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The Lazarus Group threat actor has been observed leveraging fake cryptocurrency apps as a lure to deliver a previously undocumented version of the AppleJeus malware, according to new findings from Volexity. "This activity notably involves a campaign likely targeting cryptocurrency users and organizations with a variant of the AppleJeus malware by way of malicious Microsoft Office documents," researchers Callum Roxan, Paul Rascagneres, and Robert Jan Mora  said . The North Korean government is known to adopt a three-pronged approach by employing malicious cyber activity that's orchestrated to collect intelligence, conduct attacks, and generate illicit revenue for the sanctions hit nation. The threats are collectively tracked under the name  Lazarus Group  (aka Hidden Cobra or  Zinc ). "North Korea has conducted cyber theft against financial institutions and cryptocurrency exchanges worldwide, potentially stealing hundreds of millions of dollars, probably to fund ...

The maintainers of the FreeBSD operating system have released updates to remediate a security vulnerability impacting the ping module that could be potentially exploited to crash the program or trigger remote code execution. The issue, assigned the identifier  CVE-2022-23093 , impacts all supported versions of FreeBSD and concerns a  stack-based buffer overflow  vulnerability in the  ping service . "ping reads raw IP packets from the network to process responses in the pr_pack() function," according to an  advisory  published last week. "The pr_pack() copies received IP and  ICMP  headers into stack buffers for further processing. In so doing, it fails to take into account the possible presence of IP option headers following the IP header in either the response or the quoted packet." As a consequence, the destination buffer could be overflowed by up to 40 bytes when the IP option headers are present. The FreeBSD Project noted that the ping ...

Search giant Google on Friday released an out-of-band security update to fix a new actively exploited zero-day flaw in its Chrome web browser. The high-severity flaw, tracked as  CVE-2022-4262 , concerns a type confusion bug in the V8 JavaScript engine. Clement Lecigne of Google's Threat Analysis Group (TAG) has been credited with reporting the issue on November 29, 2022. Type confusion vulnerabilities could be weaponized by threat actors to perform out-of-bounds memory access, or lead to a crash and arbitrary code execution. According to the NIST's National Vulnerability Database, the flaw  permits  a "remote attacker to potentially exploit heap corruption via a crafted HTML page." Google acknowledged active exploitation of the vulnerability but stopped short of sharing additional specifics to prevent further abuse. CVE-2022-4262 is the fourth actively exploited type confusion flaw in Chrome that Google has addressed since the start of the year. It's also ...

Platform certificates used by Android smartphone vendors like Samsung, LG, and MediaTek have been found to be abused to sign malicious apps. The findings were first  discovered and reported  by Google reverse engineer Łukasz Siewierski on Thursday. "A platform certificate is the application signing certificate used to sign the 'android' application on the system image," a report filed through the Android Partner Vulnerability Initiative ( AVPI )  reads . "The 'android' application runs with a highly privileged user id – android.uid.system – and holds system permissions, including permissions to access user data." This effectively means that a rogue application signed with the same certificate can gain the highest level of privileges as the Android operating system, permitting it to harvest all kinds of sensitive information from a compromised device. The list of malicious Android app packages that have abused the certificates is below - com....

The U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) this week released an Industrial Control Systems (ICS) advisory warning of multiple vulnerabilities in Mitsubishi Electric GX Works3 engineering software. "Successful exploitation of these vulnerabilities could allow unauthorized users to gain access to the MELSEC iQ-R/F/L series CPU modules and the MELSEC iQ-R series OPC UA server module or to view and execute programs," the agency  said . GX Works3  is an  engineering workstation  software used in ICS environments, acting as a mechanism for uploading and downloading programs from/to the controller, troubleshooting software and hardware issues, and performing maintenance operations. The wide range of functions also makes the platform an attractive target for threat actors looking to compromise such systems to commandeer the  managed PLCs . Three of the 10 shortcomings relate to cleartext storage of sensitive data, four relate to the use of a...

Old technology solutions – every organization has a few of them tucked away somewhere.  It could be an old and unsupported storage system or a tape library holding the still-functional backups from over 10 years ago.  This is a common scenario with software too. For example, consider an accounting software suite that was extremely expensive when it was purchased. If the vendor eventually went under, then there's no longer any support for the software – which means that the accounting solution only works on some older operating system that isn't supplied with updates either. How valuable is it to  keep older solutions like this running ? Well, organizations don't enjoy running old legacy systems just for the pleasure of it, but they're often forced to keep them running because it's their only option, or at least the only cost-effective option available to them. If it works, it works…? From a purely functional perspective, there is usually no problem with old te...

IBM has fixed a high-severity security vulnerability affecting its Cloud Databases (ICD) for PostgreSQL product that could be potentially exploited to tamper with internal repositories and run unauthorized code. The privilege escalation flaw (CVSS score: 8.8), dubbed " Hell's Keychain " by cloud security firm Wiz, has been described as a "first-of-its-kind supply-chain attack vector impacting a cloud provider's infrastructure." Successful exploitation of the bug could enable a malicious actor to remotely execute code in customers' environments and even read or modify data stored in the PostgreSQL database. "The vulnerability consists of a chain of three exposed secrets (Kubernetes service account token, private container registry password, CI/CD server credentials) coupled with overly permissive network access to internal build servers," Wiz researchers Ronen Shustin and Shir Tamari  said . Hell's Keychain commences with an SQL inject...

A previously undocumented Go-based malware is targeting Redis servers with the goal of taking control of the infected systems and likely building a botnet network. The attacks involve taking advantage of a critical security vulnerability in the open source, in-memory, key-value store that was disclosed earlier this year to deploy  Redigo , according to cloud security firm  Aqua . Tracked as CVE-2022-0543 (CVSS score: 10.0), the weakness pertains to a case of sandbox escape in the Lua scripting engine that could be leveraged to attain remote code execution. This is not the first time the flaw has come under active exploitation, what with Juniper Threat Labs uncovering attacks perpetrated by the  Muhstik botnet  in March 2022 to execute arbitrary commands. The Redigo infection chain is similar in that the adversaries scan for exposed Redis servers on port 6379 to establish initial access, following it up by downloading a shared library "exp_lin.so" from a remote...

The new  Cyber Incident Reporting for Critical Infrastructure Act of 2022 (CIRCIA)  requires CISA to create rules regarding cyber incident reporting by critical infrastructure organizations. The RFI and hearings precede a Notice of Proposed Rulemaking (NPRM) that CISA must publish sooner than  24 months  from the enactment of CIRCIA, which the President signed into law  in March . The sessions and NPRM are steps toward creating the new rule.  CISA is  soliciting expert opinion on what to include  in a report but is taking steps to implement the change soon. Here's what that change means for businesses in the US and what you can do about it now.  Overview of the CISA reporting rule  Owners and operators of critical infrastructure must file cyber incident reports with CISA  within 72 hours . They must report ransom payments for ransomware attacks  within 24 hours . Other businesses can take part voluntarily.  The CISA D...

Multiple unpatched vulnerabilities have been discovered in three Android apps that allow a smartphone to be used as a remote keyboard and mouse. The apps in question are Lazy Mouse , PC Keyboard , and Telepad , which have been cumulatively downloaded over two million times from the Google Play Store. Telepad is no longer available through the app marketplace but can be downloaded from its website. Lazy Mouse (com.ahmedaay.lazymouse2 and com.ahmedaay.lazymousepro) PC Keyboard (com.beapps.pckeyboard) Telepad (com.pinchtools.telepad) While these apps function by connecting to a server on a desktop and transmitting to it the mouse and keyboard events, the Synopsys Cybersecurity Research Center (CyRC)  found  as many as seven flaws related to weak or missing authentication, missing authorization, and insecure communication. The issues (from CVE-2022-45477 through CVE-2022-45483), in a nutshell, could be exploited by a malicious actor to execute arbitrary command...

The threat actors behind Cuba (aka COLDDRAW) ransomware have received more than $60 million in ransom payments and compromised over 100 entities across the world as of August 2022. In a new advisory shared by the U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), the agencies  highlighted  a "sharp increase in both the number of compromised U.S. entities and the ransom amounts." The ransomware crew, also known as  Tropical Scorpius , has been observed targeting financial services, government facilities, healthcare, critical manufacturing, and IT sectors, while simultaneously expanding its tactics to gain initial access and interact with breached networks. It's worth noting that despite the name "Cuba," there is no evidence to suggest that the actors have any connection or affiliation with the island country. The entry point for the attacks involves the exploitation of known security flaws, phishing, ...

A Barcelona-based surveillanceware vendor named Variston IT is said to have surreptitiously planted spyware on targeted devices by exploiting several zero-day flaws in Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, and Windows, some of which date back to December 2018. "Their Heliconia framework exploits n-day vulnerabilities in Chrome, Firefox, and Microsoft Defender, and provides all the tools necessary to deploy a payload to a target device," Google Threat Analysis Group (TAG) researchers Clement Lecigne and Benoit Sevens  said  in a write-up. Variston, which has a  bare-bones website , claims to "offer tailor made Information Security Solutions to our customers," "design custom security patches for any kind of proprietary system," and support the "the discovery of digital information by [law enforcement agencies]," among other services. The vulnerabilities, which have been patched by Google, Microsoft, and Mozilla in 2021 and early 2022, are believed to...

Medibank on Thursday confirmed that the threat actors behind the  devastating cyber attack  have posted another dump of data stolen from its systems on the dark web after its refusal to pay a ransom. "We are in the process of analyzing the data, but the data released appears to be the data we believed the criminal stole," the Australian health insurer  said . "While our investigation continues there are currently no signs that financial or banking data has been taken. And the personal data stolen, in itself, is not sufficient to enable identity and financial fraud. The raw data we have analyzed today so far is incomplete and hard to understand." The leak comes almost a month after the company acknowledged that personal data belonging to  around 9.7 million  of its current and former customers were accessed following a ransomware incident in October 2022. This includes 5.1 million Medibank customers, 2.8 million ahm customers, and 1.8 million international ...

A critical security vulnerability has been disclosed in the Quarkus Java framework that could be potentially exploited to achieve remote code execution on affected systems. Tracked as  CVE-2022-4116  (CVSS score: 9.8), the shortcoming could be trivially abused by a malicious actor without any privileges. "The vulnerability is found in the Dev UI Config Editor, which is vulnerable to drive-by localhost attacks that could lead to remote-code execution (RCE)," Contrast Security researcher Joseph Beeton, who reported the bug,  said  in a write-up. Quarkus, developed by Red Hat, is an  open source project  that's used for creating Java applications in  containerized  and serverless environments. It's worth pointing out that the  issue  only impacts developers who are running Quarkus and are tricked into visiting a specially crafted website, which is embedded with malicious JavaScript code designed to install or execute arbitrary payload...

Today's threat landscape is constantly evolving, and now more than ever, organizations and businesses in every sector have a critical need to consistently produce and maintain secure software. While some verticals - like the finance industry, for example - have been subject to regulatory and compliance requirements for some time, we are seeing a steady increase in attention on cybersecurity best practices at the highest levels of government, with the US, UK, and Australia all shining very recent light on the need for secure development at every stage of the SDLC.  Despite this, attackers are constantly finding new ways to bypass even the most advanced protections and defenses. For example, many have shifted their focus from delivering malware to instead compromising APIs, or launching targeted attacks  against a supply chain . And while those high-level incidents are happening with much greater frequency, so too are the more simplistic exploits like cross-site scripting and ...

More than 300,000 users across 71 countries have been victimized by a new Android threat campaign called the  Schoolyard Bully Trojan . Mainly designed to steal Facebook credentials, the malware is camouflaged as legitimate education-themed applications to lure unsuspecting users into downloading them. The apps, which were available for download from the official Google Play Store, have now been taken down. That said, they still continue to be available on third-party app stores. "This trojan uses JavaScript injection to steal the Facebook credentials," Zimperium researchers Nipun Gupta and Aazim Bill SE Yaswant said in a report shared with The Hacker News. It achieves this by launching Facebook's login page in a WebView, which also embeds within it malicious JavasCript code to exfiltrate the user's phone number, email address, and password to a configured command-and-control (C2) server. The Schoolyard Bully Trojan further makes use of native libraries such ...

An ongoing analysis into an up-and-coming cryptocurrency mining botnet known as KmsdBot has led to it being accidentally taken down by the threat actors themselves. KmsdBot, as christened by the Akamai Security Intelligence Response Team (SIRT), came to light mid-November 2022 for its ability to  brute-force systems  with weak SSH credentials. The botnet strikes both Windows and Linux devices spanning a wide range of microarchitectures with the primary goal of deploying mining software and corralling the compromised hosts into a DDoS bot. Some of the major targets included gaming firms, technology companies, and luxury car manufacturers. Akamai researcher Larry W. Cashdollar, in a new update, explained how commands sent by the malware operators to carry out a DDoS attack against the bitcoin[.]com website inadvertently neutralized the malware. "Interestingly, after one single improperly formatted command, the bot stopped sending commands," Cashdollar  said . "It...

Popular password management service LastPass said it's investigating a second security incident that involved attackers accessing some of its customer information. "We recently detected unusual activity within a third-party cloud storage service, which is currently shared by both LastPass and its affiliate, GoTo," LastPass CEO Karim Toubba  said . GoTo, formerly called LogMeIn, acquired LastPass in October 2015. In December 2021, the Boston-based firm  announced  plans to spin off LastPass as an independent company. The digital break-in resulted in the unauthorized third-party leveraging information obtained following a previous breach in August 2022 to access "certain elements of our customers' information." The August 2022 security event  targeted  its development environment, leading to the theft of some of its source code and technical information. In September, LastPass  revealed  the threat actor had access for four days. The scope of the ...

The North Korea-linked  ScarCruft  group has been attributed to a previously undocumented backdoor called Dolphin that the threat actor has used against targets located in its southern counterpart. "The backdoor [...] has a wide range of spying capabilities, including monitoring drives and portable devices and exfiltrating files of interest, keylogging and taking screenshots, and stealing credentials from browsers," ESET researcher Filip Jurčacko  said  in a new report published today. Dolphin is said to be selectively deployed, with the malware using cloud services like Google Drive for data exfiltration as well as command-and-control. The Slovak cybersecurity company said it found the implant deployed as a final-stage payload as part of a watering hole attack in early 2021 directed against a South Korean digital newspaper. The campaign, first uncovered by  Kaspersky  and  Volexity  last year,  entailed  the weaponization of two ...

New findings from cybersecurity firm JFrog show that malware targeting the npm ecosystem can evade security checks by taking advantage of an "unexpected behavior" in the npm command line interface (CLI) tool. npm CLI's  install  and  audit   commands  have built-in capabilities to check a package and all of its dependencies for known vulnerabilities, effectively acting as a warning mechanism for developers by highlighting the flaws. But as JFrog established, the security advisories are not displayed when the packages follow certain version formats, creating a scenario where critical flaws could be introduced into their systems either directly or via the package's dependencies. Specifically, the problem arises only when the installed package version contains a hyphen (e.g., 1.2.3-a), which is included to denote a  pre-release version  of an npm module. While the project maintainers treat the discrepancy between regular npm package versions and pre...