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In what's being described as an "unprecedented" twist, the operators of the TrickBot malware have resorted to systematically targeting Ukraine since the onset of the war in late February 2022. The group is believed to have orchestrated at least six phishing campaigns aimed at targets that align with Russian state interests, with the emails acting as lures for delivering malicious software such as IcedID, CobaltStrike, AnchorMail, and  Meterpreter . Tracked under the names ITG23,  Gold Blackburn , and Wizard Spider, the  financially motivated cybercrime gang  is known for its development of the TrickBot banking trojan and was  subsumed  into the now-discontinued  Conti ransomware cartel  earlier this year. But merely weeks later, the actors associated with the group resurfaced with a revamped version of the  AnchorDNS  backdoor called  AnchorMail  that uses SMTPS and IMAP protocols for command-and-control communications. "...

In a new joint cybersecurity advisory, U.S. cybersecurity and intelligence agencies have warned about the use of Maui ransomware by North Korean government-backed hackers to target the healthcare sector since at least May 2021. "North Korean state-sponsored cyber actors used Maui ransomware in these incidents to encrypt servers responsible for healthcare services—including electronic health records services, diagnostics services, imaging services, and intranet services," the authorities  noted . The  alert  comes courtesy of the U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), and the Department of the Treasury. Cybersecurity firm Stairwell, whose findings formed the basis of the advisory, said the lesser-known ransomware family stands out because of a lack of several key features commonly associated with ransomware-as-a-service (RaaS) groups. This includes the absence of "embedded ransom note to provide recov...

Researchers have disclosed what they say could be an attempt to kick-off a new large-scale cryptocurrency mining campaign targeting the NPM JavaScript package repository. The malicious activity, attributed to a software supply chain threat actor dubbed  CuteBoi , involves an array of 1,283 rogue modules that were published in an automated fashion from over 1,000 different user accounts. "This was done using automation which includes the ability to pass the NPM 2FA challenge," Israeli application security testing company Checkmarx  said . "This cluster of packages seems to be a part of an attacker experimenting at this point." All the released packages in question are said to harbor near-identical source code from an already existing package named eazyminer that's used to mine Monero by means of utilizing unused resources on web servers. One notable modification entails the URL to which the mined cryptocurrency should be sent, although installing the rogue ...

Apple on Wednesday announced it plans to introduce an enhanced security setting called  Lockdown Mode  in iOS 16, iPadOS 16, and macOS Ventura to safeguard high-risk users against "highly targeted cyberattacks." The "extreme, optional protection" feature, now available for preview in beta versions of its upcoming software, is designed to counter a surge in threats posed by private companies developing state-sponsored surveillanceware such as  Pegasus ,  DevilsTongue ,  Predator , and  Hermit . Lockdown Mode, when enabled, "hardens device defenses and strictly limits certain functionalities, sharply reducing the attack surface that potentially could be exploited by highly targeted mercenary spyware," Apple  said  in a statement. This includes blocking most message attachment types other than images and disabling link previews in Messages; rendering inoperative just-in-time ( JIT ) JavaScript compilation; removing support for shared albums in ...

Disclaimer: This article is meant to give insight into cyber threats as seen by the community of users of CrowdSec. What can tens of thousands of machines tell us about illegal hacker activities? Do you remember that scene in Batman - The Dark Knight, where Batman uses a system that aggregates active sound data from countless mobile phones to create a meta sonar feed of what is going on at any given place?  It is an interesting analogy with what we do at CrowdSec. By aggregating intrusion signals from our community, we can offer a clear picture of what is going on in terms of illegal hacking in the world. After 2 years of activity and analyzing 1 million intrusion signals daily from tens of thousands of users in 160 countries, we start having an accurate "Batman sonar" global feed of cyber threats. And there are some interesting takeaways to outline. A cyber threat with many faces  First of all, the global cyber threat is highly versatile. What do we see when looking at...

Cybersecurity researchers have taken the wraps off a new and entirely undetected Linux threat dubbed  OrBit , signally a growing trend of malware attacks geared towards the popular operating system. The malware gets its name from one of the filenames that's utilized to temporarily store the output of executed commands ("/tmp/.orbit"), according to cybersecurity firm Intezer. "It can be installed either with persistence capabilities or as a volatile implant," security researcher Nicole Fishbein  said . "The malware implements advanced evasion techniques and gains persistence on the machine by hooking key functions, provides the threat actors with remote access capabilities over SSH, harvests credentials, and logs TTY commands." OrBit is the fourth Linux malware to have come to light in a short span of three months after  BPFDoor ,  Symbiote , and  Syslogk . The malware also functions a lot like Symbiote in that it's designed to infect all of t...

Cisco on Wednesday rolled out patches for  10 security flaws  spanning multiple products, one of which is rated Critical in severity and could be weaponized to conduct absolute path traversal attacks. The issues, tracked as  CVE-2022-20812 and CVE-2022-20813 , affect Cisco Expressway Series and Cisco TelePresence Video Communication Server (VCS) and "could allow a remote attacker to overwrite arbitrary files or conduct null byte poisoning attacks on an affected device," the company  said  in an advisory. CVE-2022-20812 (CVSS score: 9.0), which concerns a case of arbitrary file overwrite in the cluster database API, requires the authenticated, remote attacker to have Administrator read-write privileges on the application so as to be able to mount path traversal attacks as a root user. "This vulnerability is due to insufficient input validation of user-supplied command arguments," the company said. "An attacker could exploit this vulnerability by authenticati...

The U.S. Department of Commerce's National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) has  chosen  the first set of quantum-resistant encryption algorithms that are designed to "withstand the assault of a future quantum computer." The post-quantum cryptography ( PQC ) technologies include the  CRYSTALS-Kyber  algorithm for general encryption, and  CRYSTALS-Dilithium ,  FALCON , and  SPHINCS+  for digital signatures. "Three of the selected algorithms are based on a family of math problems called structured lattices, while SPHINCS+ uses hash functions," NIST, which kicked off the standardization process in January 2017,  said  in a statement. Cryptography, which underpins the security of information in modern computer networks, derives its strength from the difficulty of solving mathematical problems — e.g., factoring large composite integers — using traditional computers. Quantum computers, should they mature enough, pose a  ...

The maintainers of the OpenSSL project have released patches to address a  high-severity bug  in the cryptographic library that could potentially lead to remote code execution under certain scenarios. The  issue , now assigned the identifier  CVE-2022-2274 , has been described as a case of heap memory corruption with RSA private key operation that was introduced in OpenSSL version 3.0.4 released on June 21, 2022. First released in 1998, OpenSSL is a general-purpose  cryptography library  that offers open-source implementation of the Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) and Transport Layer Security (TLS) protocols, enabling users to generate private keys, create certificate signing requests ( CSRs ), install SSL/TLS certificates. "SSL/TLS servers or other servers using 2048 bit RSA private keys running on machines supporting AVX512IFMA instructions of the X86_64 architecture are affected by this issue," the advisory  noted . Calling it a "serious bug in the...

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...