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An unknown advanced persistent threat (APT) group has been linked to a series of spear-phishing attacks targeting Russian government entities since the onset of the Russo-Ukrainian war in late February 2022. "The campaigns [...] are designed to implant a Remote Access Trojan (RAT) that can be used to surveil the computers it infects, and run commands on them remotely," Malwarebytes  said  in a technical report published Tuesday. The cybersecurity company attributed the attacks with low confidence to a Chinese hacking group, citing infrastructure overlaps between the RAT and Sakula Rat malware used by a threat actor known as  Deep Panda . The attack chains, while leveraging different lures over the course of two months, all employed the same malware barring small differences in the source code. The campaign is said to have commenced around February 26, days after Russia's military invasion of Ukraine, with the emails distributing the RAT under the guise of an interac...

Security incidents occur. It's not a matter of "if," but of "when." That's why you implemented security products and procedures to optimize the incident response (IR) process. However, many security pros who are doing an excellent job in handling incidents find effectively communicating the ongoing process with their management a much more challenging task. Feels familiar? In many organizations, leadership is not security savvy, and they aren't interested in the details regarding all the bits and bytes in which the security pro masters.  Luckily, there is a template that security leads can use when presenting to management. It's called the  IR Reporting for Management template , providing CISOs and CIOs with a clear and intuitive tool to report both the ongoing IR process and its conclusion. The IR Reporting for Management template enables CISOs and CIOs to communicate with the two key points that management cares about—assurance that the incid...

Popular video conferencing service Zoom has  resolved  as many as four security vulnerabilities, which could be exploited to compromise another user over chat by sending specially crafted Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol ( XMPP ) messages and execute malicious code. Tracked from CVE-2022-22784 through CVE-2022-22787, the issues range between 5.9 and 8.1 in severity. Ivan Fratric of Google Project Zero has been credited with discovering and reporting all the four flaws in February 2022. The list of bugs is as follows - CVE-2022-22784  (CVSS score: 8.1) - Improper XML Parsing in Zoom Client for Meetings CVE-2022-22785  (CVSS score: 5.9) - Improperly constrained session cookies in Zoom Client for Meetings CVE-2022-22786  (CVSS score: 7.5) - Update package downgrade in Zoom Client for Meetings for Windows CVE-2022-22787  (CVSS score: 5.9) - Insufficient hostname validation during server switch in Zoom Client for Meetings With Zoom's chat fu...

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Two trojanized Python and PHP packages have been uncovered in what's yet another instance of a software supply chain attack targeting the open source ecosystem. One of the packages in question is "ctx," a Python module available in the PyPi repository. The other involves "phpass," a PHP package that's been forked on GitHub to distribute a rogue update. "In both cases the attacker appears to have taken over packages that have not been updated in a while," the SANS Internet Storm Center (ISC)  said , one of whose volunteer incident handlers, Yee Ching, analyzed the ctx package. It's worth noting that ctx, prior to the latest release on May 21, 2022, was last published to PyPi on December 19, 2014. On the other hand, phpass hasn't received an update since it was uploaded to Packagist on August 31, 2012. Both the libraries have been removed from PyPi and GitHub . At its core, the modifications are designed to exfiltrate AWS credentials t...

Let's face it: we all use email, and we all use passwords. Passwords create inherent vulnerability in the system. The success rate of phishing attacks is  skyrocketing , and opportunities for the attack have greatly multiplied as lives moved online. All it takes is one password to be compromised for all other users to become victims of a data breach.  To deliver additional security, therefore, digital identities rely on verification plasters. MFA (multi-factor authentication) often falls back to knowledge factors such as password resets and OTP codes, but these are still vulnerable. As long as credentials can be shared or intercepted, they can be misused.  What is needed is a paradigm shift – from knowledge-based credentials to strong possession-factor security that can't be compromised, alongside other verification security such as biometrics. A new possession-factor API now aims to do precisely that, replacing knowledge-based credentials, by using the SIM card for p...

Cybersecurity researchers have disclosed details of the latest version of the Chaos ransomware line, dubbed Yashma. "Though Chaos ransomware builder has only been in the wild for a year, Yashma claims to be the sixth version (v6.0) of this malware," BlackBerry research and intelligence team said in a report shared with The Hacker News. Chaos is a customizable ransomware builder that  emerged  in underground forums on June 9, 2021, by falsely marketing itself as the .NET version of Ryuk despite sharing no such overlaps with the notorious counterpart. The fact that it's offered for sale also means that any malicious actor can purchase the builder and develop their own ransomware strains, turning it into a potent threat. It has since undergone five successive iterations aimed at improving its functionalities: version 2.0 on June 17, version 3.0 on July 5, version 4.0 on August 5, and version 5.0 in early 2022. While the first three variants of Chaos functioned more l...

In this day and age, we are not dealing with roughly pieced together, homebrew type of viruses anymore. Malware is an industry, and professional developers are found to exchange, be it by stealing one's code or deliberate collaboration. Attacks are multi-layer these days, with diverse sophisticated software apps taking over different jobs along the attack-chain from initial compromise to ultimate data exfiltration or encryption. The specific tools for each stage are highly specialized and can often be rented as a service, including customer support and subscription models for professional (ab)use. Obviously, this has largely increased both the availability and the potential effectiveness and impact of malware. Sound scary?  Well, it does, but the apparent professionalization actually does have some good sides too. One factor is that certain reused modules commonly found in malware can be used to identify, track, and analyze professional attack software. Ultimately this means that...