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A number of India-based call centers and their directors have been indicted for their alleged role in placing tens of millions of scam calls aimed at defrauding thousands of American consumers. The indictment charged Manu Chawla, Sushil Sachdeva, Nitin Kumar Wadwani, Swarndeep Singh, Dinesh Manohar Sachdev, Gaje Singh Rathore, Sanket Modi, Rajiv Solanki and their respective call centers for conspiring with previously indicted VoIP provider E Sampark and its director, Guarav Gupta, to forward the calls to U.S. citizens. "Criminal India-based call centers defraud U.S. residents, including the elderly, by misleading victims over the telephone utilizing scams such as Social Security and IRS impersonation as well as loan fraud," the U.S. Justice Department  said  in a release. According to the  November 2020 indictment  issued against E Sampark and Gupta, the calls from India-based phone scammers led to reported losses of over $20 million from May 2015 to June 2020, w...

The Russia-linked Gamaredon hacking group attempted to compromise an unnamed Western government entity operating in Ukraine last month amidst ongoing geopolitical tensions between the two countries. Palo Alto Networks' Unit 42 threat intelligence team, in a  new report  publicized on February 3, said that the phishing attack took place on January 19, adding it "mapped out three large clusters of their infrastructure used to support different phishing and malware purposes." The threat actor, also known as Shuckworm, Armageddon, or Primitive Bear, has historically focused its offensive cyber attacks against Ukrainian government officials and organizations since 2013. Last year, Ukraine  disclosed  the collective's ties to Russia's Federal Security Service (FSB). To carry out the phishing attack, the operators behind the campaign leveraged a job search and employment platform within the country as a conduit to upload their malware downloader in the form of a res...

Most security practitioners are now aware of the Log4Shell vulnerability discovered toward the end of 2021. No one knows how long the vulnerability existed before it was discovered. The past couple of months have had security teams scrambling to patch the Log4Shell vulnerability found in Apache Log4j, a Java library widely used to log error messages in applications. Beyond patching, it's helpful and instructive for security practitioners to have a deeper understanding of this most recent critical vulnerability. Fortunately, Cynet Senior Security Researcher Igor Lahav is hosting a webinar [ Register here ] to provide "buzzword free" insights into Log4Shell. Based on a webinar preview provided by Cynet, the discussion will cover the software bugs in Apache Log4j that permitted the critical vulnerability, the exploits used to take advantage of the vulnerabilities and the remediation options available to protect your organization. This webinar will help make sense of the so...

The U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) on Thursday published an Industrial Controls Systems Advisory (ICSA) warning of multiple vulnerabilities in the Airspan Networks Mimosa equipment that could be abused to gain remote code execution, create a denial-of-service (DoS) condition, and obtain sensitive information. "Successful exploitation of these vulnerabilities could allow an attacker to gain user data (including organization details) and other sensitive data, compromise Mimosa's AWS (Amazon Web Services) cloud EC2 instance and S3 Buckets, and execute unauthorized remote code on all cloud-connected Mimosa devices," CISA  said  in the alert. The seven flaws, which were discovered and reported to CISA by industrial cybersecurity company Claroty, affect the following products — Mimosa Management Platform ( MMP ) running versions prior to v1.0.3 Point-to-Point ( PTP ) C5c and C5x running versions prior to v2.8.6.1, and Point-to-Multipoint ( ...

A threat actor, likely Chinese in origin, is actively attempting to exploit a zero-day vulnerability in the Zimbra open-source email platform as part of spear-phishing campaigns that commenced in December 2021. The espionage operation — codenamed " EmailThief " — was detailed by cybersecurity company Volexity in a technical report published Thursday, noting that successful exploitation of the cross-site scripting (XSS) vulnerability could result in the execution of arbitrary JavaScript code in the context of the user's Zimbra session. Volexity attributed the intrusions, which started on December 14, 2021, to a previously undocumented hacking group it's tracking under the moniker TEMP_HERETIC, with the assaults aimed at European government and media entities. The zero-day bug impacts the most recent open-source edition of Zimbra running  version 8.8.15 . The attacks are believed to have occurred in two phases; the first stage aimed at reconnaissance and distribut...

Cisco has patched multiple critical  security vulnerabilities  impacting its RV Series routers that could be weaponized to elevate privileges and execute arbitrary code on affected systems, while also warning of the existence of proof-of-concept (PoC) exploit code targeting some of these bugs. Three of the 15 flaws, tracked as CVE-2022-20699, CVE-2022-20700, and CVE-2022-20707, carry the highest CVSS rating of 10.0, and affect its Small Business RV160, RV260, RV340, and RV345 Series routers. Additionally, the flaws could be exploited to bypass authentication and authorization protections, retrieve and run unsigned software, and even cause denial-of-service (DoS) conditions. The networking equipment maker acknowledged that it's "aware that proof-of-concept exploit code is available for several of the vulnerabilities" but didn't share any further specifics on the nature of the exploit or the identity of the threat actors that may be exploiting them. CVE-2022-20699...

An ongoing search engine optimization (SEO) poisoning attack campaign has been observed abusing trust in legitimate software utilities to trick users into downloading BATLOADER malware on compromised machines. "The threat actor used 'free productivity apps installation' or 'free software development tools installation' themes as SEO keywords to lure victims to a compromised website and to download a malicious installer," researchers from Mandiant  said  in a report published this week. In  SEO poisoning  attacks, adversaries artificially increase the search engine ranking of websites (genuine or otherwise) hosting their malware to make them show up on top of search results so that users searching for specific apps like TeamViewer, Visual Studio, and Zoom are infected with malware. The installer, while packing the legitimate software, is also bundled with the BATLOADER payload that's executed during the installation process. The malware then acts as a ...