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A previously undocumented threat actor dubbed  SPIKEDWINE  has been observed targeting officials in European countries with Indian diplomatic missions using a new backdoor called WINELOADER . The adversary, according to a  report  from Zscaler ThreatLabz, used a PDF file in emails that purported to come from the Ambassador of India, inviting diplomatic staff to a wine-tasting event on February 2, 2024. The  PDF document  was uploaded to VirusTotal from Latvia on January 30, 2024. That said, there is evidence to suggest that this campaign may have been active at least since July 6, 2023, going by the discovery of  another similar PDF file  uploaded from the same country. "The attack is characterized by its very low volume and the advanced tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs) employed in the malware and command-and-control (C2) infrastructure," security researchers Sudeep Singh and Roy Tay said. Central to the novel attack is the PDF fi...

The notorious North Korean state-backed hacking group Lazarus uploaded four packages to the Python Package Index (PyPI) repository with the goal of infecting developer systems with malware. The packages, now taken down, are  pycryptoenv ,  pycryptoconf ,  quasarlib , and  swapmempool . They have been collectively downloaded 3,269 times, with pycryptoconf accounting for the most downloads at 1,351. "The package names pycryptoenv and pycryptoconf are similar to pycrypto, which is a Python package used for encryption algorithms in Python," JPCERT/CC researcher Shusei Tomonaga  said . "Therefore, the attacker probably prepared the malware-containing malicious packages to target users' typos in installing Python packages." The disclosure comes days after Phylum  uncovered  several rogue packages on the npm registry that have been used to single out software developers as part of a campaign codenamed Contagious Interview. An interesting commonality bet...

At least two different suspected China-linked cyber espionage clusters, tracked as  UNC5325  and  UNC3886 , have been attributed to the exploitation of security flaws in Ivanti Connect Secure VPN appliances. UNC5325 abused  CVE-2024-21893  to deliver a wide range of new malware called LITTLELAMB.WOOLTEA, PITSTOP, PITDOG, PITJET, and PITHOOK, as well as attempted to maintain persistent access to compromised appliances, Mandiant said. The Google-owned threat intelligence firm has assessed with moderate confidence that UNC5325 is associated with UNC3886 owing to source code overlaps in LITTLELAMB.WOOLTEA and PITHOOK with malware used by the latter. It's worth pointing out that  UNC3886  has a track record of leveraging zero-day flaws in Fortinet and VMware solutions to deploy a variety of implants like VIRTUALPITA, VIRTUALPIE, THINCRUST, and CASTLETAP. "UNC3886 has primarily targeted the defense industrial base, technology, and telecommunication orga...

U.S. President Joe Biden has  issued  an Executive Order that prohibits the mass transfer of citizens' personal data to countries of concern. The Executive Order also "provides safeguards around other activities that can give those countries access to Americans' sensitive data," the White House said in a statement. This includes sensitive information such as genomic data, biometric data, personal health data, geolocation data, financial data, and certain kinds of personally identifiable information (PII). The U.S. government said threat actors could weaponize this information to track their citizens and pass that information to  data brokers  and foreign intelligence services, which can then be used for intrusive surveillance, scams, blackmail, and other violations of privacy. "Commercial data brokers and other companies can sell this data to countries of concern, or entities controlled by those countries, and it can land in the hands of foreign intelligenc...

An Iran-nexus threat actor known as  UNC1549  has been attributed with medium confidence to a new set of attacks targeting aerospace, aviation, and defense industries in the Middle East, including Israel and the U.A.E. Other targets of the cyber espionage activity likely include Turkey, India, and Albania, Google-owned Mandiant said in a new analysis. UNC1549 is said to overlap with  Smoke Sandstorm  (previously Bohrium) and  Crimson Sandstorm  (previously Curium), the latter of which is an Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) affiliated group also known as Imperial Kitten, TA456, Tortoiseshell, and Yellow Liderc. "This suspected UNC1549 activity has been active since at least June 2022 and is still ongoing as of February 2024," the company  said . "While regional in nature and focused mostly in the Middle East, the targeting includes entities operating worldwide." The attacks entail the use of Microsoft Azure cloud infrastructure for command...

The U.S. government is warning about the resurgence of BlackCat (aka ALPHV) ransomware attacks targeting the healthcare sector as recently as this month. "Since mid-December 2023, of the nearly 70 leaked victims, the healthcare sector has been the most commonly victimized," the government  said  in an updated advisory. "This is likely in response to the ALPHV/BlackCat administrator's post encouraging its affiliates to target hospitals after operational action against the group and its infrastructure in early December 2023." The alert comes courtesy of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), and the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS). The BlackCat ransomware operation suffered a major blow late last year after a coordinated law enforcement operation led to the  seizure of its dark leak sites . But the takedown turned out to be a failure after the group managed to regain control of the...

In today's digital era, data privacy isn't just a concern; it's a consumer demand. Businesses are grappling with the dual challenge of leveraging customer data for personalized experiences while navigating a maze of privacy regulations. The answer? A privacy-compliant Customer Data Platform (CDP). Join us for a transformative webinar where we unveil Twilio Segment's state-of-the-art CDP. Discover how it champions compliant and consented data use, empowering you to craft a holistic customer view and revolutionize engagement strategies. What Will You Learn? Strategies for ethically democratizing data across your organization. The power of first-party data in unlocking profound customer insights. The pivotal role of a CDP in fostering compliant and consented data utilization. Proven customer engagement methodologies from industry leaders. Why Should You Attend? Twilio Segment's State of Personalization Report reveals a compelling truth: 63% of consumers wel...

Traditional perimeter-based security has become costly and ineffective. As a result, communications security between people, systems, and networks is more important than blocking access with firewalls.  On top of that, most cybersecurity risks are caused by just a few superusers – typically one out of 200 users.  There's a company aiming to fix the gap between traditional PAM and IdM solutions and secure your one out of 200 users –  SSH Communications Security.   Your Privileged Access Management (PAM) and Identity Management (IdM) should work hand in hand to secure your users' access and identities – regular users and privileged users alike. But traditional solutions struggle to achieve that.  Microsoft Entra manages all identities and basic-level access. With increasing criticality of targets and data, the session duration decreases, and additional protection is necessary. That's where SSH Communications Security helps Let's look at what organizations need...

Mexican users have been targeted with tax-themed phishing lures at least since November 2023 to distribute a previously undocumented Windows malware called  TimbreStealer . Cisco Talos, which  discovered  the activity, described the authors as skilled and that the "threat actor has previously used similar tactics, techniques and procedures (TTPs) to distribute a banking trojan known as  Mispadu  in September 2023. Besides employing sophisticated obfuscation techniques to sidestep detection and ensure persistence, the phishing campaign makes use of geofencing to single out users in Mexico, returning an innocuous blank PDF file instead of the malicious one if the payload sites are contacted from other locations. Some of the notable evasive maneuvers include leveraging custom loaders and direct system calls to bypass conventional API monitoring, in addition to utilizing Heaven's Gate to execute 64-bit code within a 32-bit process, an approach that was also rece...

In a new joint advisory, cybersecurity and intelligence agencies from the U.S. and other countries are urging users of Ubiquiti EdgeRouter to take protective measures, weeks after a botnet comprising infected routers was  felled by law enforcement  as part of an operation codenamed Dying Ember. The botnet, named MooBot, is said to have been used by a Russia-linked threat actor known as APT28 to facilitate covert cyber operations and drop custom malware for follow-on exploitation. APT28, affiliated with Russia's Main Directorate of the General Staff (GRU), is known to be active since at least 2007. APT28 actors have "used compromised EdgeRouters globally to harvest credentials, collect NTLMv2 digests, proxy network traffic, and host spear-phishing landing pages and custom tools," the authorities  said  [PDF]. The adversary's use of EdgeRouters dates back to 2022, with the attacks targeting aerospace and defense, education, energy and utilities, governments, hospit...

A security vulnerability has been disclosed in the LiteSpeed Cache plugin for WordPress that could enable unauthenticated users to escalate their privileges. Tracked as  CVE-2023-40000 , the vulnerability was addressed in October 2023 in version 5.7.0.1. "This plugin suffers from unauthenticated site-wide stored [cross-site scripting] vulnerability and could allow any unauthenticated user from stealing sensitive information to, in this case, privilege escalation on the WordPress site by performing a single HTTP request," Patchstack researcher Rafie Muhammad  said . LiteSpeed Cache , which is used to improve site performance, has more than five million installations. The latest version of the plugin is 6.1, which was released on February 5, 2024. The WordPress security company said CVE-2023-40000 is the result of a lack of user input sanitization and  escaping output . The vulnerability is rooted in a function named update_cdn_status() and can be reproduced in a defa...

An "intricately designed" remote access trojan (RAT) called  Xeno RAT  has been made available on GitHub, making it easily accessible to other actors at no extra cost. Written in C# and compatible with Windows 10 and Windows 11 operating systems, the open-source RAT comes with a "comprehensive set of features for remote system management," according to its developer, who goes by the name moom825. It includes a SOCKS5 reverse proxy and the ability to record real-time audio, as well as incorporate a hidden virtual network computing ( hVNC ) module along the lines of  DarkVNC , which allows attackers to gain remote access to an infected computer. "Xeno RAT is developed entirely from scratch, ensuring a unique and tailored approach to remote access tools," the developer  states  in the project description. Another notable aspect is that it has a builder that enables the creation of bespoke variants of the malware.  It's worth noting that moom825 is a...

Processing alerts quickly and efficiently is the cornerstone of a Security Operations Center (SOC) professional's role. Threat intelligence platforms can significantly enhance their ability to do so. Let's find out what these platforms are and how they can empower analysts. The Challenge: Alert Overload The modern SOC faces a relentless barrage of security alerts generated by SIEMs and EDRs. Sifting through these alerts is both time-consuming and resource-intensive. Analyzing a potential threat often requires searching across multiple sources before finding conclusive evidence to verify if it poses a real risk. This process is further hampered by the frustration of spending valuable time researching artifacts that ultimately turn out to be false positives. As a result, a significant portion of these events remain uninvestigated. This highlights a critical challenge: finding necessary information related to different indicators quickly and accurately. Threat data platforms o...

Cybersecurity and intelligence agencies from the Five Eyes nations have released a joint advisory detailing the evolving tactics of the Russian state-sponsored threat actor known as  APT29 . The hacking outfit, also known as BlueBravo, Cloaked Ursa, Cozy Bear, Midnight Blizzard (formerly Nobelium), and The Dukes, is assessed to be affiliated with the Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR) of the Russian Federation. Previously attributed to the  supply chain compromise  of SolarWinds software, the cyber espionage group  attracted attention  in recent months for targeting Microsoft, Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE), and other organizations with an aim to further their strategic objectives. "As organizations continue to modernize their systems and move to cloud-based infrastructure, the SVR has adapted to these changes in the operating environment," according to the  security bulletin . These include - Obtaining access to cloud infrastructure via service a...

Cybersecurity researchers have found that it's possible to compromise the Hugging Face Safetensors conversion service to ultimately hijack the models submitted by users and result in supply chain attacks. "It's possible to send malicious pull requests with attacker-controlled data from the Hugging Face service to any repository on the platform, as well as hijack any models that are submitted through the conversion service," HiddenLayer  said  in a report published last week. This, in turn, can be accomplished using a hijacked model that's meant to be converted by the service, thereby allowing malicious actors to request changes to any repository on the platform by masquerading as the conversion bot. Hugging Face is a popular collaboration platform that helps users host pre-trained machine learning models and datasets, as well as build, deploy, and train them. Safetensors is a  format  devised by the company to store  tensors  keeping security in mind, ...

A critical security flaw has been disclosed in a popular WordPress plugin called  Ultimate Member  that has more than 200,000 active installations. The vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2024-1071, carries a CVSS score of 9.8 out of a maximum of 10. Security researcher Christiaan Swiers has been credited with discovering and reporting the flaw. In an advisory published last week, WordPress security company Wordfence  said  the plugin is "vulnerable to SQL Injection via the 'sorting' parameter in versions 2.1.3 to 2.8.2 due to insufficient escaping on the user supplied parameter and lack of sufficient preparation on the existing SQL query." As a result, unauthenticated attackers could take advantage of the flaw to append additional SQL queries into already existing queries and extract sensitive data from the database. It's worth noting that the issue only affects users who have checked the "Enable custom table for usermeta" option in the plugin settings. ...

Ukrainian entities based in Finland have been targeted as part of a malicious campaign distributing a commercial remote access trojan known as Remcos RAT using a malware loader called IDAT Loader. The attack has been attributed to a threat actor tracked by the Computer Emergency Response Team of Ukraine (CERT-UA) under the moniker UAC-0184. "The attack, as part of the IDAT Loader, used steganography as a technique," Morphisec researcher Michael Dereviashkin said in a report shared with The Hacker News. "While steganographic, or 'Stego' techniques are well-known, it is important to understand their roles in defense evasion, to better understand how to defend against such tactics." IDAT Loader , which overlaps with another loader family called Hijack Loader, has been used to serve additional payloads like DanaBot, SystemBC, and RedLine Stealer in recent months. It has also been used by a threat actor tracked as TA544 to distribute Remcos RAT and SystemBC...