The Hacker News | #1 Trusted Source for Cybersecurity News — Index Page

Ten people belonging to a criminal network have been arrested in connection with a series of SIM-swapping attacks that resulted in the theft of more than $100 million by hijacking the mobile phone accounts of high-profile individuals in the U.S. The Europol-coordinated  year-long investigation  was jointly conducted by law enforcement authorities from the U.K., U.S., Belgium, Malta, and Canada. "The attacks orchestrated by this criminal gang targeted thousands of victims throughout 2020, including famous internet influencers, sport stars, musicians and their families," Europol  said  in a statement. "The criminals are believed to have stolen from them over $100 million in cryptocurrencies after illegally gaining access to their phones." The eight suspects, aged 18 to 26, are said to be part of a larger ring, two members of which were nabbed previously in Malta and Belgium. The latest arrests were made in England and Scotland. The sweep comes almost a year afte...

New details have emerged about the remote computer intrusion at a Florida water treatment facility last Friday, highlighting a lack of adequate security measures needed to bulletproof critical infrastructure environments. The breach involved an  unsuccessful attempt  on the part of an adversary to increase sodium hydroxide dosage in the water supply to dangerous levels by remotely accessing the SCADA system at the water treatment plant. The system's plant operator, who spotted the intrusion, quickly took steps to reverse the command, leading to minimal impact. Now, according to an  advisory  published on Wednesday by the state of Massachusetts, unidentified cyber actors accessed the supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) system via TeamViewer software installed on one of the plant's several computers that were connected to the control system. Not only were these computers running 32-bit versions of the Windows 7 operating system, but the machines also...

UAE and Kuwait government agencies are targets of a new cyberespionage campaign potentially carried out by Iranian threat actors, according to new research. Attributing the operation to be the work of  Static Kitten  (aka MERCURY or MuddyWater), Anomali  said  the "objective of this activity is to install a remote management tool called ScreenConnect (acquired by ConnectWise 2015) with unique launch parameters that have custom properties," with malware samples and URLs masquerading as the Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MOFA) of Kuwait and the UAE National Council. Since its origins in 2017, MuddyWater has been tied to a number of attacks primarily against Middle Eastern nations, actively  exploiting Zerologon vulnerability  in real-world attack campaigns to strike prominent  Israeli organizations  with malicious payloads. The state-sponsored hacking group is believed to be working at the behest of Iran's Islamic Republic Guard Corps, the count...

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 -...

In what's a novel supply chain attack, a security researcher managed to breach over 35 major companies' internal systems, including that of Microsoft, Apple, PayPal, Shopify, Netflix, Yelp, Tesla, and Uber, and achieve remote code execution. The technique, called dependency confusion or a substitution attack, takes advantage of the fact that a piece of software may include components from a mix of private and public sources. These external package dependencies, which are fetched from public repositories during a build process, can pose an attack opportunity when an adversary uploads a higher version of a private module to the public feed, causing a client to automatically download the bogus "latest" version without requiring any action from the developer. "From one-off mistakes made by developers on their own machines, to misconfigured internal or cloud-based build servers, to systemically vulnerable development pipelines, one thing was clear: squatting val...

A previously known Windows remote access Trojan (RAT) with credential-stealing capabilities has now expanded its scope to set its sights on users of Android devices to further the attacker's espionage motives. "The developers of  LodaRAT  have added Android as a targeted platform," Cisco Talos researchers  said  in a Tuesday analysis. "A new iteration of LodaRAT for Windows has been identified with improved sound recording capabilities." Kasablanca, the group behind the malware, is said to have deployed the new RAT in an ongoing hybrid campaign targeting Bangladeshi users, the researchers noted. The reason why Bangladesh-based organizations have been specifically singled out for this campaign remains unclear, as is the identity of the threat actor. First documented in May 2017 by  Proofpoint , Loda is an AutoIt malware typically delivered via phishing lures that's equipped to run a wide range of commands designed to record audio, video, and capture oth...

Apple has rolled out a fix for a critical sudo vulnerability in macOS Big Sur, Catalina, and Mojave that could allow unauthenticated local users to gain root-level privileges on the system. "A local attacker may be able to elevate their privileges," Apple  said  in a security advisory. "This issue was addressed by updating to sudo version 1.9.5p2." Sudo is a common utility built into most Unix and Linux operating systems that lets a user without security privileges access and run a program with the credentials of another user. Tracked as CVE-2021-3156 (also called " Baron Samedit "), the vulnerability first came to light last month after security auditing firm Qualys  disclosed  the existence of a heap-based buffer overflow, which it said had been "hiding in plain sight" for almost 10 years. The vulnerability, which was introduced in the code back in July 2011, impacts sudo versions 1.7.7 through 1.7.10p9, 1.8.2 through 1.8.31p2, and 1.9.0...

Microsoft on Tuesday  issued fixes for 56 flaws , including a critical vulnerability that's known to be actively exploited in the wild. In all, 11 are listed as Critical, 43 are listed as Important, and two are listed as Moderate in severity — six of which are previously disclosed vulnerabilities. The updates cover .NET Framework, Azure IoT, Microsoft Dynamics, Microsoft Edge for Android, Microsoft Exchange Server, Microsoft Office, Microsoft Windows Codecs Library, Skype for Business, Visual Studio, Windows Defender, and other core components such as Kernel, TCP/IP, Print Spooler, and Remote Procedure Call (RPC). A Windows Win32k Privilege Escalation Vulnerability The most critical of the flaws is a Windows Win32k privilege escalation vulnerability (CVE-2021-1732, CVSS score 7.8) that allows attackers with access to a target system to run malicious code with elevated permissions. Microsoft credited JinQuan, MaDongZe, TuXiaoYi, and LiHao of DBAPPSecurity for discovering and re...

Law enforcement officials in Ukraine, in coordination with authorities from the U.S. and Australia, last week shut down one of the world's largest phishing services that were used to attack financial institutions in 11 countries, causing tens of millions of dollars in losses. The Ukrainian attorney general's office  said  it worked with the National Police and its Main Investigation Department to identify a 39-year-old man from the Ternopil region who developed a phishing package and a special administrative panel for the service, which were then aimed at several banks located in Australia, Spain, the U.S., Italy, Chile, the Netherlands, Mexico, France, Switzerland, Germany, and the U.K. Computer equipment, mobile phones, and hard drives were seized as part of five authorized searches conducted during the course of the operation. Security researcher Brian Krebs  noted  the raids were in connection with  U-Admin , a phishing framework that makes use of fake ...

Hackers successfully infiltrated the computer system controlling a water treatment facility in the U.S. state of Florida and remotely changed a setting that drastically altered the levels of sodium hydroxide (NaOH) in the water. During a press conference held yesterday, Pinellas County Sheriff Bob Gualtieri said an operator managed to catch the manipulation in real-time and restored the concentration levels to undo the damage. "At no time was there a significant effect on the water being treated, and more importantly the public was never in danger," Sheriff Gualtieri  said  in a statement. The water treatment facility, which is located in the city of Oldsmar and serves about 15,000 residents, is said to have been breached for approximately 3 to 5 minutes by unknown suspects on February 5, with the remote access occurring twice at 8:00 a.m. and 1:30 p.m. The attacker briefly increased the amount of sodium hydroxide from 100 parts-per-million to 11,100 parts-per-million u...