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Russian organizations have been targeted by a cybercrime gang called ExCobalt using a previously unknown Golang-based backdoor known as GoRed. "ExCobalt focuses on cyber espionage and includes several members active since at least 2016 and presumably once part of the notorious Cobalt Gang ," Positive Technologies researchers Vladislav Lunin and Alexander Badayev said in a technical report published this week. "Cobalt attacked financial institutions to steal funds. One of Cobalt's hallmarks was the use of the CobInt tool , something ExCobalt began to use in 2022." Attacks mounted by the threat actor have singled out various sectors in Russia over the past year, including government, information technology, metallurgy, mining, software development, and telecommunications. Initial access to environments is facilitated by taking advantage of a previously compromised contractor and a supply chain attack, wherein the adversary infected a component used to bu...

A new campaign is tricking users searching for the Meta Quest (formerly Oculus) application for Windows into downloading a new adware family called AdsExhaust. "The adware is capable of exfiltrating screenshots from infected devices and interacting with browsers using simulated keystrokes," cybersecurity firm eSentire said in an analysis, adding it identified the activity earlier this month. "These functionalities allow it to automatically click through advertisements or redirect the browser to specific URLs, generating revenue for the adware operators." The initial infection chain involves surfacing the bogus website ("oculus-app[.]com") on Google search results pages using search engine optimization (SEO) poisoning techniques, prompting unsuspecting site visitors to download a ZIP archive ("oculus-app.EXE.zip") containing a Windows batch script. The batch script is designed to fetch a second batch script from a command-and-control (C2) se...

The U.S. Department of the Treasury's Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) imposed sanctions against a dozen individuals serving executive and senior leadership roles at Kaspersky Lab, a day after the Russian company was banned by the Commerce Department. The move "underscores our commitment to ensure the integrity of our cyber domain and to protect our citizens against malicious cyber threats," Under Secretary of the Treasury for Terrorism and Financial Intelligence, Brian E. Nelson, said. "The United States will take action where necessary to hold accountable those who would seek to facilitate or otherwise enable these activities." The sanctions, however, do not extend to Kaspersky Lab, its parent or subsidiary companies, nor the company's founder and chief executive officer (CEO), Eugene Kaspersky, OFAC noted. The 12 C-suite and senior-level executives sanctioned are listed below - Andrei Gennadyevich Tikhonov, Chief Operating Officer (COO) and...

A previously undocumented Chinese-speaking threat actor codenamed SneakyChef has been linked to an espionage campaign primarily targeting government entities across Asia and EMEA (Europe, Middle East, and Africa) with SugarGh0st malware since at least August 2023. "SneakyChef uses lures that are scanned documents of government agencies, most of which are related to various countries' Ministries of Foreign Affairs or embassies," Cisco Talos researchers Chetan Raghuprasad and Ashley Shen said in an analysis published today. Activities related to the hacking crew were first highlighted by the cybersecurity company in late November 2023 in connection with an attack campaign that singled out South Korea and Uzbekistan with a custom variant of Gh0st RAT called SugarGh0st . A subsequent analysis from Proofpoint last month uncovered the use of SugarGh0st RAT against U.S. organizations involved in artificial intelligence efforts, including those in academia, private indust...

Cybersecurity researchers have shed light on a new phishing campaign that has been identified as targeting people in Pakistan using a custom backdoor. Dubbed PHANTOM#SPIKE by Securonix, the unknown threat actors behind the activity have leveraged military-related phishing documents to activate the infection sequence. "While there are many methods used today to deploy malware, the threat actors made use of ZIP files with a password-protected payload archive contained within," researchers Den Iuzvyk, Tim Peck, and Oleg Kolesnikov said in a report shared with The Hacker News. The campaign is notable for its lack of sophistication and the use of simple payloads to achieve remote access to target machines. The email messages come bearing a ZIP archive that purports to be meeting minutes related to the International Military-Technical Forum Army 2024, a legitimate event organized by the Ministry of Defense of the Russian Federation. It's set to be held in Moscow in mid...