The Hacker News | #1 Trusted Source for Cybersecurity News — Index Page

Kaspersky security researchers have disclosed details of a brand-new ransomware family written in Rust, making it the third strain after  BlackCat  and  Hive  to use the programming language. Luna, as it's called, is "fairly simple" and can run on Windows, Linux, and ESXi systems, with the malware banking on a combination of  Curve25519  and  AES  for encryption. "Both the Linux and ESXi samples are compiled using the same source code with some minor changes from the Windows version," the Russian firm  noted  in a report published today. Advertisements for Luna on darknet forums suggest that the ransomware is intended for use only by Russian-speaking affiliates. Its core developers are also believed to be of Russian origin owing to spelling mistakes in the ransom note hard-coded within the binary. "Luna confirms the trend for cross-platform ransomware," the researchers stated, adding how the platform agnostic nature of languages li...

The 8220 cryptomining group has expanded in size to encompass as many as 30,000 infected hosts, up from 2,000 hosts globally in mid-2021. "8220 Gang is one of the many low-skill crimeware gangs we continually observe infecting cloud hosts and operating a botnet and cryptocurrency miners through known vulnerabilities and remote access brute forcing infection vectors," Tom Hegel of SentinelOne  said  in a Monday report. The growth is said to have been fueled through the use of Linux and common cloud application vulnerabilities and poorly secured configurations for services such as Docker, Apache WebLogic, and Redis. Active since early 2017, the Chinese-speaking, Monero-mining threat actor was most recently  seen  targeting i686 and x86_64 Linux systems by means of weaponizing a newly disclosed remote code execution exploit for Atlassian Confluence Server (CVE-2022-26134) to drop the PwnRig miner payload. "Victims are not targeted geographically, but simply ident...

The U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) is warning of a handful of unpatched security vulnerabilities in  MiCODUS MV720  Global Positioning System (GPS) trackers outfitted in over 1.5 million vehicles that could lead to remote disruption of critical operations. "Successful exploitation of these vulnerabilities may allow a remote actor to exploit access and gain control of the global positioning system tracker," CISA  said . "These vulnerabilities could impact access to a vehicle fuel supply, vehicle control, or allow locational surveillance of vehicles in which the device is installed." Available on sale for $20 and manufactured by the China-based MiCODUS, the company's tracking devices are employed by major organizations in 169 countries spanning aerospace, energy, engineering, government, manufacturing, nuclear power plant, and shipping sectors. The top countries with the most users include Chile, Australia, Mexico, Ukraine, Russi...

The Great Resignation – or the Great Reshuffle as some are calling it – and the growing skills gap have been dominating headlines lately. But these issues aren't new to the cybersecurity industry. While many are just now hearing about employee burnout, security teams have faced reality and serious consequences of burnout for years.  One of the biggest culprits? Alert overload.  The average security team gets tens of thousands of alerts  each day . Many analysts feel like they can't get their heads above water…and are starting to give up. This looks like physical burnout and even apathy. Surveys found that some security analysts feel so overwhelmed they ignore alerts and even walk away from their computers.  In fact, these surveys found that  70% of security teams  feel emotionally overwhelmed by alerts, and more than  55% of security professionals  don't feel fully confident that they can prioritize and respond to every alert that really does ...

Russian threat actors capitalized on the  ongoing conflict  against Ukraine to distribute Android malware camouflaged as an app for pro-Ukrainian hacktivists to launch distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks against Russian sites. Google Threat Analysis Group (TAG) attributed the malware to Turla, an advanced persistent threat also known as Krypton, Venomous Bear, Waterbug, and Uroburos, and linked to Russia's Federal Security Service (FSB). "This is the first known instance of Turla distributing Android-related malware," TAG researcher Billy Leonard  said . "The apps were not distributed through the Google Play Store, but hosted on a domain controlled by the actor and disseminated via links on third party messaging services." It's worth noting that the  onslaught  of  cyberattacks  in the immediate aftermath of Russia's unprovoked invasion of Ukraine prompted the latter to  form an IT Army  to stage counter-DDoS attacks against Rus...

The Russian state-sponsored hacking collective known as APT29 has been attributed to a new phishing campaign that takes advantage of legitimate cloud services like Google Drive and Dropbox to deliver malicious payloads on compromised systems. "These campaigns are believed to have targeted several Western diplomatic missions between May and June 2022," Palo Alto Networks Unit 42  said  in a Tuesday report. "The lures included in these campaigns suggest targeting of a foreign embassy in Portugal as well as a foreign embassy in Brazil." APT29, also tracked under the monikers Cozy Bear, Cloaked Ursa, or The Dukes, has been characterized as an organized cyberespionage group working to collect intelligence that aligns with Russia's strategic objectives. Some aspects of the advanced persistent threat's activities, including the infamous  SolarWinds supply chain attack  of 2020, are separately tracked by Microsoft under the name Nobelium, with Mandiant calling i...

Cybersecurity researchers have taken the wraps off a previously undocumented spyware targeting the Apple macOS operating system. The malware, codenamed  CloudMensis  by Slovak cybersecurity firm ESET, is said to exclusively use public cloud storage services such as pCloud, Yandex Disk, and Dropbox for receiving attacker commands and exfiltrating files. "Its capabilities clearly show that the intent of its operators is to gather information from the victims' Macs by exfiltrating documents, keystrokes, and screen captures," ESET researcher Marc-Etienne M.Léveillé  said  in a report published today. CloudMensis, written in Objective-C, was first discovered in April 2022 and is designed to strike both Intel and Apple silicon architectures. The initial infection vector for the attacks and the targets remain unknown as yet. But its very limited distribution is an indication that the malware is being used as part of a highly targeted operation directed against entities...