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Spain's National Police Agency, the Policía Nacional, said last week it dismantled an unnamed cybercriminal organization and arrested eight individuals in connection with a series of SIM swapping attacks that were carried out with the goal of financial fraud. The suspects of the crime ring masqueraded as trustworthy representatives of banks and other organizations and used traditional phishing and smishing techniques to obtain personal information and bank data of victims before draining money from their accounts. "They usurped the identity of their victims through the falsification of official documents and tricked employees of telephone stores into getting the duplicate of SIM cards, cards where they received security confirmation messages from banks that allowed them to empty their victims' accounts," the authorities  said . Seven of the arrests were made in Barcelona and one in Seville. As many as 12 bank accounts were frozen as part of the illicit operation....

Technical details have been disclosed regarding a number of security vulnerabilities affecting Moxa's MXview web-based network management system, some of which could be chained by an unauthenticated adversary to achieve remote code execution on unpatched servers. The five security weaknesses "could allow a remote, unauthenticated attacker to execute code on the hosting machine with the highest privileges available: NT AUTHORITY\SYSTEM," Claroty security researcher Noam Moshe  said  in a report published this week. Moxa  MXview  is designed for configuring, monitoring, and diagnosing networking devices in industrial networks. The flaws, which affect versions 3.x to 3.2.2 of the network management software, were rectified in  version 3.2.4 or higher  following a coordinated disclosure process in October 2021. "Successful exploitation of these vulnerabilities may allow an attacker to create or overwrite critical files to execute code, gain access to the p...

Adobe on Sunday rolled out patches to contain a critical security vulnerability impacting its Commerce and Magento Open Source products that it said is being actively exploited in the wild. Tracked as  CVE-2022-24086 , the shortcoming has a CVSS score of 9.8 out of 10 on the vulnerability scoring system and has been characterized as an " improper input validation " issue that could be weaponized to achieve arbitrary code execution.  It's also a pre-authenticated flaw, meaning it could be exploited without requiring any credentials. Additionally, the California-headquartered company pointed out that the vulnerability can be exploited by an attacker with non-administrative privileges. The flaw affects Adobe Commerce and Magento Open Source 2.4.3-p1 and earlier versions as well as 2.3.7-p2 and earlier versions. Adobe Commerce 2.3.3 and lower are not vulnerable. "Adobe is aware that CVE-2022-24086 has been exploited in the wild in very limited attacks targeting Ad...

A previously unknown hacking group has been linked to targeted attacks against human rights activists, human rights defenders, academics, and lawyers across India in an attempt to plant "incriminating digital evidence." Cybersecurity firm SentinelOne attributed the intrusions to a group it tracks as " ModifiedElephant ," an elusive threat actor that's been operational since at least 2012, whose activity aligns sharply with Indian state interests. "ModifiedElephant operates through the use of commercially available remote access trojans (RATs) and has potential ties to the commercial surveillance industry," the researchers  said . "The threat actor uses spear-phishing with malicious documents to deliver malware, such as  NetWire ,  DarkComet , and simple keyloggers." The primary goal of ModifiedElephant is to facilitate long-term surveillance of targeted individuals, ultimately leading to the delivery of "evidence" on the victim...

French data protection regulators on Thursday found the use of Google Analytics a breach of the European Union's General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) laws in the country, almost a month after a  similar decision  was reached in Austria. To that end, the National Commission on Informatics and Liberty (CNIL) ruled that the transatlantic movement of Google Analytics data to the U.S. is not "sufficiently regulated" citing a violation of  Articles 44 et seq.  of the data protection decree, which govern the transfers of personal data to third countries or international entities. Specifically the independent administrative regulatory body highlighted the lack of equivalent privacy protections and the risk that "American intelligence services would access personal data transferred to the United States if the transfers were not properly regulated." "[A]lthough Google has adopted additional measures to regulate data transfers in the context of the Google An...

Apple on Thursday released security updates for  iOS, iPadOS ,  macOS , and  Safari  to address a new WebKit flaw that it said may have been actively exploited in the wild, making it the company's third zero-day patch since the start of the year. Tracked as CVE-2022-22620, the issue concerns a use-after-free vulnerability in the WebKit component that powers the Safari web browser and could be exploited by a piece of specially crafted web content to gain arbitrary code execution.  "Apple is aware of a report that this issue may have been actively exploited," the company said in a terse statement acknowledging in-the-wild attacks leveraging the flaw. The iPhone maker credited an anonymous researcher for discovering and reporting the flaw, adding it remediated the issue with improved memory management. The updates are available for iPhone 6s and later, iPad Pro (all models), iPad Air 2 and later, iPad 5th generation and later, iPad mini 4 and later, and iPod ...

A peer-to-peer Golang botnet has resurfaced after more than a year to compromise servers belonging to entities in the healthcare, education, and government sectors within a span of a month, infecting a total of 1,500 hosts. Dubbed FritzFrog , "the decentralized botnet targets any device that exposes an SSH server — cloud instances, data center servers, routers, etc. — and is capable of running any malicious payload on infected nodes," Akamai researchers said in a report shared with The Hacker News. The new wave of attacks commenced in early December 2021, only to pick up pace and register a 10x growth in its infection rate in a month's time, while peaking at 500 incidents per day in January 2022. The cybersecurity firm said it detected infected machines in a European television channel network, a Russian manufacturer of healthcare equipment, and multiple universities in East Asia. FritzFrog was  first documented  by Guardicore in August 2020, elaborating the botnet...

"…well, of course!" is what you might think. It's a biological threat, so how could it affect digital assets? But hang on. Among other effects, this pandemic has brought about a massive shift in several technological areas. Not only did it force numerous organizations - that up to now were reluctant - to gear up in cyber to go digital, all at once, oftentimes with hastily pieced together strategies. It also made remote working (and the involved tools) grow in double-digits, causing the good old perimeter (which was already in a questionable state due to cloud adaption) to be basically shattered. The office is now anywhere. And that means access to data needs to be everywhere too.  Keeping all of this in mind, the general assumption was that in the wake of the pandemic we would face a virtual nightmare with vulnerable users, compromised corporate networks en masse and the end of the (digital) world. But let's look at some interesting numbers of what  actually  happ...

Image Source: TechPrivacy Cybersecurity authorities from Australia, the U.K., and the U.S. have published a joint advisory warning of an increase in sophisticated, high-impact ransomware attacks targeting critical infrastructure organizations across the world in 2021. The incidents singled out a broad range of sectors, including defense, emergency services, agriculture, government facilities, IT, healthcare, financial services, education, energy, charities, legal institutions, and public services. "Ransomware tactics and techniques continued to evolve in 2021, which demonstrates ransomware threat actors' growing technological sophistication and an increased ransomware threat to organizations globally," the agencies  said  in the  joint bulletin . Spear-phishing, stolen or brute-forced Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP) credentials, and exploitation of software flaws emerged as the top three initial infection vectors that were used to deploy ransomware on compromised netwo...

A special law enforcement operation undertaken by Russia has led to the seizure and shutdown of four online bazaars that specialized in the theft and sales of stolen credit cards, as the government continues to take active measures against harboring cybercriminals on its territory. To that end, the domains operated by the card fraud forms and marketplaces, Ferum Shop, Sky-Fraud, Trump's Dumps, and UAS, were confiscated and plastered with a banner that warned "theft of funds from bank cards is illegal." Also embedded into the HTML source code was a message asking, "Which one of you is next?" The seizures were orchestrated by the Department "K," a division of the Ministry of Internal Affairs of the Russian Federation that focuses primarily on information technology-related crimes, according to  Flashpoint . In a related development, state-owned news agency TASS  said  that six Russian individuals were being charged with "the illegal circulation o...

Critical security vulnerabilities have been disclosed in a WordPress plugin known as PHP Everywhere that's used by more than 30,000 websites worldwide and could be abused by an attacker to execute arbitrary code on affected systems. PHP Everywhere is  used  to flip the switch on PHP code across WordPress installations, enabling users to insert and execute PHP-based code in the content management system's Pages, Posts, and Sidebar. The three issues, all rated 9.9 out of a maximum of 10 on the CVSS rating system, impact versions 2.0.3 and below, and are as follows - CVE-2022-24663  - Remote Code Execution by Subscriber+ users via shortcode CVE-2022-24664  - Remote Code Execution by Contributor+ users via metabox, and CVE-2022-24665  - Remote Code Execution by Contributor+ users via gutenberg block Successful exploitation of the three vulnerabilities could result in the execution of malicious PHP code that could be leveraged to achieve a complete site tak...

The U.S. Justice Department (DoJ) on Tuesday  announced  the arrest of a married couple in connection with conspiring to launder cryptocurrency worth $4.5 billion that was siphoned during the  hack  of the virtual currency exchange Bitfinex in 2016. Ilya Lichtenstein, 34, and his wife, Heather Morgan, 31, both of New York, are alleged to have "stolen funds through a labyrinth of cryptocurrency transactions," with the law enforcement getting hold of over $3.6 billion in cryptocurrency by following the money trails, resulting in the "largest financial seizure ever." Prosecutors charged the couple not for the hack itself, but rather for receiving the stolen bitcoin into a digital wallet under their ownership, a part of which was laundered to conceal the activities and the movement of the money. In 2019, Israeli authorities apprehended two brothers, Eli and Assaf Gigi, over their supposed involvement in the 2016 security breach. "Bitfinex will work with the Do...

Alarming research reveals the stress and strains the average cybersecurity team experiences on a daily basis. As many as  70% of teams  report feeling emotionally overwhelmed by security alerts. Those alerts come at such high volume, high velocity, and high intensity that they become an extreme source of stress. So extreme, in fact, that people's home lives are negatively affected. Alert overload is bad for those who work in cybersecurity. But it's even worse for everyone who depends on cybersecurity.  This is a gigantic issue in the industry, yet few people even acknowledge it, let alone deal with it. Cynet aims to correct that in this guide ( download here ), starting by shining a light on the cause of the problem and the full extent of its consequences and then offering a few ways lean security teams can pull their analysts out of the ocean of false positives and get them back to shore. It includes tips on how to reduce alerts using automation and shares guidance for...

An advanced persistent threat (APT) group with ties to Iran has refreshed its malware toolset to include a new backdoor dubbed  Marlin  as part of a long-running espionage campaign that started in April 2018. Slovak cybersecurity company ESET attributed the attacks — codenamed "Out to Sea"  — to a threat actor called  OilRig  (aka APT34), while also conclusively connecting its activities to a second Iranian group tracked under the name  Lyceum  (Hexane aka  SiameseKitten ). "Victims of the campaign include diplomatic organizations, technology companies, and medical organizations in Israel, Tunisia, and the United Arab Emirates," ESET noted in its  T3 2021 Threat Report  shared with The Hacker News. Active since at least 2014, the hacking group is known to strike Middle Eastern governments and a variety of business verticals, including chemical, energy, financial, and telecommunications. In April 2021, the actor targeted a Lebanese e...

The Russia-linked threat actor known as APT29 targeted European diplomatic missions and Ministries of Foreign Affairs as part of a series of spear-phishing campaigns mounted in October and November 2021. According to ESET's  T3 2021 Threat Report  shared with The Hacker News, the intrusions paved the way for the deployment of Cobalt Strike Beacon on compromised systems, followed by leveraging the foothold to drop additional malware for gathering information about the hosts and other machines in the same network. Also tracked under the names The Dukes, Cozy Bear, and Nobelium, the advanced persistent threat group is an infamous cyber-espionage group that has been active for more than a decade, with its attacks targeting Europe and the U.S., before it gained widespread attention for the  supply‐chain compromise  of SolarWinds, leading to further infections in several downstream entities, including U.S. government agencies in 2020. The spear-phishing attacks commen...

Microsoft on Tuesday rolled out its monthly security updates with  fixes for 51 vulnerabilities  across its software line-up consisting of Windows, Office, Teams, Azure Data Explorer, Visual Studio Code, and other components such as Kernel and Win32k. Among the 51 defects closed, 50 are rated Important and one is rated Moderate in severity, making it one of the rare Patch Tuesday updates without any fixes for Critical-rated vulnerabilities. This is also in addition to  19 more flaws  the company addressed in its Chromium-based Edge browser. None of the security vulnerabilities are listed as under active exploit, while of the flaws —  CVE-2022-21989  (CVSS score: 7.8) — has been classified as a publicly disclosed zero-day at the time of the release. The issue concerns a privilege escalation bug in Windows Kernel, with Microsoft warning of potential attacks exploiting the shortcoming. "Successful exploitation of this vulnerability requires an attacker to...

An advanced persistent threat (APT) hacking group operating with motives that likely align with Palestine has embarked on a new campaign that takes advantage of a previously undocumented implant called NimbleMamba . The intrusions leveraged a sophisticated attack chain targeting Middle Eastern governments, foreign policy think tanks, and a state-affiliated airline, enterprise security firm Proofpoint  said  in a report, attributing the covert operation to a threat actor tracked as Molerats (aka TA402). Notorious for continuously updating their malware implants and their delivery methods, the APT group was most recently linked to an  espionage offensive  aimed at human rights activists and journalists in Palestine and Turkey, while a previous attack exposed in June 2021 resulted in the deployment of a backdoor called  LastConn . But the lull in the activities has been offset by the operators actively working to retool their arsenal, resulting in the developm...

A detailed examination of a Pay-per-install (PPI) malware service called PrivateLoader has revealed its crucial role in the delivery of a variety of malware such as  SmokeLoader ,  RedLine Stealer ,  Vidar ,  Raccoon , and  GCleaner  since at least May 2021. Loaders are malicious programs used for loading additional executables onto the infected machine. With PPI malware services such as PrivateLoader, malware operators pay the service owners to get their payloads "installed" based on the targets provided. "The accessibility and moderate costs allow malware operators to leverage these services as another weapon for rapid, bulk and geo-targeted malware infections," cybersecurity firm Intel 471  said  in a new report shared with The Hacker News. PrivateLoader, written in the C++ programming language, is designed to retrieve URLs for the malicious payloads to be deployed on the infected host, with the distribution primarily relying on a network...