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The Russian GRU-backed threat actor APT28 has been attributed as behind a series of campaigns targeting networks across Europe with the HeadLace malware and credential-harvesting web pages. APT28, also known by the names BlueDelta, Fancy Bear, Forest Blizzard, FROZENLAKE, Iron Twilight, ITG05, Pawn Storm, Sednit, Sofacy, and TA422, is an advanced persistent threat (APT) group affiliated with Russia's strategic military intelligence unit, the GRU. The hacking crew operates with a high level of stealth and sophistication, often demonstrating their adaptability through deep preparedness and custom tooling, and relying on legitimate internet services (LIS) and living off-the-land binaries (LOLBins) to conceal their operations within regular network traffic. "From April to December 2023, BlueDelta deployed Headlace malware in three distinct phases using geofencing techniques to target networks throughout Europe with a heavy focus on Ukraine," Recorded Future's Insikt ...

OpenAI on Thursday disclosed that it took steps to cut off five covert influence operations (IO) originating from China, Iran, Israel, and Russia that sought to abuse its artificial intelligence (AI) tools to manipulate public discourse or political outcomes online while obscuring their true identity. These activities, which were detected over the past three months, used its AI models to generate short comments and longer articles in a range of languages, cook up names and bios for social media accounts, conduct open-source research, debug simple code, and translate and proofread texts. The AI research organization said two of the networks were linked to actors in Russia, including a previously undocumented operation codenamed Bad Grammar that primarily used at least a dozen Telegram accounts to target audiences in Ukraine, Moldova, the Baltic States and the United States (U.S.) with sloppy content in Russian and English. "The network used our models and accounts on Telegram t...

The U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) on Thursday added a security flaw impacting the Linux kernel to the Known Exploited Vulnerabilities ( KEV ) catalog, citing evidence of active exploitation. Tracked as CVE-2024-1086 (CVSS score: 7.8), the high-severity issue relates to a use-after-free bug in the netfilter component that permits a local attacker to elevate privileges from a regular user to root and possibly execute arbitrary code. "Linux kernel contains a use-after-free vulnerability in the netfilter: nf_tables component that allows an attacker to achieve local privilege escalation," CISA said. Netfilter is a framework provided by the Linux kernel that allows the implementation of various network-related operations in the form of custom handlers to facilitate packet filtering, network address translation, and port translation. The vulnerability was addressed in January 2024. That said, the exact nature of the attacks exploiting the fla...

Cloudflare on Thursday said it took steps to disrupt a month-long phishing campaign orchestrated by a Russia-aligned threat actor called FlyingYeti targeting Ukraine. "The FlyingYeti campaign capitalized on anxiety over the potential loss of access to housing and utilities by enticing targets to open malicious files via debt-themed lures," Cloudflare's threat intelligence team Cloudforce One said in a new report published today. "If opened, the files would result in infection with the PowerShell malware known as COOKBOX, allowing FlyingYeti to support follow-on objectives, such as installation of additional payloads and control over the victim's system." FlyingYeti is the denomination used by the web infrastructure company to track an activity cluster that the Computer Emergency Response Team of Ukraine (CERT-UA) is tracking under the moniker UAC-0149. Previous attacks disclosed by the cybersecurity agency have involved the use of malicious attachme...

A previously undocumented cyber espionage-focused threat actor named LilacSquid has been linked to targeted attacks spanning various sectors in the United States (U.S.), Europe, and Asia as part of a data theft campaign since at least 2021. "The campaign is geared toward establishing long-term access to compromised victim organizations to enable LilacSquid to siphon data of interest to attacker-controlled servers," Cisco Talos researcher Asheer Malhotra said in a new technical report published today. Targets include information technology organizations building software for the research and industrial sectors in the U.S, energy companies in Europe, and the pharmaceutical sector in Asia, indicating a broad victimology footprint. Attack chains are known to exploit either publicly known vulnerabilities to breach internet-facing application servers or make use of compromised remote desktop protocol (RDP) credentials to deliver a mix of open-source tools and custom malware. ...