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A novel Android malware called RatMilad has been observed targeting a Middle Eastern enterprise mobile device by concealing itself as a VPN and phone number spoofing app. The mobile trojan functions as advanced spyware with capabilities that receives and executes commands to collect and exfiltrate a wide variety of data from the infected mobile endpoint, Zimperium  said  in a report shared with The Hacker News. Evidence gathered by the mobile security company shows that the malicious app is distributed through links on social media and communication tools like Telegram, tricking unsuspecting users into sideloading the app and granting it extensive permissions. The idea behind embedding the malware within a fake VPN and phone number spoofing service is also clever in that the app claims to enable users to verify social media accounts via phone, a technique popular in countries where access is restricted. "Once installed and in control, the attackers could access the camer...

Australia's largest telecommunications company Telstra disclosed that it was the victim of a data breach through a third-party, nearly two weeks after Optus reported a breach of its own. "There has been no breach of Telstra's systems," Narelle Devine, the company's chief information security officer for the Asia Pacific region,  said . "And no customer account data was involved." It said the breach targeted a third-party platform called  Work Life NAB  that's no longer actively used by the company, and that the leaked data posted on the internet concerned a "now-obsolete Telstra employee rewards program." Telstra also noted it became aware of the breach last week, adding the information included first and last names and the email addresses used to sign up for the program. It further clarified that the data posted was from 2017. The data was "basic in nature," Devine said.  The company did not reveal how many employees wer...

Professional developers want to do the right thing, but in terms of security, they are rarely set up for success. Organizations must support their upskilling with precision training and incentives if they want secure software from the ground up. The cyber threat landscape grows more complex by the day, with our data widely considered highly desirable "digital gold". Attackers are constantly scanning networks for vulnerable applications, programs, cloud instances, and the latest flavor of the month is APIs, with Gartner  correctly predicting  that they would become the most common attack vector in 2022, and that is in no small part thanks to their often lax security controls.  Threat actors are so persistent that new apps can sometimes be compromised and exploited within hours of deployment. The  Verizon 2022 Data Breach Investigations Report  reveals that errors and misconfigurations were the cause of 13% of breaches, with the human element responsible overal...

U.S. cybersecurity and intelligence agencies on Tuesday disclosed that multiple nation-state hacking groups potentially targeted a "Defense Industrial Base (DIB) Sector organization's enterprise network" as part of a cyber espionage campaign. "[Advanced persistent threat] actors used an open-source toolkit called  Impacket  to gain their foothold within the environment and further compromise the network, and also used a custom data exfiltration tool, CovalentStealer, to steal the victim's sensitive data," the authorities  said . The  joint advisory , which was authored by the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), and the National Security Agency (NSA), said the adversaries likely had long-term access to the compromised environment. The findings are the result of CISA's incident response efforts in collaboration with cybersecurity company Mandiant from November 2021 through January 2022. I...

A former affiliate of the Netwalker ransomware has been sentenced to 20 years in prison in the U.S., a little over three months after the  Canadian national pleaded guilty  to his role in the crimes. Sebastien Vachon-Desjardins, 35, has also been ordered to forfeit $21,500,000 that was illicitly obtained from dozens of victims globally, including companies, municipalities, hospitals, law enforcement, emergency services, school districts, colleges, and universities. Launched in 2019, the Netwalker attacks particularly singled out the healthcare sector during the COVID-19 pandemic, opportunistically taking advantage of the situation to extort money from victims. "The defendant in this case used sophisticated technological means to exploit hundreds of victims in numerous countries at the height of an international health crisis," U.S. Attorney Roger B. Handberg for the Middle District of Florida  said . Vachon-Desjardins, an IT engineer working for the Canadian governm...

Microsoft has updated its mitigation measures for the newly disclosed and actively exploited zero-day flaws in Exchange Server after it was found that they could be trivially bypassed. The two vulnerabilities, tracked as CVE-2022-41040 and CVE-2022-41082, have been codenamed  ProxyNotShell  due to similarities to another set of flaws called  ProxyShell , which the tech giant resolved last year. In-the-wild attacks abusing the  shortcomings  have chained the two flaws to gain remote code execution on compromised servers with elevated privileges, leading to the deployment of web shells. The Windows maker, which is yet to release a fix for the bugs, has acknowledged that a single state-sponsored threat actor may have been weaponizing the flaws since August 2022 in limited targeted attacks. In the meantime, the company has made available temporary workarounds to reduce the risk of exploitation by restricting known attack patterns through a rule in the IIS Man...

India's Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) on Monday disclosed that it has detained a Russian national for allegedly hacking into a software platform used to conduct engineering entrance assessments in the country in 2021. "The said accused was detained by the Bureau of Immigration at Indira Gandhi International Airport, Delhi while arriving in India from Almaty, Kazakhstan," the primary investigating agency  said  in a press release. The name of the individual was not disclosed by law enforcement authorities, but Indian news reports identified the person as  Mikhail Shargin . The CBI further said that Shargin's role was uncovered as part of its investigation into alleged irregularities committed in the Joint Entrance Examination ( JEE-Main ) conducted last year. JEE is a standardized test used for admissions to engineering colleges in India. The September 2021 incident, per the agency, involved breaking into iLeon software, the platform on which the exam was...