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Cybersecurity researchers have discovered what they say is malicious cyber activity orchestrated by two prominent Chinese nation-state hacking groups targeting 24 Cambodian government organizations. "This activity is believed to be part of a long-term espionage campaign," Palo Alto Networks Unit 42 researchers  said  in a report last week. "The observed activity aligns with geopolitical goals of the Chinese government as it seeks to leverage their strong relations with Cambodia to project their power and expand their naval operations in the region." Targeted organizations span defense, election oversight, human rights, national treasury and finance, commerce, politics, natural resources, and telecommunications sectors. The assessment stems from the persistent nature of inbound network connections originating from these entities to a China-linked adversarial infrastructure that masquerades as cloud backup and storage services over a "period of several month...

Malaysian law enforcement authorities have  announced  the takedown of a phishing-as-a-service (PhaaS) operation called  BulletProofLink . The Royal Malaysia Police said the effort, which was carried out with assistance from the Australian Federal Police (AFP) and the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) on November 6, 2023, was based on information that the threat actors behind the platform were based out of the country. To that end, eight individuals aged between 29 and 56, including the syndicate's mastermind, have been arrested across different locations in Sabah, Selangor, Perak, and Kuala Lumpur, New Straits Times  reported . Along with the arrests, authorities confiscated servers, computers, jewelry, vehicles, and cryptocurrency wallets containing approximately $213,000. BulletProofLink , also called BulletProftLink, is known for offering ready-to-use phishing templates on a subscription basis to other actors for conducting credential harvesting ca...

Cybersecurity researchers have warned about a Windows version of a wiper malware that was previously observed targeting Linux systems in cyber attacks aimed at Israel. Dubbed  BiBi-Windows Wiper  by BlackBerry, the wiper is the Windows counterpart of  BiBi-Linux Wiper , which has been put to use by a pro-Hamas hacktivist group in the wake of the Israel-Hamas war last month. "The Windows variant [...] confirms that the threat actors who created the wiper are continuing to build out the malware, and indicates an expansion of the attack to target end user machines and application servers," the Canadian company  said  Friday. Slovak cybersecurity firm ESET is  tracking  the actor behind the wiper under the name BiBiGun, noting that the Windows variant (bibi.exe) is designed to overwrite data in the C:\Users directory recursively with junk data and append ".BiBi" to the filename. The BiBi-Windows Wiper artifact is said to have been compiled on October...

A sub-cluster within the infamous Lazarus Group has established new infrastructure that impersonates skills assessment portals as part of its social engineering campaigns. Microsoft attributed the activity to a threat actor it calls  Sapphire Sleet , describing it as a "shift in the persistent actor's tactics." Sapphire Sleet, also called APT38, BlueNoroff, CageyChameleon, and CryptoCore, has a track record of orchestrating cryptocurrency theft via social engineering. Earlier this week, Jamf Threat Labs implicated the threat actor to a new macOS malware family called  ObjCShellz  that's assessed to be a late-stage payload delivered in connection with another macOS malware known as RustBucket. "Sapphire Sleet typically finds targets on platforms like LinkedIn and uses lures related to skills assessment," the Microsoft Threat Intelligence team  said  in a series of posts on X (formerly Twitter). "The threat actor then moves successful communication...

The notorious Russian hackers known as  Sandworm  targeted an electrical substation in Ukraine last year, causing a brief power outage in October 2022. The findings come from Google's Mandiant, which described the hack as a "multi-event cyber attack" leveraging a novel technique for impacting industrial control systems (ICS). "The actor first used OT-level living-off-the-land ( LotL ) techniques to likely trip the victim's substation circuit breakers, causing an unplanned power outage that coincided with mass missile strikes on critical infrastructure across Ukraine," the company  said . "Sandworm later conducted a second disruptive event by deploying a new variant of  CaddyWiper  in the victim's IT environment." The threat intelligence firm did not reveal the location of the targeted energy facility, the duration of the blackout, and the number of people who were impacted by the incident. The development marks Sandworm's  continuous...

There is a seemingly never-ending quest to find the right security tools that offer the right capabilities for your organization. SOC teams tend to spend about a  third of their day  on events that don’t pose any threat to their organization, and this has accelerated the adoption of automated solutions to take the place of (or augment) inefficient and cumbersome SIEMs. With an estimated  80% of these threats  being common across most organizations, today’s SOCs are able to confidently rely on automation to cover this large percentage of threat signals.  But, while it is true that automation can greatly improve the efficiency and effectiveness of security teams, it will never be able to cover all detection and response use cases infallibly.  In the recently released  GigaOm Radar for Autonomous Security Operations Center (SOC) , they accurately state that “the SOC will not—and should not—be fully autonomous.”  As more vendors attempt to chall...