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Cybersecurity researchers have disclosed a new malware campaign that leverages a malware loader named PureCrypter to deliver a commodity remote access trojan (RAT) called DarkVision RAT. The activity, observed by Zscaler ThreatLabz in July 2024, involves a multi-stage process to deliver the RAT payload. "DarkVision RAT communicates with its command-and-control (C2) server using a custom network protocol via sockets," security researcher Muhammed Irfan V A said in an analysis. "DarkVision RAT supports a wide range of commands and plugins that enable additional capabilities such as keylogging, remote access, password theft, audio recording, and screen captures." PureCrypter, first publicly disclosed in 2022, is an off-the-shelf malware loader that's available for sale on a subscription basis, offering customers the ability to distribute information stealers, RATs, and ransomware. The exact initial access vector used to deliver PureCrypter and, by extensio...

North Korean threat actors have been observed using a Linux variant of a known malware family called FASTCash to steal funds as part of a financially-motivated campaign. The malware is "installed on payment switches within compromised networks that handle card transactions for the means of facilitating the unauthorized withdrawal of cash from ATMs," a security researcher who goes by HaxRob said . FASTCash was first documented by the U.S. government in October 2018 as used by adversaries linked to North Korea in connection with an ATM cashout scheme targeting banks in Africa and Asia since at least late 2016. "FASTCash schemes remotely compromise payment switch application servers within banks to facilitate fraudulent transactions," the agencies noted at the time. "In one incident in 2017, HIDDEN COBRA actors enabled cash to be simultaneously withdrawn from ATMs located in over 30 different countries. In another incident in 2018, HIDDEN COBRA actors enab...

In recent years, the number and sophistication of zero-day vulnerabilities have surged, posing a critical threat to organizations of all sizes. A zero-day vulnerability is a security flaw in software that is unknown to the vendor and remains unpatched at the time of discovery. Attackers exploit these flaws before any defensive measures can be implemented, making zero-days a potent weapon for cybercriminals. A recent example is, for instance, CVE-2024-0519 in Google Chrome: this high-severity vulnerability was actively exploited in the wild and involved an out-of-bounds memory access issue in the V8 JavaScript engine. It allowed remote attackers to access sensitive information or trigger a crash by exploiting heap corruption.  Also, the zero-day vulnerability at Rackspace caused massive trouble. This incident was a zero-day remote code execution vulnerability in ScienceLogic's monitoring application that led to the compromise of Rackspace's internal systems. The breach expose...

China's National Computer Virus Emergency Response Center (CVERC) has doubled down on claims that the threat actor known as Volt Typhoon is a fabrication of the U.S. and its allies. The agency, in collaboration with the National Engineering Laboratory for Computer Virus Prevention Technology, went on to accuse the U.S. federal government, intelligence agencies, and Five Eyes countries of conducting cyber espionage activities against China, France, Germany, Japan, and internet users globally. It also said there's "ironclad evidence" indicating that the U.S. carries out false flag operations in an attempt to conceal its own malicious cyber attacks, adding it's inventing the "so-called danger of Chinese cyber attacks" and that it has established a "large-scale global internet surveillance network." "And the fact that the U.S. adopted supply chain attacks, implanted backdoors in internet products and 'pre-positioned' has completely...

Cybersecurity researchers have disclosed a new malware campaign that delivers Hijack Loader artifacts that are signed with legitimate code-signing certificates. French cybersecurity company HarfangLab, which detected the activity at the start of the month, said the attack chains aim to deploy an information stealer known as Lumma. Hijack Loader , also known as DOILoader, IDAT Loader, and SHADOWLADDER, first came to light in September 2023. Attack chains involving the malware loader typically involve tricking users into downloading a booby-trapped binary under the guise of pirated software or movies. Recent variations of these campaigns have been found to direct users to fake CAPTCHA pages that urge site visitors to prove they are human by copying and running an encoded PowerShell command that drops the malicious payload in the form of a ZIP archive. HarfangLab said it observed three different versions of the PowerShell script starting mid-September 2024 - A PowerShell script ...

The maintainers of the Jetpack WordPress plugin have released a security update to remediate a critical vulnerability that could allow logged-in users to access forms submitted by others on a site. Jetpack, owned by WordPress maker Automattic, is an all-in-one plugin that offers a comprehensive suite of tools to improve site safety, performance, and traffic growth. It's used on 27 million WordPress sites, according to its website . The issue is said to have been identified by Jetpack during an internal security audit and has persisted since version 3.9.9, released in 2016. The vulnerability resides in the Contact Form feature in Jetpack, and "could be used by any logged in users on a site to read forms submitted by visitors on the site," Jetpack's Jeremy Herve said . Jetpack said it's worked closely with the WordPress.org Security Team to automatically update the plugin to a safe version on installed sites. The shortcoming has been addressed in the followi...

A suspected nation-state adversary has been observed weaponizing three security flaws in Ivanti Cloud Service Appliance (CSA) as zero-days to perform a series of malicious actions. That's according to findings from Fortinet FortiGuard Labs, which said the vulnerabilities were abused to gain unauthenticated access to the CSA, enumerate users configured in the appliance, and attempt to access the credentials of those users. "The advanced adversaries were observed exploiting and chaining zero-day vulnerabilities to establish beachhead access in the victim's network," security researchers Faisal Abdul Malik Qureshi, John Simmons, Jared Betts, Luca Pugliese, Trent Healy, Ken Evans, and Robert Reyes said . The flaws in question are listed below - CVE-2024-8190 (CVSS score: 7.2) - A command injection flaw in the resource /gsb/DateTimeTab.php CVE-2024-8963 (CVSS score: 9.4) - A path traversal vulnerability on the resource /client/index.php CVE-2024-9380 (CVSS scor...