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The U.S. Department of Justice on Wednesday became the latest government agency in the country to admit its internal network was compromised as part of the SolarWinds supply chain attack. "On December 24, 2020, the Department of Justice's Office of the Chief Information Officer (OCIO) learned of previously unknown malicious activity linked to the global SolarWinds incident that has affected multiple federal agencies and technology contractors, among others," DoJ spokesperson Marc Raimondi said in a short statement. "This activity involved access to the Department's Microsoft Office 365 email environment." Calling it a "major incident," the DoJ said the threat actors who spied on government networks through SolarWinds software potentially accessed about 3% of the Justice Department's email accounts, but added there's no indication they accessed classified systems. The disclosure comes a day after the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FB...

Cybesecurity researchers today revealed a new malspam campaign that distributes a remote access Trojan (RAT) by purporting to contain a sex scandal video of U.S. President Donald Trump. The emails, which carry with the subject line "GOOD LOAN OFFER!!," come attached with a Java archive (JAR) file called "TRUMP_SEX_SCANDAL_VIDEO.jar," which, when downloaded, installs Qua or Quaverse RAT ( QRAT ) onto the infiltrated system. "We suspect that the bad guys are attempting to ride the frenzy brought about by the recently concluded Presidential elections since the filename they used on the attachment is totally unrelated to the email's theme," Trustwave's Senior Security Researcher Diana Lopera said in a write-up published today. The latest campaign is a variant of the Windows-based QRAT downloader Trustwave researchers  discovered  in August. The infection chain starts with a spam message containing an embedded attachment or a link pointing to a m...

"Respect for your privacy is coded into our DNA," opens WhatsApp's  privacy policy . "Since we started WhatsApp, we've aspired to build our Services with a set of strong privacy principles in mind." But come February 8, 2021, this opening statement will no longer find a place in the policy. The Facebook-owned messaging service is alerting users in India of an update to its  terms of service  and  privacy policy  that's expected to go into effect next month. The "key updates" concern how it processes user data, "how businesses can use Facebook hosted services to store and manage their WhatsApp chats," and "how we partner with Facebook to offer integrations across the Facebook Company Products." The mandatory changes allow WhatsApp to  share  more user data with other Facebook companies, including account registration information, phone numbers, transaction data, service-related information, interactions on the platform,...

The U.S. government on Tuesday formally pointed fingers at the Russian government for orchestrating the massive  SolarWinds supply chain attack  that came to light early last month. "This work indicates that an Advanced Persistent Threat (APT) actor, likely Russian in origin, is responsible for most or all of the recently discovered, ongoing cyber compromises of both government and non-governmental networks," the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI), and the National Security Agency (NSA)  said  in a joint statement. Russia, however,  denied  any involvement in the operation on December 13, stating it "does not conduct offensive operations in the cyber domain." The FBI, CISA, ODNI, and NSA are members of the Cyber Unified Coordination Group (UCG), a newly-formed task force put in place by the White House National Security Council to...

Cybersecurity researchers today revealed a wide-ranging scam targeting cryptocurrency users that began as early as January last year to distribute trojanized applications to install a previously undetected remote access tool on target systems. Called ElectroRAT by Intezer, the RAT is written from ground-up in Golang and designed to target multiple operating systems such as Windows, Linux, and macOS.  The apps are developed using the open-source Electron cross-platform desktop app framework. "ElectroRAT is the latest example of attackers using Golang to develop multi-platform malware and evade most antivirus engines," the researchers said . "It is common to see various information stealers trying to collect private keys to access victims wallets. However, it is rare to see tools written from scratch and targeting multiple operating systems for these purposes." The campaign, first detected in December, is believed to have claimed over 6,500 victims based on th...

Cyberattacks targeting healthcare organizations have spiked by 45% since November 2020 as COVID-19 cases continue to increase globally. According to a new report published by Check Point Research today and shared with The Hacker News, this increase has made the sector the most targeted industry by cybercriminals when compared to an overall 22% increase in cyberattacks across all industry sectors worldwide seen during the same time period. The average number of weekly attacks in the healthcare sector reached 626 per organization in November as opposed to 430 the previous month, with attack vectors ranging from ransomware, botnets, remote code execution, and distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks. Ransomware attacks against hospitals also marked their biggest jump, with  Ryuk  and Sodinokibi emerging as the primary ransomware variants employed by various criminal groups. "The usage of Ryuk emphasizes the trend of having more targeted and tailored ransomware attacks ...

A three-year-old attack technique to bypass Google's audio reCAPTCHA by using its own Speech-to-Text API has been found to still work with 97% accuracy. Researcher Nikolai Tschacher disclosed his findings in a proof-of-concept (PoC) of the attack on January 2. "The idea of the attack is very simple: You grab the MP3 file of the audio reCAPTCHA and you submit it to Google's own speech-to-text API," Tschacher  said  in a write-up. "Google will return the correct answer in over 97% of all cases." Introduced in 2000, CAPTCHAs (or Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart) are a type of challenge-response tests designed to protect against automated account creation and service abuse by presenting users with a question that is easy for humans to solve but difficult for computers. reCAPTCHA  is a popular version of the CAPTCHA technology that was acquired by Google in 2009. The search giant released the  third iteration  of re...

A British court has rejected the U.S. government's request to extradite Wikileaks founder Julian Assange to the country on charges pertaining to illegally obtaining and sharing classified material related to national security. In a hearing at Westminster Magistrates' Court today, Judge Vanessa Baraitser denied the extradition on the grounds that Assange is a suicide risk and extradition to the U.S. prison system would be oppressive. "I find that the mental condition of Mr. Assange is such that it would be oppressive to extradite him to the United States of America," judge Baraitser  said  in a 132-page ruling. The U.S. government is expected to appeal the decision. The case against Assange centers on WikiLeaks' publication of hundreds of thousands of leaked documents about the Afghanistan and Iraq wars, as well as diplomatic cables, in 2010 and 2011. The documents include "approximately 90,000 Afghanistan war-related significant activity reports, 400,0...