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Researchers from China's Pangu Lab have disclosed details of a "top-tier" backdoor put to use by the Equation Group , an advanced persistent threat (APT) with alleged ties to the cyber-warfare intelligence-gathering unit of the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA). Dubbed " Bvp47 " owing to numerous references to the string "Bvp" and the numerical value "0x47" used in the encryption algorithm, the backdoor was extracted from Linux systems "during an in-depth forensic investigation of a host in a key domestic department" in 2013. The defense research group codenamed the attacks involving the deployment of Bvp47 "Operation Telescreen," with the implant featuring an "advanced covert channel behavior based on TCP SYN packets, code obfuscation, system hiding, and self-destruction design." Bvp47 is said to have been used on more than 287 targets in the academia, economic development, military, science, and telecom s...

Users of Horde Webmail are being urged to disable a feature to contain a nine-year-old unpatched security vulnerability in the software that could be abused to gain complete access to email accounts simply by previewing an attachment. "This gives the attacker access to all sensitive and perhaps secret information a victim has stored in their email account and could allow them to gain further access to the internal services of an organization," SonarSource vulnerability researcher, Simon Scannell,  said  in a report. An " all volunteer " initiative, the Horde Project is a free, browser-based communication suite that allows users to read, send, and organize email messages as well as manage and share calendars, contacts, tasks, notes, files, and bookmarks. The flaw, which was introduced as part of a  code change  pushed on November 30, 2012, relates to a case of an "unusual" stored cross-site scripting flaw (aka persistent XSS) that allows an adversary t...

Another batch of 25 malicious JavaScript libraries have made their way to the official NPM package registry with the goal of stealing Discord tokens and environment variables from compromised systems, more than two months after  17 similar packages  were taken down. The libraries in question leveraged typosquatting techniques and masqueraded as other legitimate packages such as colors.js, crypto-js, discord.js, marked, and  noblox.js , DevOps security firm JFrog said, attributing the packages as the work of "novice malware authors." The complete list of packages is below – node-colors-sync (Discord token stealer) color-self (Discord token stealer) color-self-2 (Discord token stealer) wafer-text (Environment variable stealer) wafer-countdown (Environment variable stealer) wafer-template (Environment variable stealer) wafer-darla (Environment variable stealer) lemaaa (Discord token stealer) adv-discord-utility (Discord token stealer) tools-for-discord (Disco...

I had the honor of hosting the first episode of the Xposure Podcast live from Xposure Summit 2025. And I couldn't have asked for a better kickoff panel: three cybersecurity leaders who don't just talk security, they live it. Let me introduce them. Alex Delay , CISO at IDB Bank, knows what it means to defend a highly regulated environment. Ben Mead , Director of Cybersecurity at Avidity Biosciences, brings a forward-thinking security perspective that reflects the innovation behind Avidity's targeted RNA therapeutics. Last but not least, Michael Francess , Director of Cybersecurity Advanced Threat at Wyndham Hotels and Resorts, leads the charge in protecting the franchise. Each brought a unique vantage point to a common challenge: applying Continuous Threat Exposure Management (CTEM) to complex production environments. Gartner made waves in 2023 with a bold prediction: organizations that prioritize CTEM will be three times less likely to be breached by 2026. But here's the kicker -...

Malicious actors took advantage of a smart contract upgrade process in the OpenSea NFT marketplace to carry out a  phishing attack  against 17 of its users that resulted in the theft of virtual assets worth about $1.7 million. NFTs , short for non-fungible tokens, are digital tokens that act like certificates of authenticity for, and in some cases represent ownership of, assets that range from expensive illustrations to collectibles and physical goods. The opportunistic social engineering scam  swindled the users  by using the same email from OpenSea notifying users about the upgrade, with the copycat email redirecting the victims to a lookalike webpage, prompting them to sign a seemingly legitimate transaction, only to steal all the NFTs in one go. "By signing the transaction, an atomicMatch_ request would be sent to the attacker contract," Check Point researchers  explained . "From there, the atomicMatch_ would be forwarded to the OpenSea contract," leadi...

An advanced persistent threat (APT) group operating with objectives aligned with the Chinese government has been linked to an organized supply chain attack on Taiwan's financial sector. The attacks are said to have first commenced at the end of November 2021, with the intrusions attributed to a threat actor tracked as  APT10 , also known as Stone Panda, the MenuPass group, and Bronze Riverside, and known to be active since at least 2009. The second wave of attacks hit a peak between February 10 and 13, 2022, according to a  new report  published by Taiwanese cybersecurity firm CyCraft, which said the wide-ranging supply chain compromise specifically targeted the software systems of financial institutions, resulting in "abnormal cases of placing orders." The infiltration activity, codenamed " Operation Cache Panda ," exploited a vulnerability in the web management interface of the unnamed securities software that has a market share of over 80% in Taiwan, usi...

Vulnerable internet-facing Microsoft SQL (MS SQL) Servers are being targeted by threat actors as part of a new campaign to deploy the Cobalt Strike adversary simulation tool on compromised hosts. "Attacks that target MS SQL servers include attacks to the environment where its vulnerability has not been patched, brute forcing, and  dictionary attack  against poorly managed servers," South Korean cybersecurity company AhnLab Security Emergency Response Center (ASEC)  said  in a report published Monday. Cobalt Strike is a commercial, full-featured  penetration testing framework  that allows an attacker to deploy an agent named "Beacon" on the victim machine, granting the operator remote access to the system. Although billed as a red team threat simulation platform,  cracked versions  of the software have been  actively used  by a wide range of threat actors. Intrusions observed by ASEC involve the unidentified actor scanning port 1433 ...

A new Android banking trojan with over 50,000 installations has been observed distributed via the official Google Play Store with the goal of targeting 56 European banks and carrying out harvesting sensitive information from compromised devices. Dubbed  Xenomorph  by Dutch security firm ThreatFabric, the in-development malware is said to share overlaps with another banking trojan tracked under the moniker Alien while also being "radically different" from its predecessor in terms of the functionalities offered. "Despite being a work-in-progress, Xenomorph is already sporting effective overlays and being actively distributed on official app stores," ThreatFabric's founder and CEO, Han Sahin, said. "In addition, it features a very detailed and modular engine to abuse accessibility services, which in the future could power very advanced capabilities, like ATS." Alien, a remote access trojan (RAT) with notification sniffing and authenticator-based 2FA ...

An investigation into the cyberattack targeting Iranian national media corporation, Islamic Republic of Iran Broadcasting (IRIB), in late January 2022 revealed the deployment of a wiper malware and other custom implants, as the country's national infrastructure continues to face a  wave  of  attacks  aimed at inflicting serious damage. "This indicates that the attackers' aim was also to disrupt the state's broadcasting networks, with the damage to the TV and radio networks possibly more serious than officially reported," Tel Aviv-based cybersecurity firm Check Point  said  in a report published last week. The 10-second attack, which took place on January 27, involved the breach of state broadcaster IRIB to air pictures of Mujahedin-e-Khalq Organization ( MKO ) leaders Maryam and Massoud Rajavi alongside a call for the assassination of the Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. "This is an extremely complex attack and only the owners of this technology ...