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An ongoing  ZLoader  malware campaign has been uncovered exploiting remote monitoring tools and a nine-year-old flaw concerning Microsoft's digital signature verification to siphon user credentials and sensitive information. Israeli cybersecurity company Check Point Research, which has been tracking the sophisticated infection chain since November 2021, attributed it to a cybercriminal group dubbed MalSmoke , citing similarities with previous attacks. "The techniques incorporated in the infection chain include the use of legitimate remote management software (RMM) to gain initial access to the target machine," Check Point's Golan Cohen said in a report shared with The Hacker News. "The malware then exploits Microsoft's digital signature verification method to inject its payload into a signed system DLL to further evade the system's defenses." A banking trojan at its core, ZLoader has been employed by many an attacker to steal cookies, passwords...

Threat actors leveraged a cloud video hosting service to carry out a supply chain attack on more than  100 real estate websites  operated by Sotheby's Realty that involved injecting malicious skimmers to steal sensitive personal information. "The attacker injected the skimmer JavaScript codes into video, so whenever others import the video, their websites get embedded with skimmer codes as well," Palo Alto Networks' Unit 42 researchers  said  in a report published this week. The skimmer attacks, also called formjacking, relates to a type of cyber attack wherein bad actors insert malicious JavaScript code into the target website, most often to checkout or payment pages on shopping and e-commerce portals, to harvest valuable information such as credit card details entered by users. In the latest incarnation of the Magecart attacks, the operators behind the campaign breached the Brightcove account of Sotheby's and deployed malicious code into the player of the ...

Microsoft is warning of continuing attempts by nation-state adversaries and commodity attackers to take advantage of  security vulnerabilities  uncovered in the Log4j open-source logging framework to deploy malware on vulnerable systems. "Exploitation attempts and testing have remained high during the last weeks of December," Microsoft Threat Intelligence Center (MSTIC)  said  in revised guidance published earlier this week. "We have observed many existing attackers adding exploits of these vulnerabilities in their existing malware kits and tactics, from coin miners to hands-on-keyboard attacks." Publicly disclosed by the Apache Software Foundation on December 10, 2021, the remote code execution (RCE) vulnerability in Apache Log4j 2, aka  Log4Shell , has emerged as a new attack vector for  widespread exploitation  by a variety of threat actors. In the subsequent weeks, four more weaknesses in the utility have come to light —  CVE-2021-45046 ,...

A group of academics from the University of California, Santa Barbara, has demonstrated what it calls a "scalable technique" to vet smart contracts and mitigate state-inconsistency bugs, discovering 47 zero-day vulnerabilities on the Ethereum blockchain in the process. Smart contracts are  programs  stored on the blockchain that are automatically executed when predetermined conditions are met based on the encoded terms of the agreement. They allow trusted transactions and agreements to be carried out between anonymous parties without the need for a central authority. In other words, the code itself is meant to be the final arbiter of "the deal" it represents, with the program controlling all aspects of the execution, and providing an immutable evidentiary audit trail of transactions that are both trackable and irreversible. This also means that vulnerabilities in the code could result in hefty losses, as evidenced by hacks aimed at  the DAO  and more recently,...

A persistent denial-of-service (DoS) vulnerability has been discovered in Apple's iOS mobile operating system that's capable of sending affected devices into a crash or reboot loop upon connecting to an Apple Home-compatible appliance. The behavior, dubbed "doorLock," is trivial in that it can be triggered by simply changing the name of a HomeKit device to a string larger than 500,000 characters. This causes an iPhone or iPad that attempts to connect to the device to become unresponsive and enter an indefinite cycle of system failure and restart that can only be mitigated by restoring the affected device from Recovery or DFU (Device Firmware Update) Mode. HomeKit  is Apple's software framework that allows iOS and iPadOS users to configure, communicate with, and control connected accessories and smart-home appliances using Apple devices. "Any device with an affected iOS version installed that loads the string will be disrupted, even after rebooting,...

Trojanized installers of the Telegram messaging application are being used to distribute the Windows-based Purple Fox backdoor on compromised systems. That's according to new research published by Minerva Labs, describing the attack as different from intrusions that typically take advantage of legitimate software for dropping malicious payloads. "This threat actor was able to leave most parts of the attack under the radar by separating the attack into several small files, most of which had very low detection rates by [antivirus] engines, with the final stage leading to Purple Fox rootkit infection," researcher Natalie Zargarov  said . First discovered in 2018, Purple Fox comes with rootkit capabilities that allow the malware to be planted beyond the reach of security solutions and evade detection. A March 2021 report from Guardicore  detailed  its worm-like propagation feature, enabling the backdoor to spread more rapidly. Then in October 2021, Trend Micro researche...

Cybersecurity researchers have proposed a novel approach that harnesses electromagnetic field emanations from the Internet of Things (IoT) devices as a side-channel to glean precise knowledge about the different kinds of malware targeting the embedded systems, even in scenarios where obfuscation techniques have been applied to hinder analysis. With the rapid adoption of IoT appliances presenting an attractive attack surface for threat actors, in part due to them being equipped with higher processing power and capable of running fully functional operating systems, the latest research aims to improve malware analysis to mitigate potential security risks. The findings were presented by a group of academics from the Research Institute of Computer Science and Random Systems (IRISA) at the Annual Computer Security Applications Conference ( ACSAC ) held last month. "[Electromagnetic] emanation that is measured from the device is practically undetectable by the malware," the res...