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The Computer Emergency Response Team of Ukraine (CERT-UA) has warned of a new phishing campaign orchestrated by the  Russia-linked APT28 group  to deploy previously undocumented malware such as OCEANMAP, MASEPIE, and STEELHOOK to harvest sensitive information. The activity, which was  detected  by the agency between December 15 and 25, 2023, targeted Ukrainian government entities and Polish organizations with email messages urging recipients to click on a link to view a document. However, to the contrary, the links redirect to malicious web resources that abuse JavaScript and the  "search-ms:" URI protocol handler  to drop a Windows shortcut file (LNK) that launches PowerShell commands to activate an infection chain for a new malware known as MASEPIE. MASEPIE is a Python-based tool to download/upload files and execute commands, with communications with the command-and-control (C2) server taking place over an encrypted channel using the TCP pr...

Nation-state actors affiliated to North Korea have been observed using spear-phishing attacks to deliver an assortment of backdoors and tools such as AppleSeed, Meterpreter, and TinyNuke to seize control of compromised machines. South Korea-based cybersecurity company AhnLab attributed the activity to an advanced persistent threat group known as  Kimsuky . “A notable point about attacks that use AppleSeed is that similar methods of attack have been used for many years with no significant changes to the malware that are used together,” the AhnLab Security Emergency Response Center (ASEC)  said  in an analysis published Thursday. Kimsuky , active for over a decade, is known for its targeting of a wide range of entities in South Korea, before expanding its focus to include other geographies in 2017. It was  sanctioned  by the U.S. government late last month for amassing intelligence to support North Korea’s strategic objectives. The threat actor’s espionage c...

Microsoft on Thursday said it’s once again disabling the  ms-appinstaller protocol handler  by default following its abuse by multiple threat actors to distribute malware. “The observed threat actor activity abuses the current implementation of the ms-appinstaller protocol handler as an access vector for malware that may lead to ransomware distribution,” the Microsoft Threat Intelligence team  said . It further noted that several cybercriminals are offering a malware kit for sale as a service that leverages the MSIX file format and ms-appinstaller protocol handler. The  changes  have gone into effect in App Installer version 1.21.3421.0 or higher. The attacks take the form of signed malicious MSIX application packages that are distributed via Microsoft Teams or malicious advertisements for legitimate popular software on search engines like Google. At least four different financially motivated hacking groups have been observed taking advantage of the App I...

Google Cloud has addressed a medium-severity security flaw in its platform that could be abused by an attacker who already has access to a Kubernetes cluster to escalate their privileges. "An attacker who has compromised the  Fluent Bit  logging container could combine that access with high privileges required by  Anthos Service Mesh  (on clusters that have enabled it) to escalate privileges in the cluster," the company  said  as part of an advisory released on December 14, 2023. Palo Alto Networks Unit 42, which discovered and reported the shortcoming, said adversaries could weaponize it to carry out "data theft, deploy malicious pods, and disrupt the cluster's operations." There is no evidence that the issue has been exploited in the wild. It has been addressed in the following versions of Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) and Anthos Service Mesh (ASM) - 1.25.16-gke.1020000 1.26.10-gke.1235000 1.27.7-gke.1293000 1.28.4-gke.1083000 1.17.8-asm.8 ...

The  Operation Triangulation  spyware attacks targeting Apple iOS devices leveraged never-before-seen exploits that made it possible to even bypass pivotal hardware-based security protections erected by the company. Russian cybersecurity firm Kaspersky, which  discovered  the  campaign  at the beginning of 2023 after becoming one of the targets,  described  it as the "most sophisticated attack chain" it has ever observed to date. The campaign is believed to have been active since 2019. Operation Triangulation gets its name from the use of a fingerprinting technique called canvas fingerprinting to draw a yellow triangle on a pink background with Web Graphics Library ( WebGL ) in the device’s memory. The exploitation activity involved the use of four zero-day flaws that were fashioned into a chain to obtain an unprecedented level of access and backdoor target devices running iOS versions up to iOS 16.2 with the ultimate goal of gathering ...