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Based on the findings of Malwarebytes' Threat Review for 2022, 40 million Windows business computers' threats were detected in 2021. In order to combat and avoid these kinds of attacks, malware analysis is essential. In this article, we will break down the goal of malicious programs' investigation and how to do malware analysis with a sandbox. What is malware analysis?  Malware analysis is a process of studying a malicious sample. During the study, a researcher's goal is to understand a malicious program's type, functions, code, and potential dangers. Receive the information organization needs to respond to the intrusion. Results of analysis that you get: how malware works: if you investigate the code of the program and its algorithm, you will be able to stop it from infecting the whole system. characteristics of the program: improve detection by using data on malware like its family, type, version, etc. what is the goal of malware: trigger the sample's...

Palo Alto Networks Unit 42 has detailed the inner workings of a malware called  OriginLogger , which has been touted as a successor to the widely used information stealer and remote access trojan (RAT) known as  Agent Tesla . A .NET based keylogger and remote access, Agent Tesla has had a long-standing presence in the threat landscape, allowing malicious actors to gain remote access to targeted systems and beacon sensitive information to an actor-controlled domain. Known to be used in the wild since 2014, it's advertised for sale on dark web forums and is generally distributed through malicious spam emails as an attachment. In February 2021, cybersecurity firm Sophos  disclosed two new variants  of the commodity malware (version 2 and 3) that featured capabilities to steal credentials from web browsers, email apps, and VPN clients, as well as use Telegram API for command-and-control. Now according to Unit 42 researcher Jeff White, what has been tagged as Agent ...

Tech giant Microsoft on Tuesday shipped fixes to quash  64 new security flaws  across its software lineup, including one zero-day flaw that has been actively exploited in real-world attacks. Of the 64 bugs, five are rated Critical, 57 are rated Important, one is rated Moderate, and one is rated Low in severity. The patches are in addition to  16 vulnerabilities  that Microsoft addressed in its Chromium-based Edge browser earlier this month. "In terms of CVEs released, this Patch Tuesday may appear on the lighter side in comparison to other months," Bharat Jogi, director of vulnerability and threat research at Qualys, said in a statement shared with The Hacker News. "However, this month hit a sizable milestone for the calendar year, with MSFT having fixed the 1000th CVE of 2022 – likely on track to surpass 2021, which patched 1,200 CVEs in total." The actively exploited vulnerability in question is  CVE-2022-37969  (CVSS score: 7.8), a privilege e...

A zero-day flaw in the latest version of a WordPress premium plugin known as  WPGateway  is being actively exploited in the wild, potentially allowing malicious actors to completely take over affected sites. Tracked as  CVE-2022-3180  (CVSS score: 9.8), the issue is being weaponized to add a malicious administrator user to sites running the WPGateway plugin, WordPress security company Wordfence noted. "Part of the plugin functionality exposes a vulnerability that allows unauthenticated attackers to insert a malicious administrator," Wordfence researcher Ram Gall  said  in an advisory. WPGateway is billed as a means for site administrators to install, backup, and clone WordPress plugins and themes from a unified dashboard. The most common indicator that a website running the plugin has been compromised is the presence of an administrator with the username "rangex." Additionally, the appearance of requests to "//wp-content/plugins/wpgateway/wpgateway-w...

Contemporary organizations understand the importance of data and its impact on improving interactions with customers, offering quality products or services, and building loyalty. Data is fundamental to business success. It allows companies to make the right decisions at the right time and deliver the high-quality, personalized products and services that customers expect. There is a challenge, though. Businesses are collecting more data than ever before, and new technologies have accelerated this process dramatically. As a result, organizations have significant volumes of data, making it hard to manage, protect, and get value from it. Here is where Governance, Risk, and Compliance (GRC) comes in. GRC enables companies to define and implement the best practices, procedures, and governance to ensure the data is clean, safe, and reliable across the board.  More importantly,  organizations can use GRC platforms like StandardFusion  to create an organizational culture aro...

Government and state-owned organizations in a number of Asian countries have been targeted by a distinct group of espionage hackers as part of an intelligence gathering mission that has been underway since early 2021. "A notable feature of these attacks is that the attackers leveraged a wide range of legitimate software packages in order to load their malware payloads using a technique known as  DLL side-loading ," the Symantec Threat Hunter team, part of Broadcom Software,  said  in a report shared with The Hacker News. The campaign is said to be exclusively geared towards government institutions related to finance, aerospace, and defense, as well as state-owned media, IT, and telecom firms.  Dynamic-link library (DLL) side-loading is a popular cyberattack method that leverages how Microsoft Windows applications handle DLL files. In these intrusions, a spoofed malicious DLL is planted in the Windows Side-by-Side ( WinSxS ) directory so that the operating system ...

Hackers tied to the Iranian government have been targeting individuals specializing in Middle Eastern affairs, nuclear security, and genome research as part of a new social engineering campaign designed to hunt for sensitive information. Enterprise security firm Proofpoint attributed the targeted attacks to a threat actor named  TA453 , which broadly overlaps with cyber activities monitored under the monikers APT42, Charming Kitten, and Phosphorus. It all starts with a phishing email impersonating legitimate individuals at Western foreign policy research organizations that's ultimately designed to gather intelligence on behalf of Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC). The sock puppet accounts include people from Pew Research Center, the Foreign Policy Research Institute (FRPI), the U.K.'s Chatham House, and the scientific journal Nature. The technique is said to have been deployed in mid-June 2022. However, what differentiates this from other phishing attacks...