gain remote code execution, create a denial-of-service (DoS) condition, and obtain sensitive information. "Successful exploitation of these vulnerabilities could allow an attacker to gain user data (including organization details) and other sensitive data, compromise Mimosa's AWS (Amazon Web Services) cloud EC2 instance and S3 Buckets, and execute unauthorized remote code on all cloud-connected Mimosa devices," CISA  said  in the alert. The seven flaws, which were discovered and reported to CISA by industrial cybersecurity company Claroty, affect the following products — Mimosa Management Platform ( MMP ) running versions prior to v1.0.3 Point-to-Point ( PTP ) C5c and C5x running versions prior to v2.8.6.1, and Point-to-Multipoint ( ...

A threat actor, likely Chinese in origin, is actively attempting to exploit a zero-day vulnerability in the Zimbra open-source email platform as part of spear-phishing campaigns that commenced in December 2021. The espionage operation — codenamed " EmailThief " — was detailed by cybersecurity company Volexity in a technical report published Thursday, noting that successful exploitation of the cross-site scripting (XSS) vulnerability could result in the execution of arbitrary JavaScript code in the context of the user's Zimbra session. Volexity attributed the intrusions, which started on December 14, 2021, to a previously undocumented hacking group it's tracking under the moniker TEMP_HERETIC, with the assaults aimed at European government and media entities. The zero-day bug impacts the most recent open-source edition of Zimbra running  version 8.8.15 . The attacks are believed to have occurred in two phases; the first stage aimed at reconnaissance and distribut...

Cisco has patched multiple critical  security vulnerabilities  impacting its RV Series routers that could be weaponized to elevate privileges and execute arbitrary code on affected systems, while also warning of the existence of proof-of-concept (PoC) exploit code targeting some of these bugs. Three of the 15 flaws, tracked as CVE-2022-20699, CVE-2022-20700, and CVE-2022-20707, carry the highest CVSS rating of 10.0, and affect its Small Business RV160, RV260, RV340, and RV345 Series routers. Additionally, the flaws could be exploited to bypass authentication and authorization protections, retrieve and run unsigned software, and even cause denial-of-service (DoS) conditions. The networking equipment maker acknowledged that it's "aware that proof-of-concept exploit code is available for several of the vulnerabilities" but didn't share any further specifics on the nature of the exploit or the identity of the threat actors that may be exploiting them. CVE-2022-20699...

An ongoing search engine optimization (SEO) poisoning attack campaign has been observed abusing trust in legitimate software utilities to trick users into downloading BATLOADER malware on compromised machines. "The threat actor used 'free productivity apps installation' or 'free software development tools installation' themes as SEO keywords to lure victims to a compromised website and to download a malicious installer," researchers from Mandiant  said  in a report published this week. In  SEO poisoning  attacks, adversaries artificially increase the search engine ranking of websites (genuine or otherwise) hosting their malware to make them show up on top of search results so that users searching for specific apps like TeamViewer, Visual Studio, and Zoom are infected with malware. The installer, while packing the legitimate software, is also bundled with the BATLOADER payload that's executed during the installation process. The malware then acts as a ...