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A  growing number of threat actors  are using the ongoing Russo-Ukrainian war as a lure in various phishing and malware campaigns, even as critical infrastructure entities continue to be heavily targeted. "Government-backed actors from China, Iran, North Korea and Russia, as well as various unattributed groups, have used various Ukraine war-related themes in an effort to get targets to open malicious emails or click malicious links," Google Threat Analysis Group's (TAG) Billy Leonard  said  in a report. "Financially motivated and criminal actors are also using current events as a means for targeting users," Leonard added. One notable threat actor is Curious Gorge, which TAG has attributed to China People's Liberation Army Strategic Support Force (PLA SSF) and has been observed striking government, military, logistics and manufacturing organizations in Ukraine, Russia and Central Asia. Attacks aimed at Russia have singled out several governmental entiti...

Cybersecurity researchers have detailed as many as five severe security flaws in the implementation of TLS protocol in several models of Aruba and Avaya network switches that could be abused to gain remote access to enterprise networks and steal valuable information. The findings follow the March disclosure of  TLStorm , a set of three critical flaws in APC Smart-UPS devices that could permit an attacker to take over control and, worse, physically damage the appliances. IoT security firm Armis, which uncovered the shortcomings, noted that the design flaws can be traced back to a common source: a misuse of  NanoSSL , a standards-based SSL developer suite from Mocana, a DigiCert subsidiary. The new set of flaws, dubbed  TLStorm 2.0 , renders Aruba and Avaya network switches vulnerable to remote code execution vulnerabilities, enabling an adversary to commandeer the devices, move laterally across the network, and exfiltrate sensitive data. Affected devices include Avay...

An analysis of four months of chat logs spanning more than 40 conversations between the operators of Conti and Hive ransomware and their victims has offered an insight into the groups' inner workings and their negotiation techniques. In one exchange, the Conti Team is said to have significantly reduced the ransom demand from a staggering $50 million to $1 million, a 98% drop, suggesting a willingness to settle for a far lower amount. "Both Conti and Hive are quick to lower ransom demands, routinely offering substantial reductions multiple times throughout negotiations," Cisco Talos  said  in a report shared with The Hacker News. "This signals that despite popular belief, victims of a ransomware attack actually have significant negotiating power." Conti  and  Hive  are among the most prevalent ransomware strains in the threat landscape, cumulatively accounting for  29.1% of attacks  detected during the three-month-period between October and December...

Cybersecurity researchers have disclosed a new variant of the AvosLocker ransomware that disables antivirus solutions to evade detection after breaching target networks by taking advantage of unpatched security flaws.  "This is the first sample we observed from the U.S. with the capability to disable a defense solution using a legitimate Avast Anti-Rootkit Driver file (asWarPot.sys)," Trend Micro researchers, Christoper Ordonez and Alvin Nieto,  said  in a Monday analysis. "In addition, the ransomware is also capable of scanning multiple endpoints for the Log4j vulnerability (Log4shell) using Nmap  NSE script ." AvosLocker , one of the newer ransomware families to fill the vacuum left by  REvil , has been linked to a number of attacks that targeted critical infrastructure in the U.S., including financial services and government facilities. A ransomware-as-a-service (RaaS) affiliate-based group first spotted in July 2021, AvosLocker goes beyond double extor...

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 ...