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A new malware tool that enables cybercriminal actors to build malicious Windows shortcut ( .LNK ) files has been spotted for sale on cybercrime forums. Dubbed Quantum Lnk Builder , the software makes it possible to spoof any extension and choose from over 300 icons, not to mention support  UAC  and  Windows SmartScreen  bypass as well as "multiple payloads per .LNK" file. Also offered are capabilities to generate .HTA and disk image (.ISO) payloads. Quantum Builder is available for lease at different price points: €189 a month, €355 for two months, €899 for six months, or as a one-off lifetime purchase for €1,500. ".LNK files are shortcut files that reference other files, folders, or applications to open them," Cyble researchers  said  in a report. "The [threat actor] leverages the .LNK files and drops malicious payloads using  LOLBins  [living-off-the-land binaries]." Early evidence of malware samples using Quantum Builder in the wild is s...

The U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), along with the Coast Guard Cyber Command (CGCYBER), on Thursday released a joint advisory warning of continued attempts on the part of threat actors to exploit the Log4Shell flaw in VMware Horizon servers to breach target networks. "Since December 2021, multiple threat actor groups have exploited Log4Shell on unpatched, public-facing VMware Horizon and [Unified Access Gateway] servers," the agencies  said . "As part of this exploitation, suspected APT actors implanted loader malware on compromised systems with embedded executables enabling remote command-and-control (C2)." In one instance, the adversary is said to have been able to move laterally inside the victim network, obtain access to a disaster recovery network, and collect and exfiltrate sensitive law enforcement data. Log4Shell , tracked as  CVE-2021-44228  (CVSS score: 10.0), is a remote code execution vulnerability affecting the Apache ...

The beleaguered Israeli surveillanceware vendor NSO Group this week admitted to the European Union lawmakers that its Pegasus tool was used by at least five countries in the region. "We're trying to do the right thing and that's more than other companies working in the industry," Chaim Gelfand, the company's general counsel and chief compliance officer, said, according to a  report  from Politico. Acknowledging that it had "made mistakes," the company also stressed on the need for an international standard to regulate the government use of spyware. The disclosure comes as a special inquiry committee was  launched in April 2022  to investigate alleged breaches of E.U. law following revelations that the company's Pegasus spyware is being used to snoop on phones belonging to politicians, diplomats, and civil society members. "The committee is going to look into existing national laws regulating surveillance, and whether Pegasus spyware was us...

When it comes to keeping SaaS stacks secure, IT and security teams need to be able to streamline the detection and remediation of misconfigurations in order to best protect their SaaS stack from threats. However, while companies adopt more and more apps, their increase in SaaS security tools and staff has lagged behind, as found in the  2022 SaaS Security Survey Report.  The survey report, completed by Adaptive Shield in conjunction with Cloud Security Alliance (CSA), dives into how CISOs today are managing the growing SaaS app attack surface and the steps they are taking to secure their organizations.  The report finds that at least 43% of organizations have experienced a security incident as a result of a SaaS misconfiguration; however, with another 20% being "unsure," the real number could be  as high as 63% . These numbers are particularly striking when compared to the 17% of organizations experiencing security incidents due to an IaaS misconfiguration.  ...

A threat cluster with ties to a hacking group called Tropic Trooper has been spotted using a previously undocumented malware coded in Nim language to strike targets as part of a newly discovered campaign. The novel loader, dubbed Nimbda, is "bundled with a Chinese language greyware 'SMS Bomber' tool that is most likely illegally distributed in the Chinese-speaking web," Israeli cybersecurity company Check Point  said  in a report. "Whoever crafted the Nim loader took special care to give it the same executable icon as the SMS Bomber that it drops and executes," the researchers said. "Therefore the entire bundle works as a trojanized binary." SMS Bomber, as the name indicates, allows a user to input a phone number (not their own) so as to flood the victim's device with messages and potentially render it unusable in what's a denial-of-service (DoS) attack. The fact that the binary doubles up as SMS Bomber and a backdoor suggests that t...

QNAP, Taiwanese maker of network-attached storage (NAS) devices, on Wednesday said it's in the process of fixing a critical three-year-old PHP vulnerability that could be abused to achieve remote code execution. "A vulnerability has been reported to affect PHP versions 7.1.x below 7.1.33, 7.2.x below 7.2.24, and 7.3.x below 7.3.11 with improper nginx config," the hardware vendor  said  in an advisory. "If exploited, the vulnerability allows attackers to gain remote code execution." The vulnerability, tracked as  CVE-2019-11043 , is rated 9.8 out of 10 for severity on the CVSS vulnerability scoring system. That said, it's required that Nginx and php-fpm are running in appliances using the following QNAP operating system versions - QTS 5.0.x and later QTS 4.5.x and later QuTS hero h5.0.x and later QuTS hero h4.5.x and later QuTScloud c5.0.x and later "As QTS, QuTS hero or QuTScloud does not have nginx installed by default, QNAP NAS are not aff...

A new piece of research from academics at ETH Zurich has identified a number of critical security issues in the MEGA cloud storage service that could be leveraged to break the confidentiality and integrity of user data. In a paper titled " MEGA: Malleable Encryption Goes Awry ," the researchers point out how MEGA's system does not protect its users against a malicious server, thereby enabling a rogue actor to fully compromise the privacy of the uploaded files. "Additionally, the integrity of user data is damaged to the extent that an attacker can insert malicious files of their choice which pass all authenticity checks of the client," ETH Zurich's Matilda Backendal, Miro Haller, and Kenneth G. Paterson said in an analysis of the service's cryptographic architecture. MEGA, which  advertises  itself as the "privacy company" and claims to provide user-controlled end-to-end encrypted cloud storage, has more than 10 million daily active users, w...

The Computer Emergency Response Team of Ukraine (CERT-UA) has  cautioned  of a new set of spear-phishing attacks exploiting the "Follina" flaw in the Windows operating system to deploy password-stealing malware. Attributing the intrusions to a Russian nation-state group tracked as APT28 (aka Fancy Bear or Sofacy), the agency said the attacks commence with a lure document titled "Nuclear Terrorism A Very Real Threat.rtf" that, when opened, exploits the recently disclosed vulnerability to download and execute a malware called CredoMap. Follina ( CVE-2022-30190 , CVSS score: 7.8), which concerns a case of remote code execution affecting the Windows Support Diagnostic Tool (MSDT), was addressed by Microsoft on June 14, as part of its Patch Tuesday updates , but not before it was subjected to widespread zero-day exploit activity by numerous threat actors. According to an independent report published by Malwarebytes,  CredoMap  is a variant of the .NET-based credenti...

A newly discovered Magecart skimming campaign has its roots in a previous attack activity going all the way back to November 2021. To that end, it has come to light that  two   malware  domains identified as hosting credit card skimmer code — "scanalytic[.]org" and "js.staticounter[.]net" — are part of a broader infrastructure used to carry out the intrusions, Malwarebytes said in a Tuesday analysis. "We were able to connect these two domains with a  previous campaign from November 2021  which was the first instance to our knowledge of a skimmer checking for the use of virtual machines," Jérôme Segura  said . "However, both of them are now devoid of VM detection code. It's unclear why the threat actors removed it, unless perhaps it caused more issues than benefits." The earliest evidence of the campaign's activity, based on the additional domains uncovered, suggests it dates back to at least May 2020. Magecart  refers to a cybercrim...

Europol on Tuesday announced the dismantling of an organized crime group that dabbled in phishing, fraud, scams, and money laundering activities. The cross-border operation, which involved law enforcement authorities from Belgium and the Netherlands, saw the arrests of nine individuals in the Dutch nation. The suspects are men between the ages of 25 and 36 from Amsterdam, Almere, Rotterdam, and Spijkenisse and a 25-year-old woman from Deventer, according to a  statement  from the National Police Force. Also confiscated as part of 24 house searches were firearms, ammunition, jewelry, designer clothing, expensive watches, electronic devices, tens of thousands of euros in cash, and cryptocurrency, the officials said. "The criminal group contacted victims by email, text message and through mobile messaging applications," the agency  noted . "These messages were sent by the members of the gang and contained a phishing link leading to a bogus banking website." Unsu...

The operators behind the Rig Exploit Kit have swapped the Raccoon Stealer malware for the Dridex financial trojan as part of an ongoing campaign that commenced in January 2022. The switch in modus operandi,  spotted  by Romanian company Bitdefender, comes in the wake of Raccoon Stealer  temporarily closing the project  after one of its team members responsible for critical operations passed away in the Russo-Ukrainian war in March 2022. The Rig Exploit Kit is notable for its abuse of browser exploits to distribute an array of malware. First spotted in 2019, Raccoon Stealer is a credential-stealing trojan that's advertised and sold on underground forums as a malware-as-a-service (MaaS) for $200 a month. That said, the Raccoon Stealer actors are already working on a second version that's expected to be "rewritten from scratch and optimized." But the void left by the malware's exit is being filled by other information stealers such as RedLine Stealer and Vidar. ...

An advanced persistent threat (APT) actor codenamed ToddyCat has been linked to a string of attacks aimed at government and military entities in Europe and Asia since at least December 2020. The relatively new adversarial collective is said to have commenced its operations by targeting Microsoft Exchange servers in Taiwan and Vietnam using an unknown exploit to deploy the China Chopper web shell and activate a multi-stage infection chain. Other prominent countries singled out include Afghanistan, India, Indonesia, Iran, Kyrgyzstan, Malaysia, Pakistan, Russia, Slovakia, Thailand, the U.K., and Uzbekistan, the swift escalation in targeting marked by improvements to its toolset over the course of successive campaigns. "The first wave of attacks exclusively targeted Microsoft Exchange Servers, which were compromised with Samurai, a sophisticated passive backdoor that usually works on ports 80 and 443," Russian cybersecurity company Kaspersky  said  in a report published toda...

Nearly five dozen security vulnerabilities have been disclosed in devices from 10 operational technology (OT) vendors due to what researchers call are "insecure-by-design practices." Collectively dubbed  OT:ICEFALL  by Forescout, the 56 issues span as many as 26 device models from Bently Nevada, Emerson, Honeywell, JTEKT, Motorola, Omron, Phoenix Contact, Siemens, and Yokogawa. "Exploiting these vulnerabilities, attackers with network access to a target device could remotely execute code, change the logic, files or firmware of OT devices, bypass authentication, compromise credentials, cause denials of service or have a variety of operational impacts," the company said in a technical report. These vulnerabilities could have disastrous consequences considering the impacted products are widely employed in critical infrastructure industries such as oil and gas, chemical, nuclear, power generation and distribution, manufacturing, water treatment and distribution, min...

Ransomware has been a thorn in the side of cybersecurity teams for years. With the move to remote and hybrid work, this insidious threat has become even more of a challenge for  organizations everywhere. 2021 was a case study in ransomware due to the wide variety of attacks, significant financial and economic impact, and diverse ways that organizations responded.  These attacks  should be seen as a lesson that can inform future security strategies to mitigate ransomware risk. As an organization continues to evolve, so should its security strategy. The Remote Environment Is Primed for Ransomware With organizations continuing to support remote and hybrid work, they no longer have the visibility and control they once had inside their perimeter. Attackers are  exploiting this weakness  and profiting. Here are three reasons they're able to do so: Visibility and control have changed.  Most organizations now have employees working from anywhere. These employe...

A 36-year-old former Amazon employee was convicted of wire fraud and computer intrusions in the U.S. for her role in the theft of personal data of no fewer than 100 million people in the  2019 Capital One breach . Paige Thompson , who operated under the online alias "erratic" and worked for the tech giant till 2016, was found guilty of wire fraud, five counts of unauthorized access to a protected computer, and damaging a protected computer. The seven-day trial saw the jury acquitted her of other charges, including access device fraud and aggravated identity theft. She is scheduled for sentencing on September 15, 2022. Cumulatively, the offenses are punishable by up to 25 years in prison. "Ms. Thompson used her hacking skills to steal the personal information of more than 100 million people, and hijacked computer servers to mine cryptocurrency,"  said  U.S. Attorney Nick Brown. "Far from being an ethical hacker trying to help companies with their computer s...

A new kind of Windows NTLM relay attack dubbed  DFSCoerce  has been uncovered that leverages the Distributed File System (DFS): Namespace Management Protocol (MS-DFSNM) to seize control of a domain. "Spooler service disabled, RPC filters installed to prevent PetitPotam and File Server VSS Agent Service not installed but you still want to relay [Domain Controller authentication] to [Active Directory Certificate Services]? Don't worry MS-DFSNM have (sic) your back," security researcher Filip Dragovic  said  in a tweet. MS-DFSNM  provides a remote procedure call (RPC) interface for administering distributed file system configurations. The NTLM (NT Lan Manager) relay attack is a well-known method that exploits the challenge-response mechanism. It allows malicious parties to sit between clients and servers and intercept and relay validated authentication requests in order to gain unauthorized access to network resources, effectively gaining an initial foothold i...

Insurance exists to protect the insured party against catastrophe, but the insurer needs protection so that its policies are not abused – and that's where the fine print comes in. However, in the case of ransomware insurance, the fine print is becoming contentious and arguably undermining the usefulness of ransomware insurance. In this article, we'll outline why, particularly given the current climate, war exclusion clauses are increasingly rendering ransomware insurance of reduced value – and why your organization should focus on protecting itself instead. What is ransomware insurance In recent years, ransomware insurance has grown as a product field because organizations are trying to buy protection against the catastrophic effects of a successful ransomware attack. Why try to buy insurance? Well, a single, successful attack can just about wipe out a large organization, or lead to crippling costs –  NotPetya alone led to a total of $10bn in damages .  Ransomware attacks...

A security flaw in Apple Safari that was exploited in the wild earlier this year was originally fixed in 2013 and reintroduced in December 2016, according to a new report from Google Project Zero. The issue, tracked as  CVE-2022-22620  (CVSS score: 8.8), concerns a case of a use-after-free vulnerability in the WebKit component that could be exploited by a piece of specially crafted web content to gain arbitrary code execution. In early February 2022, Apple shipped patches for the bug across Safari, iOS, iPadOS, and macOS, while acknowledging that it "may have been actively exploited." "In this case, the variant was completely patched when the vulnerability was initially reported in 2013," Maddie Stone of Google Project Zero  said . "However, the variant was reintroduced three years later during large refactoring efforts. The vulnerability then continued to exist for 5 years until it was fixed as an in-the-wild zero-day in January 2022." While both th...