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Ransomware is a kind of malware used by cybercriminals to stop users from accessing their systems or files; the cybercriminals then threaten to leak, destroy or withhold sensitive information unless a ransom is paid. Ransomware attacks can target either the data held on computer systems (known as locker ransomware) or devices (crypto-ransomware). In both instances, once a ransom is paid, threat actors typically provide victims with a decryption key or tool to unlock their data or device, though this is not guaranteed. Oliver Pinson-Roxburgh, CEO of  Defense.com , the all-in-one cybersecurity platform, shares knowledge and advice in this article on how ransomware works, how damaging it can be, and how your business can mitigate ransomware attacks from occurring. What does a ransomware attack comprise? There are three key elements to a ransomware attack: Access In order to deploy malware to encrypt files and gain control, cybercriminals need to initially gain access to an orga...

A threat actor associated with the LockBit 3.0 ransomware-as-a-service (RaaS) operation has been observed abusing the Windows Defender command-line tool to decrypt and load Cobalt Strike payloads.  According to a report published by SentinelOne last week, the incident occurred after obtaining initial access via the  Log4Shell vulnerability  against an unpatched VMware Horizon Server. "Once initial access had been achieved, the threat actors performed a series of enumeration commands and attempted to run multiple post-exploitation tools, including Meterpreter, PowerShell Empire, and a new way to side-load Cobalt Strike," researchers Julio Dantas, James Haughom, and Julien Reisdorffer  said . LockBit 3.0 (aka LockBit Black), which comes with the tagline "Make Ransomware Great Again!," is the  next iteration  of the prolific  LockBit RaaS family  that emerged in June 2022 to iron out  critical weaknesses  discovered in its predecessor...

Researchers have uncovered a list of 3,207 mobile apps that are exposing Twitter API keys in the clear, some of which can be utilized to gain unauthorized access to Twitter accounts associated with them. The takeover is made possible, thanks to a leak of legitimate Consumer Key and Consumer Secret information, respectively, Singapore-based cybersecurity firm CloudSEK said in a report exclusively shared with The Hacker News. "Out of 3,207, 230 apps are leaking all four authentication credentials and can be used to fully take over their Twitter Accounts and can perform any critical/sensitive actions," the researchers said.  This can range from reading direct messages to carrying out arbitrary actions such as retweeting, liking and deleting tweets, following any account, removing followers, accessing account settings, and even changing the account profile picture. Access to the Twitter API  requires  generating secret keys and access tokens, which act as the usernames...

A newly released report by cybersecurity firm CTM360 reveals a large-scale scam operation utilizing fake news websites—known as Baiting News Sites (BNS)—to deceive users into online investment fraud across 50 countries. These BNS pages are made to look like real news outlets: CNN, BBC, CNBC, or regional media. They publish fake stories that feature public figures, central banks, or financial brands, all claiming to back new ways to earn passive income. The goal? Build trust quickly and steer readers toward professional-looking scam platforms like Trap10, Solara Vynex, or Eclipse Earn. Scammers use sponsored ads on Google, Meta, and blog networks to push traffic to these sites. Ads often carry clickbait headlines—"You won't believe what a prominent public figure just revealed"—paired with official photos or national flags to make them feel legit. Clicking the ad directs users to a fake article, which then redirects them to a fraudulent trading platform. Many of these scams follow a...

Now more than ever, organizations need to enable their development teams to build and grow their security skills. Today organizations face a threat landscape where individuals, well-financed syndicates, and state actors are actively trying to exploit errors in software. Yet, according to recent global research, 67% of developers that were interviewed said they were still shipping code they knew contained vulnerabilities.  Helping your development teams progress to achieve security maturity is possible, and ultimately beneficial. It will help ensure secure software development at every stage of the software development lifecycle. But how can you help your development teams reach security maturity? We dug deep and leveraged insights from over 400 of our customers to identify traits and behaviors that occur when a development team increases its security maturity. Here we share two of them: #1: A deep understanding of your gaps Before creating any maturity program, we first need ...

A 24-year-old Australian national has been charged for his purported role in the creation and sale of spyware for use by domestic violence perpetrators and child sex offenders. Jacob Wayne John Keen, who currently resides at Frankston, Melbourne, is said to have created the remote access trojan (RAT) when he was 15, while also administering the tool from 2013 until its shutdown in 2019 as part of a coordinated Europol-led exercise. "The Frankston man engaged with a network of individuals and sold the spyware, named Imminent Monitor (IM), to more than 14,500 individuals across 128 countries," the Australian Federal Police (AFP)  alleged  in a press release over the weekend. The defendant has been slapped with six counts of committing a computer offense by developing and supplying the malware, in addition to profiting off its illegal sale. Another woman, aged 42, who lives in the same home as the accused and is identified as his mother by  The Guardian , has also be...

The operators of the Gootkit access-as-a-service ( AaaS ) malware have resurfaced with updated techniques to compromise unsuspecting victims. "In the past, Gootkit used freeware installers to mask malicious files; now it uses legal documents to trick users into downloading these files," Trend Micro researchers Buddy Tancio and Jed Valderama  said  in a write-up last week. The findings build on a previous report from eSentire, which  disclosed  in January of widespread attacks aimed at employees of accounting and law firms to deploy malware on infected systems. Gootkit is part of the proliferating underground ecosystem of access brokers, who are known to provide other malicious actors a pathway into corporate networks for a price, paving the way for actual damaging attacks such as ransomware. The loader utilizes malicious search engine results, a technique called  SEO poisoning , to lure unsuspecting users into visiting compromised websites hosting malware...

Image via Keeper Right Now, Get 50% Off Keeper, the Most Trusted Name in Password Management. In one way or another, almost every aspect of our lives is online, so it's no surprise that hackers target everything from email accounts to banks to smart home devices, looking for vulnerabilities to exploit. One of the easiest exploits is cracking a weak password. That's why using a strong, unique password for each individual account is so important. But creating and remembering strong, unique passwords for dozens of accounts is nearly impossible – unless you're using  a top-rated password manager like Keeper . The Problem With Weak Passwords Image via Keeper A strong password  should  be a minimum of 12 characters long, with uppercase and lowercase letters, numbers, and one or more special characters. More importantly, it shouldn't contain dictionary words or personal information like birthdays or names. But the average American has  100 passwords . Maybe that's why...

Microsoft on Friday disclosed a potential connection between the Raspberry Robin USB-based worm and an infamous Russian cybercrime group tracked as Evil Corp. The tech giant  said  it observed the  FakeUpdates  (aka SocGholish) malware being delivered via existing Raspberry Robin infections on July 26, 2022. Raspberry Robin, also called QNAP Worm, is  known  to spread from a compromised system via infected USB devices containing a malicious .LNK file to other devices in the target network. The campaign, which was first spotted by Red Canary in September 2021, has been elusive in that no later-stage activity has been documented nor has there been any concrete link tying it to a known threat actor or group. The disclosure, therefore, marks the first evidence of post-exploitation actions carried out by the threat actor upon leveraging the malware to gain initial access to a Windows machine. "The DEV-0206-associated FakeUpdates activity on affected ...

A threat actor operating with interests aligned with North Korea has been deploying a malicious extension on Chromium-based web browsers that's capable of stealing email content from Gmail and AOL. Cybersecurity firm Volexity attributed the malware to an activity cluster it calls  SharpTongue , which is said to share overlaps with an  adversarial collective  publicly referred to under the name  Kimsuky . SharpTongue has a history of singling out individuals working for organizations in the U.S., Europe, and South Korea who "work on topics involving North Korea, nuclear issues, weapons systems, and other matters of strategic interest to North Korea," researchers Paul Rascagneres and Thomas Lancaster  said . Kimsuky 's use of rogue extensions in attacks is not new. In 2018, the actor was seen utilizing a Chrome plugin as part of a campaign called  Stolen Pencil  to infect victims and steal browser cookies and passwords. But the latest espionag...

The U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) on Friday  added  the recently disclosed Atlassian security flaw to its Known Exploited Vulnerabilities Catalog, based on evidence of active exploitation. The vulnerability, tracked as  CVE-2022-26138 , concerns the use of hard-coded credentials when the Questions For Confluence app is enabled in Confluence Server and Data Center instances. "A remote unauthenticated attacker can use these credentials to log into Confluence and access all content accessible to users in the confluence-users group," CISA  notes  in its advisory. Depending on the page restrictions and the information a company has in Confluence, successful exploitation of the shortcoming could lead to the disclosure of sensitive information. Although the bug was addressed by the Australian software company last week in versions 2.7.38 and 3.0.5, it has since come under active exploitation , cybersecurity firm Rapid7 disclos...

A malicious campaign leveraged seemingly innocuous Android dropper apps on the Google Play Store to compromise users' devices with  banking   malware . These 17 dropper apps, collectively dubbed  DawDropper  by Trend Micro, masqueraded as productivity and utility apps such as document scanners, QR code readers, VPN services, and call recorders, among others. All these apps in question have been removed from the app marketplace. "DawDropper uses Firebase Realtime Database, a third-party cloud service, to evade detection and dynamically obtain a payload download address," the researchers  said . "It also hosts malicious payloads on GitHub." Droppers are apps designed to sneak past Google's Play Store security checks, following which they are used to download more potent and intrusive malware on a device, in this case,  Octo  (Coper),  Hydra ,  Ermac , and  TeaBot . Attack chains involved the DawDropper malware establishing connectio...

Details have been shared about a security vulnerability in Dahua's Open Network Video Interface Forum ( ONVIF ) standard implementation, which, when exploited, can lead to seizing control of IP cameras.  Tracked as CVE-2022-30563 (CVSS score: 7.4), the "vulnerability could be abused by attackers to compromise network cameras by sniffing a previous unencrypted ONVIF interaction and replaying the credentials in a new request towards the camera," Nozomi Networks  said  in a Thursday report. The issue, which was  addressed  in a patch released on June 28, 2022,  impacts  the following products - Dahua ASI7XXX: Versions prior to v1.000.0000009.0.R.220620 Dahua IPC-HDBW2XXX: Versions prior to v2.820.0000000.48.R.220614 Dahua IPC-HX2XXX: Versions prior to v2.820.0000000.48.R.220614 ONVIF governs the development and use of an open standard for how IP-based physical security products such as video surveillance cameras and access control systems can com...

The decentralized file system solution known as IPFS is becoming the new "hotbed" for hosting phishing sites, researchers have warned. Cybersecurity firm Trustwave SpiderLabs, which disclosed specifics of the spam campaigns, said it identified no less than 3,000 emails containing IPFS phishing URLs as an attack vector in the last three months. IPFS , short for InterPlanetary File System, is a peer-to-peer (P2P) network to store and share files and data using cryptographic hashes, instead of URLs or filenames, as is observed in a traditional client-server approach. Each hash forms the basis for a unique content identifier ( CID ). The idea is to create a resilient distributed file system that allows data to be stored across multiple computers. This would allow information to be accessed without having to rely on third parties such as cloud storage providers, effectively making it resistant to censorship. "Taking down phishing content stored on IPFS can be difficult ...

The rise of  DevOps culture  in enterprises has accelerated product delivery timelines. Automation undoubtedly has its advantages. However,  containerization and the rise of cloud software development  are exposing organizations to a sprawling new attack surface. Machine identities vastly outnumber human ones in enterprises these days. Indeed, the rise of machine identities is creating cybersecurity debt, and increasing security risks.  Let's take a look at three of the top security risks which machine identities create – and how you can combat them. Certificate renewal issues Machine identities are secured differently from human ones. While human IDs can be verified with login and password credentials, machine IDs use certificates and keys. A huge issue with these types of credentials is they have expiration dates.  Generally, certificates remain valid for two years, but the rapid pace of technological improvement has reduced some lifespans to 13 mon...

Spanish law enforcement officials have announced the arrest of two individuals in connection with a cyberattack on the country's radioactivity alert network (RAR), which took place between March and June 2021. The act of sabotage is said to have disabled more than one-third of the sensors that are maintained by the Directorate-General for Civil Protection and Emergencies ( DGPCE ) and used to monitor excessive radiation levels across the country. The reason for the attacks is unknown as yet. "The two detainees, former workers, attacked the computer system and caused the connection of the sensors to fail, reducing their detection capacity even in the environment of nuclear power plants," the Policía Nacional  said . The law enforcement probe, dubbed Operation GAMMA, commenced in June 2021 in the immediate aftermath of the attack perpetrated against the RAR network, which is a mesh of 800 gamma radiation detection sensors deployed in various parts of the country to de...

A week after Atlassian rolled out patches to contain a critical flaw in its Questions For Confluence app for Confluence Server and Confluence Data Center, the shortcoming has now come under active exploitation in the wild. The bug in question is  CVE-2022-26138 , which concerns the use of a hard-coded password in the app that could be exploited by a remote, unauthenticated attacker to gain unrestricted access to all pages in Confluence. The real-world exploitation follows the release of the hard-coded credentials on Twitter, prompting the Australian software company to prioritize patches to mitigate potential threats targeting the flaw. "Unsurprisingly, it didn't take long [...] to observe exploitation once the hard-coded credentials were released, given the high value of Confluence for attackers who often jump on Confluence vulnerabilities to execute ransomware attacks," Rapid7 security researcher Glenn Thorpe  said . It's worth noting that the bug only exists...

Google on Wednesday said it's once again delaying its plans to turn off third-party cookies in the Chrome web browser from late 2023 to the second half of 2024. "The most consistent feedback we've received is the need for more time to evaluate and test the new Privacy Sandbox technologies before deprecating third-party cookies in Chrome," Anthony Chavez, vice president of Privacy Sandbox,  said . In keeping this in mind, the internet and ad tech giant said it's taking a "deliberate approach" and  extending the testing window  for its ongoing Privacy Sandbox initiatives prior to phasing out third-party cookies. Cookies are pieces of data planted on a user's computer or other device by the web browser as a website is accessed, with third-party cookies fueling much of the digital advertising ecosystem and its ability to track users across different sites to show targeted ads. Privacy Sandbox is Google's umbrella term for a set of technologies ...

With Microsoft taking steps to block Excel 4.0 (XLM or XL4) and Visual Basic for Applications (VBA) macros by default across Office apps, malicious actors are responding by refining their tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs). "The use of VBA and XL4 Macros decreased approximately 66% from October 2021 through June 2022," Proofpoint  said  in a report shared with The Hacker News, calling it "one of the largest email threat landscape shifts in recent history." In its place, adversaries are increasingly pivoting away from macro-enabled documents to other alternatives, including container files such as ISO and RAR as well as Windows Shortcut (LNK) files in campaigns to distribute malware. "Threat actors pivoting away from directly distributing macro-based attachments in email represents a significant shift in the threat landscape," Sherrod DeGrippo, vice president of threat research and detection at Proofpoint, said in a statement. "Threat act...