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The U.S. State Department has  announced  rewards of up to $10 million for any information leading to the identification of key individuals who are part of the infamous Conti cybercrime gang. Additionally, it's offering another $5 million for intelligence information that could help arrest or convict individuals who are conspiring or attempting to affiliate with the group in a ransomware attack. The department called the Conti variant the "costliest strain of ransomware ever documented." Conti , the work of a Russia-based transnational organized crime group dubbed Gold Ulrick, is one most prolific ransomware cartels that has continued to strike entities globally while simultaneously  expanding its empire  by absorbing TrickBot and running side hustles that involve data extortion. After the syndicate expressed public support for Russia's invasion of Ukraine in February, it  suffered a major breach  of its own after its source code and internal chats we...

Days after F5 released patches for a critical remote code execution vulnerability affecting its BIG-IP family of products, security researchers are warning that they were able to create an exploit for the shortcoming. Tracked  CVE-2022-1388  (CVSS score: 9.8), the flaw relates to an iControl REST authentication bypass that, if successfully exploited, could lead to remote code execution, allowing an attacker to gain initial access and take control of an affected system. This could range anywhere from deploying cryptocurrency miners to dropping web shells for follow-on attacks, such as information theft and ransomware. "We have reproduced the fresh CVE-2022-1388 in F5's BIG-IP," cybersecurity company Positive Technologies  said  in a tweet on Friday. "Patch ASAP!" The critical security vulnerability impacts the following versions of BIG-IP products - 16.1.0 - 16.1.2 15.1.0 - 15.1.5 14.1.0 - 14.1.4 13.1.0 - 13.1.4 12.1.0 - 12.1.6 11.6.1 - 11.6.5 Fixe...

The U.S. Treasury Department on Friday moved to sanction virtual currency mixer Blender.io, marking the first time a mixing service has been subjected to economic blockades. The move signals continued efforts on the part of the government to prevent North Korea's Lazarus Group from laundering the funds stolen from the  unprecedented hack of Ronin Bridge  in late March. The newly imposed sanctions, issued by the U.S. Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC), target 45 Bitcoin addresses linked to Blender.io and four new wallets linked to Lazarus Group, an advanced persistent with ties to the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK). "Blender was used in processing over $20.5 million of the illicit proceeds," the Treasury  said , adding it was utilized by DPRK to "support its malicious cyber activities and money-laundering of stolen virtual currency." Cryptocurrency mixers, also called  tumblers , are privacy-focused services that allow users to move cr...

A new malicious campaign has been spotted taking advantage of Windows event logs to stash chunks of shellcode for the first time in the wild. "It allows the 'fileless' last stage trojan to be hidden from plain sight in the file system," Kaspersky researcher Denis Legezo  said  in a technical write-up published this week. The stealthy infection process, not attributed to a known actor, is believed to have commenced in September 2021 when the intended targets were lured into downloading compressed .RAR files containing Cobalt Strike and  Silent Break . "The spreading of the Cobalt Strike module was achieved by persuading the target to download the link to the .RAR on the legitimate site file.io, and run it themselves," Legezo explained. The adversary simulation software modules are then used as a launchpad to inject code into Windows system processes or trusted applications. Also notable is the use of anti-detection wrappers as part of the toolset, sugg...

QNAP, Taiwanese maker of network-attached storage (NAS) devices, on Friday released security updates to patch nine security weaknesses, including a critical issue that could be exploited to take over an affected system. "A vulnerability has been reported to affect QNAP VS Series NVR running QVR," QNAP  said  in an advisory. "If exploited, this vulnerability allows remote attackers to run arbitrary commands." Tracked as  CVE-2022-27588  (CVSS score: 9.8), the vulnerability has been addressed in QVR 5.1.6 build 20220401 and later. Credited with reporting the flaw is the Japan Computer Emergency Response Team Coordination Center (JPCERT/CC). Aside from the critical shortcoming, QNAP has also resolved three high-severity and five medium-severity bugs in its software - CVE-2021-38693  (CVSS score: 5.3) - A  path traversal vulnerability  in thttpd affecting QNAP devices running QTS, QuTS hero, QuTScloud, and QVR Pro Appliance, leading to information d...

Cybersecurity researchers have discovered a new Windows malware with worm-like capabilities and is propagated by means of removable USB devices. Attributing the malware to a cluster named " Raspberry Robin ," Red Canary researchers  noted  that the worm "leverages Windows Installer to reach out to QNAP-associated domains and download a malicious DLL." The earliest signs of the activity are said to date back to September 2021, with infections observed in organizations with ties to technology and manufacturing sectors. Attack chains pertaining to Raspberry Robin start with connecting an infected USB drive to a Windows machine. Present within the device is the worm payload, which appears as a .LNK shortcut file to a legitimate folder. The worm then takes care of spawning a new process using cmd.exe to read and execute a malicious file stored on the external drive. This is followed by launching explorer.exe and msiexec.exe, the latter of which is used for extern...