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Malicious actors have been observed abusing legitimate adversary simulation software in their attacks in an attempt to stay under the radar and evade detection. Palo Alto Networks Unit 42 said a  malware sample  uploaded to the VirusTotal database on May 19, 2022, contained a payload associated with Brute Ratel C4, a relatively new sophisticated toolkit "designed to avoid detection by endpoint detection and response (EDR) and antivirus (AV) capabilities." Authored by an Indian security researcher named  Chetan Nayak , Brute Ratel (BRc4) is analogous to Cobalt Strike and is  described  as a "customized command-and-control center for red team and adversary simulation." The commercial software was first released in late 2020 and has since gained over 480 licenses across 350 customers. Each license is offered at $2,500 per user for a year, after which it can be renewed for the same duration at the cost of $2,250. BRc4 is equipped with a wide variety of featur...

July may positively disrupt and adrenalize the old-fashioned Dynamic Application Security Scanning (DAST) market, despite the coming holiday season. The pathbreaking innovation comes from ImmuniWeb, a global application security company, well known for, among other things, its free  Community Edition  that processes over 100,000 daily security scans of web and mobile apps.  Today, ImmuniWeb announced that its new product –  Neuron  – is publicly available. This would be another boring press release by a software vendor, but the folks from ImmuniWeb managed to add a secret sauce that you will unlikely be able to resist tasting. The DAST scanning service is flexibly available as a SaaS, and unsurprisingly contains all fashionable features commonly advertised by competitors on the rapidly growing global market, spanning from native CI/CD integrations to advanced configuration of security scanning, pre-programmed or authenticated testing.  But the groundbrea...

Military entities located in Bangladesh continue to be at the receiving end of sustained cyberattacks by an advanced persistent threat tracked as Bitter. "Through malicious document files and intermediate malware stages the threat actors conduct espionage by deploying Remote Access Trojans," cybersecurity firm SECUINFRA  said  in a new write-up published on July 5. The findings from the Berlin-headquartered company build on a  previous report  from Cisco Talos in May, which disclosed the group's expansion in targeting to strike Bangladeshi government organizations with a backdoor called  ZxxZ . Bitter, also tracked under the codenames APT-C-08 and T-APT-17, is said to be active  since at least late 2013  and has a track record of targeting China, Pakistan, and Saudi Arabia using different tools such as BitterRAT and ArtraDownloader. The latest attack chain detailed by SECUINFRA is believed to have been conducted in mid-May 2022, originating with...

The operators of the Hive ransomware-as-a-service (RaaS) scheme have overhauled their file-encrypting software to fully migrate to Rust and adopt a more sophisticated encryption method. "With its latest variant carrying several major upgrades, Hive also proves it's one of the fastest evolving ransomware families, exemplifying the continuously changing ransomware ecosystem," Microsoft Threat Intelligence Center (MSTIC)  said  in a report on Tuesday. Hive , which was first observed in June 2021, has emerged as one of the most prolific RaaS groups,  accounting  for 17 attacks in the month of May 2022 alone, alongside  Black Basta and Conti . The shift from GoLang to Rust makes Hive the second ransomware strain after  BlackCat  to be written in the programming language, enabling the malware to gain additional benefits such as memory safety and deeper control over low-level resources as well as make use of a wide range of cryptographic libraries. What...

A widespread software supply chain attack has targeted the NPM package manager at least since December 2021 with rogue modules designed to steal data entered in forms by users on websites that include them. The coordinated attack, dubbed IconBurst by ReversingLabs, involves no fewer than two dozen NPM packages that include obfuscated JavaScript, which comes with malicious code to harvest sensitive data from forms in embedded downstream mobile applications and websites. "These clearly malicious attacks relied on typo-squatting, a technique in which attackers offer up packages via public repositories with names that are similar to — or common misspellings of — legitimate packages," security researcher Karlo Zanki  said  in a Tuesday report. "Attackers impersonated high-traffic NPM modules like umbrellajs and packages published by ionic.io." The packages in question, most of which were published in the last months, have been collectively downloaded more than 27,00...

A pro-China  influence campaign  singled out rare earth mining companies in Australia, Canada, and the U.S. with negative messaging in an unsuccessful attempt to manipulate public discourse to China's benefit. Targeted firms included Australia's Lynas Rare Earths Ltd, Canada's Appia Rare Earths & Uranium Corp, and the American company USA Rare Earth, threat intelligence firm Mandiant said in a report last week, calling the digital campaign  Dragonbridge . "It targeted an industry of strategic significance to the PRC, including specifically three commercial entities challenging the  PRC's global market dominance  in that industry," Mandiant  noted . The goal, the company noted, was to instigate environmental protests against the companies and propagate counter-narratives in response to potential or planned rare earths production activities involving the targets. This comprised a network of thousands of inauthentic accounts across numerous social m...

Change is a part of life, and nothing stays the same for too long, even with hacking groups, which are at their most dangerous when working in complete silence. The notorious REvil  ransomware  gang, linked to the infamous JBS and Kaseya, has resurfaced three months after the arrest of its members in Russia. The Russian domestic intelligence service, the FSB, had caught 14 people from the gang. In this apprehension, the 14 members of the gang were found in possession of 426 million roubles, $600,000, 500,000 euros, computer equipment, and 20 luxury cars were brought to justice. REvil Ransomware Gang- The Context The financially-motivated cybercriminal threat group Gold Southfield controlled ransomware group known as REvil emerged in 2019 and spread like wildfire after extorting $11 million from the meat-processor JBS. REvil would incentivize its affiliates to carry out cyberattacks for them by giving a percentage of the ransom pay-outs to those who help with infiltration ...

Cybersecurity researchers have detailed the various measures ransomware actors have taken to obscure their true identity online as well as the hosting location of their web server infrastructure. "Most ransomware operators use hosting providers outside their country of origin (such as Sweden, Germany, and Singapore) to host their ransomware operations sites," Cisco Talos researcher Paul Eubanks  said . "They use VPS hop-points as a proxy to hide their true location when they connect to their ransomware web infrastructure for remote administration tasks." Also prominent are the use of the TOR network and DNS proxy registration services to provide an added layer of anonymity for their illegal operations. But by taking advantage of the threat actors' operational security missteps and other techniques, the cybersecurity firm disclosed last week that it was able to identify TOR hidden services hosted on public IP addresses, some of which are previously unknown in...

Google on Monday shipped security updates to address a high-severity zero-day vulnerability in its Chrome web browser that it said is being exploited in the wild. The shortcoming, tracked as  CVE-2022-2294 , relates to a heap overflow flaw in the  WebRTC  component that provides real-time audio and video communication capabilities in browsers without the need to install plugins or download native apps. Heap buffer overflows, also referred to as heap overrun or heap smashing, occur when data is overwritten in the  heap area of the memory , leading to arbitrary code execution or a denial-of-service (DoS) condition. "Heap-based overflows can be used to overwrite function pointers that may be living in memory, pointing it to the attacker's code," MITRE  explains . "When the consequence is arbitrary code execution, this can often be used to subvert any other security service." Credited with reporting the flaw on July 1, 2022, is Jan Vojtesek from the Avast Thre...

The Cyber Police of Ukraine last week disclosed that it apprehended nine members of a criminal gang that embezzled 100 million hryvnias via hundreds of phishing sites that claimed to offer financial assistance to Ukrainian citizens as part of a campaign aimed at capitalizing on the ongoing conflict. "Criminals created more than 400 phishing links to obtain bank card data of citizens and appropriate money from their accounts," the agency  said  in a press statement last week. "The perpetrators may face up to 15 years behind bars." The law enforcement operation culminated in the seizure of computer equipment, mobile phones, bank cards as well as the criminal proceeds illicitly obtained through the scheme. Some of the rogue domains registered by the actors included ross0.yolasite[.]com, foundationua[.]com, ua-compensation[.]buzz, www.bless12[.]store, help-compensation[.]xyz, newsukraine10.yolasite[.]com, and euro24dopomoga0.yolasite[.]com, among others. The mali...

Gardeners know that worms are good. Cybersecurity professionals know that worms are  bad . Very bad. In fact, worms are literally the most devasting force for evil known to the computing world. The  MyDoom  worm holds the dubious position of most costly computer malware  ever  – responsible for some  $52 billion  in damage. In second place…  Sobig , another worm. It turns out, however, that there are exceptions to every rule. Some biological worms are actually  not welcome  in most gardens. And some cyber worms, it seems, can use their powers for good …  Meet Hopper, The Good Worm Detection tools are not good at  catching non-exploit-based propagation , which is what worms do best. Most cybersecurity solutions are less resilient to worm attack methods like token impersonation and others that take advantage of deficient internal configurations - PAM, segmentation, insecure credential storage, and more. So, what better way t...

Vulnerability coordination and bug bounty platform HackerOne on Friday disclosed that a former employee at the firm improperly accessed security reports submitted to it for personal gain. "The person anonymously disclosed this vulnerability information outside the HackerOne platform with the goal of claiming additional bounties," it  said . "In under 24 hours, we worked quickly to contain the incident by identifying the then-employee and cutting off access to data." The employee, who had access to HackerOne systems between April 4 and June 23, 2022, for triaging vulnerability disclosures associated with different customer programs, has since been terminated by the San Francisco-headquartered company as of June 30. Calling the incident as a "clear violation" of its values, culture, policies, and employment contracts, HackerOne said it was alerted to the breach on June 22 by an unnamed customer, which asked it to "investigate a suspicious vulnerabi...

Following heightened worries that U.S. users' data had been accessed by TikTok engineers in China between September 2021 and January 2022, the company sought to assuage U.S. lawmakers that it's taking steps to "strengthen data security." The admission that some China-based employees can access information from U.S. users came in a letter sent to nine senators, which further noted that the procedure requires the individuals to clear numerous internal security protocols. The contents of the letter, first  reported  by The New York Times, shares more details about TikTok's plans to address data security concerns through a multi-pronged initiative codenamed "Project Texas." "Employees outside the U.S., including China-based employees, can have access to TikTok U.S. user data subject to a series of robust cybersecurity controls and authorization approval protocols overseen by our U.S.-based security team," TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew wrote in the m...

Microsoft has detailed the evolving capabilities of toll fraud malware apps on Android, pointing out its "complex multi-step attack flow" and an improved mechanism to evade security analysis. Toll fraud belongs to a category of billing fraud wherein malicious mobile applications come with hidden subscription fees, roping in unsuspecting users to premium content without their knowledge or consent. It's also different from other  fleeceware threats  in that the malicious functions are only carried out when a compromised device is connected to one of its target network operators. "It also, by default, uses cellular connection for its activities and forces devices to connect to the mobile network even if a Wi-Fi connection is available," Dimitrios Valsamaras and Sang Shin Jung of the Microsoft 365 Defender Research Team  said  in an exhaustive analysis. "Once the connection to a target network is confirmed, it stealthily initiates a fraudulent subscription...

Google on Thursday announced a slew of improvements to its  password manager  service aimed at creating a more consistent look and feel across different platforms. Central to the changes is a "simplified and unified management experience that's the same in Chrome and Android settings," Ali Sarraf, Google Chrome product manager,  said  in a blog post. The updates are also expected to automatically group multiple passwords for the same sites as well as introduce an option to manually add passwords. Although Google appears to be not ready yet to make Password Manager as a standalone app, users on Android can now add a shortcut to it on the homescreen. In a related change on iOS, should users opt for Chrome as the  default autofill provider , Password Manager now comes with the ability to generate unique, strong passwords. The built-in Password Checkup feature on Android is receiving an upgrade of its own too. Beyond checking for hacked credentials, it can f...

A newly discovered malware has been put to use in the wild at least since March 2021 to backdoor Microsoft Exchange servers belonging to a wide range of entities worldwide, with infections lingering in 20 organizations as of June 2022. Dubbed  SessionManager , the malicious tool masquerades as a module for Internet Information Services ( IIS ), a web server software for Windows systems, after exploiting one of the ProxyLogon flaws within Exchange servers.  Targets included 24 distinct NGOs, government, military, and industrial organizations spanning Africa, South America, Asia, Europe, Russia and the Middle East. A total of 34 servers have been compromised by a SessionManager variant to date. This is far from the first time the technique has been  observed in real-world attacks . The use of a rogue IIS module as a means to distribute stealthy implants has its echoes in an Outlook credential stealer called  Owowa  that came to light in December 2021. "Dropp...

Fixing indirect vulnerabilities is one of those complex, tedious and, quite frankly, boring tasks that no one really wants to touch. No one except for  Debricked , it seems. Sure, there are lots of ways to do it manually, but can it be done automatically with minimal risk of breaking changes? The Debricked team decided to find out.  A forest full of fragile trees So, where do you even start? Firstly, there needs to be a way to fix the vulnerability, which, for indirect dependencies, is no walk in the park. Secondly, it needs to be done in a safe way, or, without anything breaking.  You see, indirect dependencies are introduced deep down the dependency tree and it's very tricky to get to the exact version you want. As Debricked's Head of R&D once put it, " You are turning the knobs by playing around with your direct dependencies and praying to Torvalds that the correct indirect packages are resolved. When Torvalds is in your favour, you have to sacrifice some clou...