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A politically motivated hacker group tied to a series of espionage and sabotage attacks on Israeli entities in 2021 incorporated a previously undocumented remote access trojan (RAT) that masquerades as the Windows Calculator app as part of a conscious effort to stay under the radar. Cybersecurity company Cybereason, which has been tracking the operations of the Iranian actor known as Moses Staff, dubbed the malware " StrifeWater ." "The StrifeWater RAT appears to be used in the initial stage of the attack and this stealthy RAT has the ability to remove itself from the system to cover the Iranian group's tracks," Tom Fakterman, Cybereason security analyst,  said  in a report. "The RAT possesses other capabilities, such as command execution and screen capturing, as well as the ability to download additional extensions." Moses Staff came to light towards the end of last year when Check Point Research  unmasked  a series of attacks aimed at Israeli or...

A WordPress plugin with over one million installs has been found to contain a critical vulnerability that could result in the execution of arbitrary code on compromised websites. The plugin in question is  Essential Addons for Elementor , which provides WordPress site owners with a library of over 80 elements and extensions to help design and customize pages and posts. "This vulnerability allows any user, regardless of their authentication or authorization status, to perform a local file inclusion attack," Patchstack  said  in a report. "This attack can be used to include local files on the filesystem of the website, such as /etc/passwd. This can also be used to perform RCE by including a file with malicious PHP code that normally cannot be executed." That said, the vulnerability only exists if widgets like dynamic gallery and product gallery are used, which utilize the vulnerable function, resulting in local file inclusion – an attack technique in which a web ...

In a sign that threat actors continuously shift tactics and update their defensive measures, the operators of the SolarMarker information stealer and backdoor have been found leveraging stealthy Windows Registry tricks to establish long-term persistence on compromised systems. Cybersecurity firm Sophos, which spotted the new behavior, said that the remote access implants are still being detected on targeted networks despite the campaign witnessing a decline in November 2021. Boasting of information harvesting and backdoor capabilities, the .NET-based malware has been linked to at least three different attack waves in 2021. The first set,  reported in April , took advantage of search engine poisoning techniques to trick business professionals into visiting sketchy Google sites that installed SolarMarker on the victim's machines. Then in August, the malware was  observed  targeting healthcare and education sectors with the goal of gathering credentials and sensitive in...

An advanced persistent threat group with links to Iran has updated its malware toolset to include a novel PowerShell-based implant called PowerLess Backdoor , according to new research published by Cybereason. The Boston-headquartered cybersecurity company attributed the malware to a hacking group known as Charming Kitten (aka Phosphorous, APT35, or  TA453 ), while also calling out the backdoor's evasive PowerShell execution. "The PowerShell code runs in the context of a .NET application, thus not launching 'powershell.exe' which enables it to evade security products," Daniel Frank, senior malware researcher at Cybereason,  said . "The toolset analyzed includes extremely modular, multi-staged malware that decrypts and deploys additional payloads in several stages for the sake of both stealth and efficacy." The threat actor, which is active since at least 2017, has been behind a series of campaigns in recent years, including those wherein the adversa...

Cybersecurity researchers on Monday said they uncovered evidence of attempted attacks by a Russia-linked hacking operation targeting a Ukrainian entity in July 2021. Broadcom-owned Symantec, in a new report published Monday, attributed the attacks to an actor tracked as Gamaredon (aka Shuckworm or Armageddon), a cyber-espionage collective known to be active since at least 2013. In November 2021, Ukrainian intelligence agencies  branded  the group as a "special project" of Russia's Federal Security Service (FSB), in addition to pointing fingers at it for carrying out over 5,000 cyberattacks against public authorities and critical infrastructure located in the country. Gamaredon attacks typically originate with phishing emails that trick the recipients into installing a custom remote access trojan called Pterodo. Symantec disclosed that, between July 14, 2021 and August 18, 2021, the actor installed several variants of the backdoor as well as deployed additional scripts...