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Virtual Private Network (VPN) provider ExpressVPN on Thursday announced that it's removing Indian-based VPN servers in response to a new cybersecurity directive issued by the Indian Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT-In). "Rest assured, our users will still be able to connect to VPN servers that will give them Indian IP addresses and allow them to access the internet as if they were located in India," the company  said . "These 'virtual' India servers will instead be physically located in Singapore and the U.K." The development comes as the CERT-In has enforced new  controversial   data retention requirements  that are set to come into effect on June 27, 2022, and mandate VPN service providers to store subscribers' real names, contact details, and IP addresses assigned to them for at least five years. The logged user data, CERT-In emphasized, will only be requested for the purposes of "cyber incident response, protective and preventive ...

A critical security flaw has been uncovered in UNISOC's smartphone chipset that could be potentially weaponized to disrupt a smartphone's radio communications through a malformed packet. "Left unpatched, a hacker or a military unit can leverage such a vulnerability to neutralize communications in a specific location," Israeli cybersecurity company Check Point said in a report shared with The Hacker News. "The vulnerability is in the modem firmware, not in the Android OS itself." UNISOC, a semiconductor company based in Shanghai, is the world's fourth-largest mobile processor manufacturer after Mediatek, Qualcomm, and Apple, accounting for 10% of all SoC shipments in Q3 2021, according to  Counterpoint Research . The now-patched issue has been assigned the identifier CVE-2022-20210 and is rated 9.4 out of 10 for severity on the CVSS vulnerability scoring system. In a nutshell, the vulnerability — discovered following a reverse-engineering of UNISOC...

The threat actor known as SideWinder has added a new custom tool to its arsenal of malware that's being used in phishing attacks against Pakistani public and private sector entities. "Phishing links in emails or posts that mimic legitimate notifications and services of government agencies and organizations in Pakistan are primary attack vectors of the gang," Singapore-headquartered cybersecurity company Group-IB  said  in a Wednesday report. SideWinder, also tracked under the monikers Hardcore Nationalist, Rattlesnake, Razor Tiger, and T-APT-04, has been active since at least 2012 with a primary focus on Pakistan and other Central Asian countries like Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Nepal, Singapore, and Sri Lanka. Last month, Kaspersky  attributed  to this group over 1,000 cyber attacks that took place in the past two years, while calling out its persistence and sophisticated obfuscation techniques. The threat actor's modus operandi involves the use of spear-phishing...

The U.S. Department of Justice (DoJ) on Wednesday  announced  the seizure of three domains used by cybercriminals to trade stolen personal information and facilitate distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks for hire. This includes weleakinfo[.]to, ipstress[.]in, and ovh-booter[.]com, the first of which allowed its users to traffic hacked personal data and offered a searchable database containing illegally amassed information obtained from over 10,000 data breaches. The database consisted of seven billion indexed records featuring names, email addresses, usernames, phone numbers, and passwords for online accounts that could be accessed through different subscription tiers. The shutdown of weleakinfo[.]to comes more than two years after a related internet domain named weleakinfo[.]com was  confiscated in January 2020 , with law enforcement officials arresting 21 individuals in connection to the operation later that year. Last May, one of its operators was  sen...

A new unpatched security vulnerability has been disclosed in the open-source Horde Webmail client that could be exploited to achieve remote code execution on the email server simply by sending a specially crafted email to a victim. "Once the email is viewed, the attacker can silently take over the complete mail server without any further user interaction," SonarSource said in a report shared with The Hacker News. "The vulnerability exists in the default configuration and can be exploited with no knowledge of a targeted Horde instance." The issue, which has been assigned the CVE identifier  CVE-2022-30287 , was reported to the vendor on February 2, 2022. The maintainers of the Horde Project did not immediately respond to a request for comment regarding the unresolved vulnerability. At its core, the issue makes it possible for an authenticated user of a Horde instance to run malicious code on the underlying server by taking advantage of a quirk in how the client...

An international law enforcement operation involving 11 countries has culminated in the takedown of a notorious mobile malware threat called  FluBot . "This Android malware has been spreading aggressively through SMS, stealing passwords, online banking details and other sensitive information from infected smartphones across the world," Europol  said  in a statement. The "complex investigation" included authorities from Australia, Belgium, Finland, Hungary, Ireland, Romania, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, the Netherlands, and the U.S. FluBot , also called Cabassous, emerged in the wild in December 2020, masking its insidious intent behind the veneer of seemingly innocuous package tracking applications such as FedEx, DHL, and Correos.  It primarily spreads via smishing (aka SMS-based phishing) messages that trick unsuspecting recipients into clicking on a link to download the malware-laced apps. Once launched, the app would proceed to request access to Android...

As many as 47,337 malicious plugins have been uncovered on 24,931 unique websites, out of which 3,685 plugins were sold on legitimate marketplaces, netting the attackers $41,500 in illegal revenues. The findings come from a new tool called  YODA  that aims to detect rogue WordPress plugins and track down their origin, according to an 8-year-long study conducted by a group of researchers from the Georgia Institute of Technology. "Attackers impersonated benign plugin authors and spread malware by distributing pirated plugins," the researchers  said  in a new paper titled " Mistrust Plugins You Must ." "The number of malicious plugins on websites has steadily increased over the years, and malicious activity peaked in March 2020. Shockingly, 94% of the malicious plugins installed over those 8 years are still active today." The large-scale research entailed analyzing WordPress plugins installed in 410,122 unique web servers dating all the way back to 2012...

An enhanced version of the XLoader malware has been spotted adopting a probability-based approach to camouflage its command-and-control (C&C) infrastructure, according to the latest research. "Now it is significantly harder to separate the wheat from the chaff and discover the real C&C servers among thousands of legitimate domains used by Xloader as a smokescreen," Israeli cybersecurity company Check Point  said . First spotted in the wild in October 2020, XLoader is a successor to Formbook and a  cross-platform information stealer  that's capable of plundering credentials from web browsers, capturing keystrokes and screenshots, and executing arbitrary commands and payloads. More recently, the  ongoing geopolitical conflict  between Russia and Ukraine has proved to be a lucrative fodder for  distributing XLoader  by means of  phishing emails  aimed at high-ranking government officials in Ukraine. The latest findings from Check P...

An advanced persistent threat (APT) actor aligned with Chinese state interests has been observed weaponizing the new  zero-day flaw  in Microsoft Office to achieve code execution on affected systems. "TA413 CN APT spotted [in-the-wild] exploiting the Follina zero-day using URLs to deliver ZIP archives which contain Word Documents that use the technique," enterprise security firm Proofpoint  said  in a tweet. "Campaigns impersonate the 'Women Empowerments Desk' of the Central Tibetan Administration and use the domain tibet-gov.web[.]app." TA413  is best known for its campaigns aimed at the Tibetan diaspora to deliver implants such as  Exile RAT  and  Sepulcher  as well as a rogue Firefox browser extension dubbed  FriarFox . The high-severity security flaw, dubbed Follina and tracked as CVE-2022-30190 (CVSS score: 7.8), relates to a case of remote code execution that abuses the "ms-msdt:" protocol URI scheme to execute arbitrary code...

An analysis of the mobile threat landscape in 2022 shows that Spain and Turkey are the most targeted countries for malware campaigns, even as a mix of new and existing banking trojans are increasingly targeting Android devices to conduct on-device fraud (ODF). Other frequently targeted countries include Poland, Australia, the U.S., Germany, the U.K., Italy, France, and Portugal. "The most worrying leitmotif is the increasing attention to On-Device Fraud (ODF)," Dutch cybersecurity company ThreatFabric  said  in a report shared with The Hacker News. "Just in the first five months of 2022 there has been an increase of more than 40% in malware families that abuse Android OS to perform fraud using the device itself, making it almost impossible to detect them using traditional fraud scoring engines." Hydra ,  FluBot  (aka Cabassous),  Cerberus ,  Octo , and  ERMAC  accounted for the most active banking trojans based on the number of samples obser...

An "aggressive" advanced persistent threat (APT) group known as SideWinder has been linked to over 1,000 new attacks since April 2020. "Some of the main characteristics of this threat actor that make it stand out among the others, are the sheer number, high frequency and persistence of their attacks and the large collection of encrypted and obfuscated malicious components used in their operations," cybersecurity firm Kaspersky  said  in a report that was presented at Black Hat Asia this month. SideWinder , also called Rattlesnake or T-APT-04, is said to have been active since at least 2012 with a  track record  of targeting military, defense, aviation, IT companies, and legal firms in Central Asian countries such as Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Nepal, and Pakistan. Kaspersky's APT trends report for Q1 2022  published  late last month revealed that the threat actor is actively expanding the geography of its targets beyond its traditional victim profil...

This is an exciting time for the  Internet of Things . According to Deloitte research, the average U.S. household now has 25 connected devices — and new products are being launched every day. This rush of demand means that many tech companies are looking for developers with IoT knowledge. And even if you don't want to specialize in this field, the  programming skills  are transferable. Featuring nine full-length video courses,  The 2022 Complete Raspberry Pi & Arduino Developer Bundle  provides a really good introduction to this world. The included training is worth a total of $1,800, but readers of The Hacker News can currently pick up the bundle for  only $39.99 .  Special Offer  —  For a limited time, you can get lifetime access to nine courses on Arduino and Raspberry Pi development  for just $39.99 . That's a massive 97% off the total price. Both the Raspberry Pi and the Arduino were specifically designed to help people lear...

Interpol on Monday announced the arrest of three suspected global scammers in Nigeria for using remote access trojans (RATs) such as Agent Tesla to facilitate malware-enabled cyber fraud. "The men are thought to have used the RAT to reroute financial transactions, stealing confidential online connection details from corporate organizations, including oil and gas companies in South East Asia, the Middle East and North Africa," the International Criminal Police Organization  said  in a statement. One of the scammers in question, named Hendrix Omorume, has been charged and convicted of three counts of financial fraud and has been sentenced to a 12-month prison term. The two other suspects are still on trial. The three Nigerian individuals, who are aged between 31 and 38, have been apprehended for being in possession of fake documents such as fraudulent invoices and forged official letters. The law enforcement said that the suspects systematically used Agent Tesla to breach...

Microsoft on Monday published guidance for a newly discovered  zero-day security flaw  in its Office productivity suite that could be exploited to achieve code execution on affected systems. The weakness, now assigned the identifier  CVE-2022-30190 , is rated 7.8 out of 10 for severity on the CVSS vulnerability scoring system. Microsoft Office versions Office 2013, Office 2016, Office 2019, and Office 2021, as well as Professional Plus editions, are impacted.  "To help protect customers, we've published CVE-2022-30190 and additional guidance  here ," a Microsoft spokesperson told The Hacker News in an emailed statement. The  Follina  vulnerability, which came to light late last week, involved a real-world exploit that leveraged the shortcoming in a weaponized Word document to execute arbitrary PowerShell code by making use of the "ms-msdt:" URI scheme. The sample was uploaded to VirusTotal from Belarus. But first signs of exploitation of the flaw...

It's no secret that 3rd party apps can boost productivity, enable remote and hybrid work and are overall, essential in building and scaling a company's work processes.  An innocuous process much like clicking on an attachment was in the earlier days of email, people don't think twice when connecting an app they need with their Google workspace or M365 environment, etc. Simple actions that users take, from creating an email to updating a contact in the CRM, can result in several other automatic actions and notifications in the connected platforms.  As seen in the image below, the OAuth mechanism makes it incredibly easy to interconnect apps and many don't consider what the possible ramifications could be. When these apps and other add-ons for SaaS platforms ask for permissions' access, they are usually granted without a second thought, presenting more opportunities for bad actors to gain access to a company's data. This puts companies at risk for supply chain ...

A nascent Linux-based botnet named Enemybot has expanded its capabilities to include recently disclosed security vulnerabilities in its arsenal to target web servers, Android devices, and content management systems (CMS). "The malware is rapidly adopting one-day vulnerabilities as part of its exploitation capabilities," AT&T Alien Labs  said  in a technical write-up published last week. "Services such as VMware Workspace ONE, Adobe ColdFusion, WordPress, PHP Scriptcase and more are being targeted as well as IoT and Android devices." First disclosed by  Securonix  in March and later by  Fortinet , Enemybot has been linked to a threat actor tracked as Keksec (aka Kek Security, Necro, and FreakOut), with early attacks targeting routers from Seowon Intech, D-Link, and iRZ. Enemybot, which is capable of carrying out  DDoS attacks , draws its origins from several other botnets like Mirai, Qbot, Zbot, Gafgyt, and LolFMe. An analysis of the latest variant...

Cybersecurity researchers are calling attention to a zero-day flaw in Microsoft Office that could be abused to achieve arbitrary code execution on affected Windows systems. The vulnerability came to light after an independent cybersecurity research team known as nao_sec uncovered a Word document (" 05-2022-0438.doc ") that was uploaded to VirusTotal from an IP address in Belarus. "It uses Word's external link to load the HTML and then uses the 'ms-msdt' scheme to execute PowerShell code," the researchers  noted  in a series of tweets last week. According to security researcher Kevin Beaumont, who dubbed the flaw "Follina," the maldoc leverages Word's  remote template  feature to fetch an HTML file from a server, which then makes use of the "ms-msdt://" URI scheme to run the malicious payload. The shortcoming has been so named because the malicious sample references 0438, which is the area code of Follina, a municipality in t...

Cybersecurity researchers have disclosed a new ransomware strain called  GoodWill  that compels victims into donating for social causes and provide financial assistance to people in need. "The ransomware group propagates very unusual demands in exchange for the decryption key," researchers from CloudSEK  said  in a report published last week. "The Robin Hood-like group claims to be interested in helping the less fortunate, rather than extorting victims for financial motivations." Written in .NET, the ransomware was first identified by the India-based cybersecurity firm in March 2022, with the infections blocking access to sensitive files by making use of the AES encryption algorithm. The malware is also notable for sleeping for 722.45 seconds to interfere with dynamic analysis. The encryption process is followed by displaying a multiple-paged ransom note that requires the victims to carry out three socially-driven activities to be able to obtain the decryption...

Network credentials and virtual private network (VPN) access for colleges and universities based in the U.S. are being advertised for sale on underground and public criminal marketplaces. "This exposure of sensitive credential and network access information, especially privileged user accounts, could lead to subsequent cyber attacks against individual users or affiliated organizations," the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI)  said  in an advisory published last week. The cyber intrusions against educational institutions involve threat actors leveraging tactics like spear-phishing and ransomware to carry out credential harvesting activities. The gathered credentials are then exfiltrated and sold on Russian cybercrime forums for prices ranging from a few to thousands of U.S. dollars. Armed with this login information, the agency pointed out, adversaries can proceed to conduct brute-force  credential stuffing  attacks to break into victim accounts spanning ...