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The China-aligned Mustang Panda actor has been observed using a hitherto unseen custom backdoor called  MQsTTang  as part of an ongoing social engineering campaign that commenced in January 2023. "Unlike most of the group's malware, MQsTTang doesn't seem to be based on existing families or publicly available projects," ESET researcher Alexandre Côté Cyr  said  in a new report. Attack chains orchestrated by the group have stepped up targeting of European entities in the wake of  Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine  last year. The victimology of the current activity is unclear, but the Slovak cybersecurity company said the decoy filenames are in line with the group's previous campaigns that target European political organizations. That said, ESET also observed attacks against unknown entities in Bulgaria and Australia, as well as a governmental institution in Taiwan, indicating a broader focus on Europe and Asia. Mustang Panda has a  history ...

The U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) has  released  a new advisory about  Royal ransomware , which emerged in the threat landscape last year. "After gaining access to victims' networks, Royal actors disable antivirus software and exfiltrate large amounts of data before ultimately deploying the ransomware and encrypting the systems," CISA  said . The custom  ransomware program , which has targeted U.S. and international organizations since September 2022, is believed to have evolved from earlier iterations that were dubbed Zeon.  What's more, it's said to be  operated  by seasoned threat actors who used to be part of Conti Team One, cybersecurity company Trend Micro disclosed in December 2022. The ransomware group employs call back phishing as a means of delivering their ransomware to victims, a technique  widely adopted  by criminal groups that splintered from the Conti enterprise last year following its...

A sophisticated attack campaign dubbed  SCARLETEEL  is targeting containerized environments to perpetrate theft of proprietary data and software. "The attacker exploited a containerized workload and then leveraged it to perform privilege escalation into an AWS account in order to steal proprietary software and credentials," Sysdig  said  in a new report. The advanced cloud attack also entailed the deployment of crypto miner software, which the cybersecurity company said is either an attempt to generate illicit profits or a ploy to distract defenders and throw them off the trail. The initial infection vector banked on exploiting a vulnerable public-facing service in a self-managed Kubernetes cluster hosted on Amazon Web Services (AWS). Upon gaining a successful foothold, an XMRig crypto miner was launched and a bash script was used to obtain credentials that could be used to further burrow into the AWS cloud infrastructure and exfiltrate sensitive data. "Either...

Misconfigured Redis database servers are the target of a novel cryptojacking campaign that leverages a legitimate and open source command-line file transfer service to implement its attack. "Underpinning this campaign was the use of transfer[.]sh," Cado Security  said  in a report shared with The Hacker News. "It's possible that it's an attempt at evading detections based on other common code hosting domains (such as pastebin[.]com)." The cloud cybersecurity firm said the command line interactivity associated with transfer[.]sh has made it an ideal tool for hosting and delivering malicious payloads. The attack chain commences with targeting insecure Redis deployments, followed by registering a  cron job  that leads to arbitrary code execution when parsed by the scheduler. The job is designed to retrieve a payload hosted at transfer[.]sh. It's worth noting that  similar   attack mechanisms  have been employed by other threat actors like TeamTNT an...

As a primary working interface, the browser plays a significant role in today's corporate environment. The browser is constantly used by employees to access websites, SaaS applications and internal applications, from both managed and unmanaged devices. A new report published by LayerX, a browser security vendor, finds that attackers are exploiting this reality and are targeting it in increasing numbers ( download report here ). The key report findings  Over half of all the browsers in the enterprise environment are misconfigured.  While a configured browser is nearly impossible to compromise, stealing data from misconfigured browsers is like taking candy from a baby. The Leading misconfigurations are improper use of personal browser profiles on work devices (29%), poor patching routine (50%), and the use of corporate browser profiles on unmanaged devices. 3 of every 10 SaaS applications are non-corporate shadow SaaS,  and no SaaS discovery/security solution can addre...