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Unofficial patches have been issued to remediate an improperly patched Windows security vulnerability that could allow information disclosure and local privilege escalation (LPE) on vulnerable systems. Tracked as  CVE-2021-24084  (CVSS score: 5.5), the flaw concerns an information disclosure vulnerability in the Windows Mobile Device Management component that could enable an attacker to gain unauthorized file system access and read arbitrary files. Security researcher Abdelhamid Naceri was credited with discovering and reporting the bug in October 2020, prompting Microsoft to address the issue as part of its February 2021 Patch Tuesday updates. But as  observed  by Naceri in June 2021, not only could the patch be bypassed to achieve the same objective, the researcher this month found that the incompletely patched vulnerability could also be  exploited  to gain administrator privileges and run malicious code on Windows 10 machines running the  late...

Government, diplomatic entities, military organizations, law firms, and financial institutions primarily located in the Middle East have been targeted as part of a stealthy malware campaign as early as 2019 by making use of malicious Microsoft Excel and Word documents. Russian cybersecurity company Kaspersky attributed the attacks with high confidence to a threat actor named WIRTE, adding the intrusions involved "MS Excel droppers that use hidden spreadsheets and VBA macros to drop their first stage implant," which is a Visual Basic Script (VBS) with functionality to amass system information and execute arbitrary code sent by the attackers on the infected machine. An analysis of the campaign as well as the toolset and methods employed by the adversary has also led the researchers to conclude with low confidence that the  WIRTE group  has connections to another politically motivated collective called the  Gaza Cybergang . The affected entities are spread across Armenia,...

Four different Android banking trojans were spread via the official Google Play Store between August and November 2021, resulting in more than 300,000 infections through various dropper apps that posed as seemingly harmless utility apps to take full control of the infected devices. Designed to deliver Anatsa (aka TeaBot), Alien, ERMAC, and Hydra, cybersecurity firm ThreatFabric  said  the malware campaigns are not only more refined, but also engineered to have a small malicious footprint, effectively ensuring that the payloads are installed only on smartphones devices from specific regions and preventing the malware from being downloaded during the publishing process . Once installed, these banking trojans can surreptitiously siphon user passwords and SMS-based two-factor authentication codes, keystrokes, screenshots, and even deplete users' bank accounts without their knowledge by using a tool called Automatic Transfer System ( ATSs ). The apps have since been removed fro...

North Korean defectors, journalists who cover North Korea-related news, and entities in South Korea are being zeroed in on by a nation-state-sponsored advanced persistent threat (APT) as part of a new wave of highly-targeted surveillance attacks. Russian cybersecurity firm Kaspersky attributed the infiltrations to a North Korean hacker group tracked as  ScarCruft , also known as  APT37 , Reaper Group, InkySquid, and Ricochet Chollima. "The actor utilized three types of malware with similar functionalities: versions implemented in PowerShell, Windows executables and Android applications," the company's Global Research and Analysis Team (GReAT)  said  in a new report published today. "Although intended for different platforms, they share a similar command and control scheme based on HTTP communication. Therefore, the malware operators can control the whole malware family through one set of command and control scripts." Likely active since at least 2012, ScarC...

Threat actors are exploiting improperly-secured Google Cloud Platform (GCP) instances to download cryptocurrency mining software to the compromised systems as well as abusing its infrastructure to install ransomware, stage phishing campaigns, and even generate traffic to YouTube videos for view count manipulation. "While cloud customers continue to face a variety of threats across applications and infrastructure, many successful attacks are due to poor hygiene and a lack of basic control implementation," Google's Cybersecurity Action Team (CAT)  outlined  as part of its recent Threat Horizons report published last week. Of the 50 recently compromised GCP instances, 86% of them were used to conduct cryptocurrency mining, in some cases within 22 seconds of successful breach, while 10% of the instances were exploited to perform scans of other publicly accessible hosts on the Internet to identify vulnerable systems, and 8% of the instances were used to strike other entiti...