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Microsoft Word documents exploiting known remote code execution flaws are being used as phishing lures to drop malware called  LokiBot  on compromised systems. "LokiBot, also known as Loki PWS, has been a well-known information-stealing Trojan active since 2015," Fortinet FortiGuard Labs researcher Cara Lin  said . "It primarily targets Windows systems and aims to gather sensitive information from infected machines." The cybersecurity company, which spotted the campaign in May 2023, said the attacks take advantage of  CVE-2021-40444  and  CVE-2022-30190  (aka Follina) to achieve code execution. The Word file that weaponizes CVE-2021-40444 contains an external GoFile link embedded within an XML file that leads to the download of an HTML file, which exploits Follina to download a next-stage payload, an injector module written in Visual Basic that decrypts and launches LokiBot. The injector also features evasion techniques to check for the presence ...

The Russia-linked threat actor known as Gamaredon has been observed conducting data exfiltration activities within an hour of the initial compromise. "As a vector of primary compromise, for the most part, emails and messages in messengers (Telegram, WhatsApp, Signal) are used, in most cases, using previously compromised accounts," the Computer Emergency Response Team of Ukraine (CERT-UA)  said  in an analysis of the group published last week. Gamaredon , also called Aqua Blizzard, Armageddon, Shuckworm, or UAC-0010, is a  state-sponsored actor  with ties to the SBU Main Office in the Autonomous Republic of Crimea, which was annexed by Russia in 2014. The group is estimated to have infected thousands of government computers. It is also one of the  many Russian hacking crews  that have maintained an  active presence  since the start of the Russo-Ukrainian war in February 2022, leveraging phishing campaigns to deliver PowerShell backdoors such a...

With generative artificial intelligence (AI) becoming all the rage these days, it's perhaps not surprising that the technology has been repurposed by malicious actors to their own advantage, enabling avenues for accelerated cybercrime. According to findings from SlashNext, a new generative AI cybercrime tool called  WormGPT  has been advertised on underground forums as a way for adversaries to launch sophisticated phishing and business email compromise ( BEC ) attacks. "This tool presents itself as a blackhat alternative to GPT models, designed specifically for malicious activities," security researcher Daniel Kelley  said . "Cybercriminals can use such technology to automate the creation of highly convincing fake emails, personalized to the recipient, thus increasing the chances of success for the attack." The author of the software has described it as the "biggest enemy of the well-known ChatGPT" that "lets you do all sorts of illegal stuff....

Microsoft on Friday said a validation error in its source code allowed for Azure Active Directory (Azure AD) tokens to be forged by a malicious actor known as  Storm-0558  using a Microsoft account (MSA) consumer signing key to breach two dozen organizations. "Storm-0558 acquired an inactive MSA consumer signing key and used it to forge authentication tokens for Azure AD enterprise and MSA consumer to access OWA and Outlook.com," the tech giant  said  in a deeper analysis of the campaign. "The method by which the actor acquired the key is a matter of ongoing investigation." "Though the key was intended only for MSA accounts, a validation issue allowed this key to be trusted for signing Azure AD tokens. This issue has been corrected." It's not immediately clear if the token validation issue was exploited as a "zero-day vulnerability" or if Microsoft was already aware of the problem before it came under in-the-wild abuse. The attacks singl...

Multiple security vulnerabilities have been discovered in various services, including Honeywell Experion distributed control system (DCS) and QuickBlox, that, if successfully exploited, could result in severe compromise of affected systems. Dubbed Crit.IX, the nine flaws in the Honeywell Experion DCS platform allow for "unauthorized remote code execution, which means an attacker would have the power to take over the devices and alter the operation of the DCS controller, whilst also hiding the alterations from the engineering workstation that manages the controller," Armis said in a statement shared with The Hacker News. Put differently, the issues relate to lack of encryption and adequate authentication mechanisms in a proprietary protocol called Control Data Access (CDA) that's used to communicate between Experion Servers and C300 controllers, effectively enabling a threat actor to take over the devices and alter the operation of the DCS controller. "As a resul...

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