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In the past 2 years, we have observed a significant surge in hacktivism activity due to ongoing wars and geopolitical conflicts in various regions. Since the war against Ukraine began, we have witnessed a notable mobilization of non-state and state-backed actors alike, forming new groups or joining existing hacker collectives.  We understand hacktivism as a form of computer hacking that is done to further the goals of political or social  activism 1 . While  activism  describes a normal, non-disruptive use of the Internet in order to support a specific cause (online petitions, fundraising, coordinating activities),  hacktivism  includes operations that use hacking techniques with the intent to disrupt but not to cause serious harm (e.g., data theft, website defacements, redirects, Denial-of-Service attacks). Cyber operations that inherit a willingness or intent to cause harm to physical property, severe economic damage or loss of life would be referred to...

An installer for a tool likely used by the Russian Consular Department of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MID) has been backdoored to deliver a remote access trojan called  Konni RAT  (aka  UpDog ). The findings come from German cybersecurity company DCSO, which linked the activity as originating from the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK)-nexus actors targeting Russia. The Konni (aka Opal Sleet, Osmium, or  TA406 ) activity cluster has an established pattern of deploying Konni RAT against Russian entities, with the threat actor also linked to  attacks directed against MID  at least since October 2021. In November 2023, Fortinet FortiGuard Labs  revealed  the use of Russian-language Microsoft Word documents to deliver malware capable of harvesting sensitive information from compromised Windows hosts. DCSO said the packaging of Konni RAT within software installers is a technique  previously adopted  by the group in Octobe...

The U.S. State Department has announced monetary rewards of up to $15 million for information that could lead to the identification of key leaders within the LockBit ransomware group and the arrest of any individual participating in the operation. "Since January 2020, LockBit actors have executed over 2,000 attacks against victims in the United States, and around the world, causing costly disruptions to operations and the destruction or exfiltration of sensitive information," the State Department  said . "More than $144 million in ransom payments have been made to recover from LockBit ransomware events." The development comes as a sweeping law enforcement operation led by the U.K. National Crime Agency (NCA)  disrupted  LockBit, a Russia-linked ransomware gang that has been active for more than four years, wreaking havoc on business and critical infrastructure entities around the world. Ransomware-as-a-service (RaaS) operations like LockBit and others work by e...

Cybersecurity researchers have identified two authentication bypass flaws in open-source Wi-Fi software found in Android, Linux, and ChromeOS devices that could trick users into joining a malicious clone of a legitimate network or allow an attacker to join a trusted network without a password. The vulnerabilities, tracked as CVE-2023-52160 and CVE-2023-52161, have been discovered following a security evaluation of  wpa_supplicant  and Intel's iNet Wireless Daemon ( IWD ), respectively. The flaws "allow attackers to trick victims into connecting to malicious clones of trusted networks and intercept their traffic, and join otherwise secure networks without needing the password," Top10VPN  said  in a new research conducted in collaboration with Mathy Vanhoef, who has previously uncovered Wi-Fi attacks like  KRACK ,  DragonBlood , and  TunnelCrack . CVE-2023-52161, in particular, permits an adversary to gain unauthorized access to a protected Wi-Fi ne...

The China-linked threat actor known as Mustang Panda has targeted various Asian countries using a variant of the PlugX (aka Korplug) backdoor dubbed DOPLUGS. "The piece of customized PlugX malware is dissimilar to the general type of the PlugX malware that contains a completed backdoor command module, and that the former is only used for downloading the latter," Trend Micro researchers Sunny Lu and Pierre Lee  said  in a new technical write-up. Targets of DOPLUGS have been primarily located in Taiwan, and Vietnam, and to a lesser extent in Hong Kong, India, Japan, Malaysia, Mongolia, and even China. PlugX is a staple tool of  Mustang Panda , which is also tracked as BASIN, Bronze President, Camaro Dragon, Earth Preta, HoneyMyte, RedDelta, Red Lich, Stately Taurus, TA416, and TEMP.Hex. It's known to be active since at least 2012, although it first came to light in 2017. The threat actor's tradecraft entails carrying out well-forged spear-phishing campaigns that a...

With SaaS applications now making up the vast majority of technology used by employees in most organizations, tasks related to identity governance need to happen across a myriad of individual SaaS apps. This presents a huge challenge for centralized IT teams who are ultimately held responsible for managing and securing app access, but can't possibly become experts in the nuances of the native security settings and access controls for hundreds (or thousands) of apps. And, even if they could, the sheer volume of tasks would easily bury them. Modern IT teams need a way to orchestrate and govern SaaS identity governance by engaging the application owners in the business who are most familiar with how the tool is used, and who needs what type of access.  Nudge Security is a  SaaS security and governance solution  that can help you do just that, with automated workflows to save time and make the process manageable at scale. Read on to learn how it works. 1 . Discover all Sa...

Facebook advertisers in Vietnam are the target of a previously unknown information stealer dubbed  VietCredCare  at least since August 2022. The malware is "notable for its ability to automatically filter out Facebook session cookies and credentials stolen from compromised devices, and assess whether these accounts manage business profiles and if they maintain a positive Meta ad credit balance," Singapore-headquartered Group-IB  said  in a new report shared with The Hacker News. The end goal of the large-scale malware distribution scheme is to facilitate the takeover of corporate Facebook accounts by targeting Vietnamese individuals who manage the Facebook profiles of prominent businesses and organizations. Facebook accounts that have been successfully seized are then used by the threat actors behind the operation to post political content or to propagate phishing and affiliate scams for financial gain. VietCredCare is offered to other aspiring cybercriminals u...