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Cybersecurity firm Sophos on Monday warned that a recently patched critical security vulnerability in its firewall product is being actively exploited in real-world attacks. The flaw, tracked as  CVE-2022-1040 , is rated 9.8 out of 10 on the CVSS scoring system and impacts Sophos Firewall versions 18.5 MR3 (18.5.3) and older. It relates to an authentication bypass vulnerability in the User Portal and Webadmin interface that, if successfully weaponized, allows a remote attacker to execute arbitrary code. "Sophos has observed this vulnerability being used to target a small set of specific organizations primarily in the South Asia region," the company  noted  in a revised advisory published Monday. "We have informed each of these organizations directly." The flaw has been addressed in a hotfix that's automatically installed for customers who have the " Allow automatic installation of hotfixes " setting enabled. As a workaround, Sophos is recommending...

An unidentified threat actor has been observed employing a "complex and powerful" malware loader with the ultimate objective of deploying cryptocurrency miners on compromised systems and potentially facilitating the theft of Discord tokens. "The evidence found on victim networks appears to indicate that the goal of the attacker was to install cryptocurrency mining software on victim machines," researchers from the Symantec Threat Hunter Team, part of Broadcom Software,  said  in a report shared with The Hacker News. "This would appear to be a relatively low-reward goal for the attacker given the level of effort that would have been required to develop this sophisticated malware." This advanced piece of malware, dubbed Verblecon, is said to have been first spotted two months ago in January 2022, with the payload incorporating  polymorphic qualities  to evade signature-based detections by security software. In addition, the loader carries out further a...

Cybersecurity researchers have shed more light on a malicious loader that runs as a server and executes received modules in memory, laying bare the structure of an "advanced multi-layered virtual machine" used by the malware to fly under the radar. Wslink, as the malicious loader is called, was first  documented  by Slovak cybersecurity company ESET in October 2021, with very few telemetry hits detected in the past two years spanning Central Europe, North America, and the Middle East. Analysis of the malware samples have yielded little to no clues about the initial compromise vector used, and no code, functionality, or operational similarities have been uncovered to suggest that this is a tool from a previously identified threat actor. Packed with a file compression utility named NsPack, Wslink makes use of what's called a  process virtual machine  (VM), a mechanism to run an application in a platform-independent manner that abstracts the underlying hardware or ...

A threat actor dubbed " RED-LILI " has been linked to an ongoing large-scale supply chain attack campaign targeting the NPM package repository by publishing nearly 800 malicious modules. "Customarily, attackers use an anonymous disposable NPM account from which they launch their attacks," Israeli security company Checkmarx  said . "As it seems this time, the attacker has fully-automated the process of NPM account creation and has opened dedicated accounts, one per package, making his new malicious packages batch harder to spot." The findings build on recent reports from  JFrog  and  Sonatype , both of which detailed hundreds of NPM packages that leverage techniques like  dependency confusion  and typosquatting to target Azure, Uber, and Airbnb developers. According to a detailed analysis of RED-LILI's modus operandi, earliest evidence of anomalous activity is said to have occurred on February 23, 2022, with the cluster of malicious packages publis...

An independent security researcher has shared what's a detailed timeline of events that transpired as the notorious LAPSUS$ extortion gang broke into a third-party provider linked to the cyber incident at Okta in late January 2022. In a set of screenshots posted on Twitter, Bill Demirkapi  published  a two-page "intrusion timeline" allegedly prepared by Mandiant, the cybersecurity firm hired by Sitel to investigate the security breach. Sitel, through its acquisition of Sykes Enterprises in September 2021, is the third-party service provider that provides customer support on behalf of Okta. The authentication services provider revealed last week that on January 20, it was alerted to a new factor that was added to a Sitel customer support engineer's Okta account, an attempt that it said was successful and blocked. The incident only came to light two months later after LAPSUS$  posted screenshots  on their Telegram channel as evidence of the breach on March 22. Th...

A new email phishing campaign has been spotted leveraging the tactic of conversation hijacking to deliver the IcedID info-stealing malware onto infected machines by making use of unpatched and publicly-exposed Microsoft Exchange servers. "The emails use a social engineering technique of conversation hijacking (also known as thread hijacking)," Israeli company Intezer said in a report shared with The Hacker News. "A forged reply to a previous stolen email is being used as a way to convince the recipient to open the attachment. This is notable because it increases the credibility of the phishing email and may cause a high infection rate." The latest wave of attacks, detected in mid-March 2022, is said to have targeted organizations within energy, healthcare, law, and pharmaceutical sectors. IcedID, aka BokBot, like its counterparts TrickBot and  Emotet , is a  banking trojan  that has evolved to become an entry point for more sophisticated threats, including hu...

You don't like having the FBI knocking on your door at 6 am in the morning. Surprisingly, nor does your usual cybercriminal. That is why they hide (at least the good ones), for example, behind layers of proxies, VPNs, or TOR nodes. Their IP address will never be exposed directly to the target's machine. Cybercriminals will always use third-party IP addresses to deliver their attacks. There are countless ways to deliver cyberattacks. But one thing is common to all of them. The need for a pool of IP addresses to serve as a medium. Criminals need IP addresses to deliver distributed denial of service attacks. Criminals need IP addresses to hide behind when probing services. Criminals need IP addresses to attempt brute force attacks. Criminals need IP addresses to run bot networks and services. In a nutshell, criminals need to maintain IP addresses under their control for pretty much anything. It is their most important asset and is the ammo they need to deliver attacks. So how...