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The notorious  Lazarus Group  actor has been observed mounting a new campaign that makes use of the Windows Update service to execute its malicious payload, expanding the arsenal of living-off-the-land (LotL) techniques leveraged by the APT group to further its objectives. The Lazarus Group, also known as  APT38 , Hidden Cobra, Whois Hacking Team, and Zinc, is the moniker assigned to the North Korea-based nation-state hacking group that's been active since at least 2009. Last year, the threat actor was  linked  to an elaborate  social engineering campaign  targeting security researchers. The latest spear-phishing attacks, which  Malwarebytes  detected on January 18, originate from weaponized documents with job-themed lures impersonating the American global security and aerospace company Lockheed Martin. Opening the decoy Microsoft Word file triggers the execution of a malicious macro embedded within the document that, in turn, executes a...

A cyberespionage group with ties to North Korea has resurfaced with a stealthier variant of its remote access trojan called Konni to attack political institutions located in Russia and South Korea. "The authors are constantly making code improvements," Malwarebytes researcher Roberto Santos  said . "Their efforts are aimed at breaking the typical flow recorded by sandboxes and making detection harder, especially via regular signatures as critical parts of the executable are now encrypted." Most  recent intrusions  staged by the group, believed to be operating under the Kimsuky umbrella, involved targeting the Russian Federation's Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MID) with New Year lures to compromise Windows systems with malware. The infections, as with other attacks of this kind, starts with a malicious Microsoft Office document that, when opened, initiates a mult-stage process that involves several moving parts that help the attackers elevate privileges, eva...

Microsoft this week revealed that it had fended off a record number of distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks aimed at its customers in 2021, three of which surpassed 2.4 terabit per second (Tbps). One of the DDoS attacks took place in November, targeting an unnamed Azure customer in Asia and lasted a total of 15 minutes. It hit a peak throughput of 3.47 Tbps and a packet rate of 340 million packets per second (pps), making it the largest attack ever reported in history. "This was a distributed attack originating from approximately 10,000 sources and from multiple countries across the globe, including the United States, China, South Korea, Russia, Thailand, India, Vietnam, Iran, Indonesia, and Taiwan," Alethea Toh, product manager of Azure Networking,  said . DDoS attacks occur when several compromised devices are employed as a conduit to overwhelm a targeted server, service, or network with a flood of internet traffic with the goal of overloading the systems and d...

SaaS Adoption is Skyrocketing, Resilience Hasn't Kept Pace SaaS platforms have revolutionized how businesses operate. They simplify collaboration, accelerate deployment, and reduce the overhead of managing infrastructure. But with their rise comes a subtle, dangerous assumption: that the convenience of SaaS extends to resilience. It doesn't. These platforms weren't built with full-scale data protection in mind . Most follow a shared responsibility model — wherein the provider ensures uptime and application security, but the data inside is your responsibility. In a world of hybrid architectures, global teams, and relentless cyber threats, that responsibility is harder than ever to manage. Modern organizations are being stretched across: Hybrid and multi-cloud environments with decentralized data sprawl Complex integration layers between IaaS, SaaS, and legacy systems Expanding regulatory pressure with steeper penalties for noncompliance Escalating ransomware threats and inside...

Taiwanese company QNAP has warned customers to secure network-attached storage (NAS) appliances and routers against a new ransomware variant called DeadBolt . "DeadBolt has been widely targeting all NAS exposed to the Internet without any protection and encrypting users' data for Bitcoin ransom," the company  said . "QNAP urges all QNAP NAS users to […] immediately update QTS to the latest available version." A query on IoT search engine Censys shows that at least 3,687 devices have been encrypted by the DeadBolt ransomware so far, with most NAS devices located in the U.S., Taiwan, France, Italy, the U.K., Hong Kong, Germany, the Netherlands, Poland, and South Korea. In addition, QNAP is also urging users to check if their NAS devices are public-facing, and if so, take steps to turn off the port forwarding function of the router and disable the Universal Plug and Play ( UPnP ) function of the QNAP NAS. The advisory comes as  Bleeping Computer  revealed t...

There are three things you can be sure of in life: death, taxes – and new CVEs. For organizations that rely on CentOS 8, the inevitable has now happened, and it didn't take long. Just two weeks after reaching the official end of life, something broke spectacularly, leaving  CentOS 8  users at major risk of a severe attack – and with no support from CentOS. You'd think that this issue no longer affects a significant number of organizations because by now, companies would have migrated away from CentOS 8 to an OS that is actively supported by vendors. After all, vendor support is critical for security and compliance. But as it always is with these things, you can count on the fact that a big chunk of CentOS 8 users are soldiering on with an unsupported OS, despite being aware of the risks. With that risk now crystallizing we're using this article to examine  CVE-2021-4122 , the newly discovered vulnerability in LUKS encryption, and to discuss your options for mitigating ...

A financially-motivated malware campaign has compromised over 800 WordPress websites to deliver a banking trojan dubbed Chaes targeting Brazilian customers of Banco do Brasil, Loja Integrada, Mercado Bitcoin, Mercado Livre, and Mercado Pago. First documented by  Cybereason  in November 2020, the info-stealing malware is delivered via a sophisticated infection chain that's engineered to harvest sensitive consumer information, including login credentials, credit card numbers, and other financial information. "Chaes is characterized by the multiple-stage delivery that utilizes scripting frameworks such as JScript, Python, and NodeJS, binaries written in Delphi, and malicious Google Chrome extensions," Avast researchers Anh Ho and Igor Morgenstern  said . "The ultimate goal of Chaes is to steal credentials stored in Chrome and intercept logins of popular banking websites in Brazil." The attack sequence is triggered when users visit one of the infected websites...

Researchers from the Bitdefender Mobile Threats team said they have intercepted more than 100,000 malicious SMS messages attempting to distribute  Flubot  malware since the beginning of December. "Findings indicate attackers are modifying their subject lines and using older yet proven scams to entice users to click," the Romanian cybersecurity firm  detailed  in a report published Wednesday. "Additionally, attackers are rapidly changing the countries they are targeting in this campaign." The new wave of attacks is said to have been most active in Australia, Germany, Poland, Spain, Austria, and Italy, among others, with attacks spreading to newer countries like Romania, the Netherlands, and Thailand starting mid-January. FluBot (aka Cabassous) campaigns use smishing as the primary delivery method to target potential victims, wherein users receive an SMS message with the question "Is this you in this video?" and are tricked into clicking a link that inst...

A new, sophisticated phishing attack has been observed delivering the AsyncRAT trojan as part of a malware campaign that's believed to have commenced in September 2021. "Through a simple email phishing tactic with an HTML attachment, threat attackers are delivering AsyncRAT (a remote access trojan) designed to remotely monitor and control its infected computers through a secure, encrypted connection," Michael Dereviashkin, security researcher at enterprise breach prevention firm Morphisec,  said  in a report. The intrusions commence with an email message containing an HTML attachment that's disguised as an order confirmation receipt (e.g., Receipt-<digits>.html). Opening the decoy file redirects the message recipient to a web page prompting the user to save an ISO file. But unlike other attacks that route the victim to a phishing domain set up explicitly for downloading the next-stage malware, the latest RAT campaign cleverly uses JavaScript to locally crea...