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

A suspected Iranian threat activity cluster has been linked to attacks aimed at Israeli shipping, government, energy, and healthcare organizations as part of an espionage-focused campaign that commenced in late 2020. Cybersecurity firm Mandiant is tracking the group under its uncategorized moniker  UNC3890 , which is believed to conduct operations that align with Iranian interests. "The collected data may be leveraged to support various activities, from hack-and-leak, to enabling kinetic warfare attacks like those that have plagued the shipping industry in recent years," the company's Israel Research Team  noted . Intrusions mounted by the group lead to the deployment of two proprietary pieces of malware: a "small but efficient" backdoor named SUGARUSH and a browser credential stealer called SUGARDUMP that exfiltrates password information to an email address associated with Gmail, ProtonMail, Yahoo, and Yandex. Also employed is a network of command-and-con...

A novel data exfiltration technique has been found to leverage a covert ultrasonic channel to leak sensitive information from isolated, air-gapped computers to a nearby smartphone that doesn't even require a microphone to pick up the sound waves. Dubbed  GAIROSCOPE , the adversarial model is the latest addition to a long list of  acoustic, electromagnetic, optical, and thermal approaches  devised by Dr. Mordechai Guri , the head of R&D in the Cyber Security Research Center in the Ben Gurion University of the Negev in Israel. "Our malware generates ultrasonic tones in the resonance frequencies of the  MEMS gyroscope ," Dr. Guri said in a  new paper  published this week. "These inaudible frequencies produce tiny mechanical oscillations within the smartphone's gyroscope, which can be demodulated into binary information." Air-gapping is seen as an  essential security countermeasure  that involves isolating a computer or network and preventing...

The U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) on Monday  added  a security flaw impacting Palo Alto Networks PAN-OS to its  Known Exploited Vulnerabilities Catalog , based on evidence of active exploitation. The high-severity vulnerability, tracked as  CVE-2022-0028  (CVSS score: 8.6), is a URL filtering policy misconfiguration that could allow an unauthenticated, remote attacker to carry out reflected and amplified TCP denial-of-service (DoS) attacks. "If exploited, this issue would not impact the confidentiality, integrity, or availability of our products," Palo Alto Networks said in an alert. "However, the resulting denial-of-service (DoS) attack may help obfuscate the identity of the attacker and implicate the firewall as the source of the attack. The weakness impacts the following product versions and has been addressed as part of updates released this month - PAN-OS 10.2 (version < 10.2.2-h2) PAN-OS 10.1 (version < 10.1.6-h...

Budget Android device models that are counterfeit versions associated with popular smartphone brands are harboring multiple trojans designed to target WhatsApp and WhatsApp Business messaging apps. The malware, which Doctor Web first came across in July 2022, were discovered in the system partition of at least four different smartphones: P48pro, radmi note 8, Note30u, and Mate40, was "These incidents are united by the fact that the attacked devices were copycats of famous brand-name models," the cybersecurity firm  said  in a report published today. "Moreover, instead of having one of the latest OS versions installed on them with the corresponding information displayed in the device details (for example, Android 10), they had the long outdated 4.4.2 version." Specifically, the tampering concerns two files "/system/lib/libcutils.so" and "/system/lib/libmtd.so" that are modified in such a manner that when the libcutils.so system library is us...

Details of an eight-year-old security vulnerability in the Linux kernel have emerged that the researchers say is "as nasty as Dirty Pipe." Dubbed  DirtyCred  by a group of academics from Northwestern University, the security weakness exploits a previously unknown flaw ( CVE-2022-2588 ) to escalate privileges to the maximum level. "DirtyCred is a kernel exploitation concept that swaps unprivileged  kernel credentials  with privileged ones to escalate privilege," researchers Zhenpeng Lin, Yuhang Wu, and Xinyu Xing noted. "Instead of overwriting any critical data fields on kernel heap, DirtyCred abuses the heap memory reuse mechanism to get privileged." This entails three steps - Free an in-use unprivileged credential with the vulnerability Allocate privileged credentials in the freed memory slot by triggering a privileged userspace process such as su, mount, or sshd Operate as a privileged user The novel exploitation method, according to the resea...

Atlanta-based cyber risk intelligence company, Cyble discovered a new Remote Access Trojan (RAT) malware. What makes this particular RAT malware distinct enough to be named after the  comic creation of Sacha Baron Cohen ? RAT malware typically helps cybercriminals gain complete control of a victim's system, permitting them to access network resources, files, and power to toggle the mouse and keyboard. Borat RAT malware goes beyond the standard features and enables threat actors to deploy ransomware and  DDoS attacks . It also increases the number of threat actors who can launch attacks, sometimes appealing to the lowest common denominator. The added functionality of carrying out DDoS attacks makes it insidious and a risk to today's digital organizations. Ransomware has been the most common top attack type for over  three years . According to an IBM report, REvil was the most common ransomware strain, consisting of about  37%  of all ransomware attacks. Borat ...

Researchers have disclosed multiple vulnerabilities impacting Ultra-wideband (UWB) Real-time Locating Systems ( RTLS ), enabling threat actors to launch adversary-in-the-middle (AitM) attacks and tamper with location data. "The zero-days found specifically pose a security risk for workers in industrial environments," cybersecurity firm Nozomi Networks  disclosed  in a technical write-up last week. "If a threat actor exploits these vulnerabilities, they have the ability to tamper with safety zones designated by RTLS to protect workers in hazardous areas." RTLS is used to automatically identify and track the location of objects or people in real-time, usually within a confined indoor area. This is achieved by making use of tags that are attached to assets, which broadcast USB signals to fixed reference points called anchors that then determine their location. But flaws identified in RTLS solutions –  Sewio Indoor Tracking RTLS UWB Wi-Fi Kit  and  Avalue Renit...