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A Chinese-aligned cyberespionage group has been observed striking the telecommunication sector in Central Asia with versions of malware such as ShadowPad and PlugX. Cybersecurity firm SentinelOne tied the intrusions to an actor it tracks under the name "Moshen Dragon," with tactical overlaps between the collective and another threat group referred to as Nomad Panda (aka  RedFoxtrot ). "PlugX and ShadowPad have a well-established history of use among Chinese-speaking threat actors primarily for espionage activity," SentinelOne's Joey Chen  said . "Those tools have flexible, modular functionality and are compiled via shellcode to easily bypass traditional endpoint protection products." ShadowPad , labeled a "masterpiece of privately sold malware in Chinese espionage," emerged as a successor to PlugX in 2015, even as variants of the latter have continually popped up as part of different campaigns associated with Chinese threat actors. Alth...

Cybersecurity researchers have disclosed an unpatched security vulnerability that could pose a serious risk to IoT products. The issue, which was originally reported in September 2021, affects the Domain Name System (DNS) implementation of two popular C libraries called  uClibc  and  uClibc-ng  that are used for developing embedded Linux systems. uClibc is known to be used by major vendors such as Linksys, Netgear, and Axis, as well as Linux distributions like Embedded Gentoo, potentially exposing millions of IoT devices to security threats. "The flaw is caused by the predictability of transaction IDs included in the DNS requests generated by the library, which may allow attackers to perform DNS poisoning attacks against the target device," Giannis Tsaraias and Andrea Palanca of Nozomi Networks  said  in a Monday write-up. DNS poisoning , also referred to as DNS spoofing, is the technique of corrupting a DNS resolver cache — which provides clients wi...

A newly discovered suspected espionage threat actor has been targeting employees focusing on mergers and acquisitions as well as large corporate transactions to facilitate bulk email collection from victim environments. Mandiant is tracking the activity cluster under the uncategorized moniker UNC3524, citing a lack of evidence linking it to an existing group. However, some of the intrusions are said to mirror techniques used by different Russia-based hacking crews like  APT28  and  APT29 .  "The high level of operational security, low malware footprint, adept evasive skills, and a large Internet of Things (IoT) device botnet set this group apart and emphasize the 'advanced' in Advanced Persistent Threat," the threat intelligence firm  said  in a Monday report. The initial access route is unknown but upon gaining a foothold, attack chains involving UNC3524 culminate in the deployment of a novel backdoor called QUIETEXIT for persistent remote access for ...

Cloud-based code hosting platform GitHub described the recent  attack campaign  involving the abuse of OAuth access tokens issued to Heroku and Travis CI as "highly targeted" in nature. "This pattern of behavior suggests the attacker was only listing organizations in order to identify accounts to selectively target for listing and downloading private repositories," GitHub's Mike Hanley  said  in an updated post. The  security incident , which it discovered on April 12, related to an unidentified attacker leveraging stolen OAuth user tokens issued to two third-party OAuth integrators, Heroku and Travis CI, to download data from dozens of organizations, including NPM. The Microsoft-owned company said last week that it's in the process of sending a final set of notifications to GitHub customers who had either the Heroku or Travis CI OAuth app integrations authorized in their accounts. According to a detailed step-by-step analysis carried out by GitHub, th...

A Chinese state-sponsored espionage group known as Override Panda has resurfaced in recent weeks with a new phishing attack with the goal of stealing sensitive information. "The Chinese APT used a spear-phishing email to deliver a beacon of a Red Team framework known as 'Viper,'" Cluster25  said  in a report published last week. "The target of this attack is currently unknown but with high probability, given the previous history of the attack perpetrated by the group, it might be a government institution from a South Asian country." Override Panda, also called  Naikon , Hellsing, and Bronze Geneva, is known to operate on behalf of Chinese interests since at least 2005 to conduct intelligence-gathering operations targeting  ASEAN countries . Attack chains unleashed by the threat actor have involved the use of decoy documents attached to spear-phishing emails that are designed to entice the intended victims to open and compromise themselves with malware...

According to folklore, witches were able to sail in a sieve, a strainer with holes in the bottom. Unfortunately, witches don't work in cybersecurity – where networks generally have so many vulnerabilities that they resemble sieves.  For most of us, keeping the sieve of our networks afloat requires nightmarishly hard work and frequent compromises on which holes to plug first. The reason? In 2010, just under 5000 CVEs were recorded in the MITRE vulnerabilities database. By 2021, the yearly total had skyrocketed to  over 20,000 . Today, software and network integrity are synonymous with business continuity. And this makes the issue of which vulnerabilities to address first mission-critical. Yet owing to the countless documented vulnerabilities lurking in a typical enterprise ecosystem – across thousands of laptops, servers, and internet-connected devices – less than  one in ten  actually needs to be patched. The question is: how can we know which patches will ensure ...

A Russian state-sponsored threat actor has been observed targeting diplomatic and government entities as part of a series of phishing campaigns commencing on January 17, 2022. Threat intelligence and incident response firm Mandiant attributed the attacks to a hacking group tracked as APT29 (aka Cozy Bear), with some set of the activities associated with the crew assigned the moniker  Nobelium  (aka UNC2452/2652). "This latest wave of spear phishing showcases APT29's enduring interests in obtaining diplomatic and foreign policy information from governments around the world," Mandiant  said  in a report published last week. The initial access is said to have been aided through spear-phishing emails masquerading as administrative notices, using legitimate but compromised email addresses from other diplomatic entities. These emails contain an HTML dropper attachment called ROOTSAW (aka  EnvyScout ) that, when opened, triggers an infection sequence that deliver...