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A threat cluster with ties to a hacking group called Tropic Trooper has been spotted using a previously undocumented malware coded in Nim language to strike targets as part of a newly discovered campaign. The novel loader, dubbed Nimbda, is "bundled with a Chinese language greyware 'SMS Bomber' tool that is most likely illegally distributed in the Chinese-speaking web," Israeli cybersecurity company Check Point  said  in a report. "Whoever crafted the Nim loader took special care to give it the same executable icon as the SMS Bomber that it drops and executes," the researchers said. "Therefore the entire bundle works as a trojanized binary." SMS Bomber, as the name indicates, allows a user to input a phone number (not their own) so as to flood the victim's device with messages and potentially render it unusable in what's a denial-of-service (DoS) attack. The fact that the binary doubles up as SMS Bomber and a backdoor suggests that t...

QNAP, Taiwanese maker of network-attached storage (NAS) devices, on Wednesday said it's in the process of fixing a critical three-year-old PHP vulnerability that could be abused to achieve remote code execution. "A vulnerability has been reported to affect PHP versions 7.1.x below 7.1.33, 7.2.x below 7.2.24, and 7.3.x below 7.3.11 with improper nginx config," the hardware vendor  said  in an advisory. "If exploited, the vulnerability allows attackers to gain remote code execution." The vulnerability, tracked as  CVE-2019-11043 , is rated 9.8 out of 10 for severity on the CVSS vulnerability scoring system. That said, it's required that Nginx and php-fpm are running in appliances using the following QNAP operating system versions - QTS 5.0.x and later QTS 4.5.x and later QuTS hero h5.0.x and later QuTS hero h4.5.x and later QuTScloud c5.0.x and later "As QTS, QuTS hero or QuTScloud does not have nginx installed by default, QNAP NAS are not aff...

A new piece of research from academics at ETH Zurich has identified a number of critical security issues in the MEGA cloud storage service that could be leveraged to break the confidentiality and integrity of user data. In a paper titled " MEGA: Malleable Encryption Goes Awry ," the researchers point out how MEGA's system does not protect its users against a malicious server, thereby enabling a rogue actor to fully compromise the privacy of the uploaded files. "Additionally, the integrity of user data is damaged to the extent that an attacker can insert malicious files of their choice which pass all authenticity checks of the client," ETH Zurich's Matilda Backendal, Miro Haller, and Kenneth G. Paterson said in an analysis of the service's cryptographic architecture. MEGA, which  advertises  itself as the "privacy company" and claims to provide user-controlled end-to-end encrypted cloud storage, has more than 10 million daily active users, w...

The Computer Emergency Response Team of Ukraine (CERT-UA) has  cautioned  of a new set of spear-phishing attacks exploiting the "Follina" flaw in the Windows operating system to deploy password-stealing malware. Attributing the intrusions to a Russian nation-state group tracked as APT28 (aka Fancy Bear or Sofacy), the agency said the attacks commence with a lure document titled "Nuclear Terrorism A Very Real Threat.rtf" that, when opened, exploits the recently disclosed vulnerability to download and execute a malware called CredoMap. Follina ( CVE-2022-30190 , CVSS score: 7.8), which concerns a case of remote code execution affecting the Windows Support Diagnostic Tool (MSDT), was addressed by Microsoft on June 14, as part of its Patch Tuesday updates , but not before it was subjected to widespread zero-day exploit activity by numerous threat actors. According to an independent report published by Malwarebytes,  CredoMap  is a variant of the .NET-based credenti...

A newly discovered Magecart skimming campaign has its roots in a previous attack activity going all the way back to November 2021. To that end, it has come to light that  two   malware  domains identified as hosting credit card skimmer code — "scanalytic[.]org" and "js.staticounter[.]net" — are part of a broader infrastructure used to carry out the intrusions, Malwarebytes said in a Tuesday analysis. "We were able to connect these two domains with a  previous campaign from November 2021  which was the first instance to our knowledge of a skimmer checking for the use of virtual machines," Jérôme Segura  said . "However, both of them are now devoid of VM detection code. It's unclear why the threat actors removed it, unless perhaps it caused more issues than benefits." The earliest evidence of the campaign's activity, based on the additional domains uncovered, suggests it dates back to at least May 2020. Magecart  refers to a cybercrim...

Europol on Tuesday announced the dismantling of an organized crime group that dabbled in phishing, fraud, scams, and money laundering activities. The cross-border operation, which involved law enforcement authorities from Belgium and the Netherlands, saw the arrests of nine individuals in the Dutch nation. The suspects are men between the ages of 25 and 36 from Amsterdam, Almere, Rotterdam, and Spijkenisse and a 25-year-old woman from Deventer, according to a  statement  from the National Police Force. Also confiscated as part of 24 house searches were firearms, ammunition, jewelry, designer clothing, expensive watches, electronic devices, tens of thousands of euros in cash, and cryptocurrency, the officials said. "The criminal group contacted victims by email, text message and through mobile messaging applications," the agency  noted . "These messages were sent by the members of the gang and contained a phishing link leading to a bogus banking website." Unsu...

The operators behind the Rig Exploit Kit have swapped the Raccoon Stealer malware for the Dridex financial trojan as part of an ongoing campaign that commenced in January 2022. The switch in modus operandi,  spotted  by Romanian company Bitdefender, comes in the wake of Raccoon Stealer  temporarily closing the project  after one of its team members responsible for critical operations passed away in the Russo-Ukrainian war in March 2022. The Rig Exploit Kit is notable for its abuse of browser exploits to distribute an array of malware. First spotted in 2019, Raccoon Stealer is a credential-stealing trojan that's advertised and sold on underground forums as a malware-as-a-service (MaaS) for $200 a month. That said, the Raccoon Stealer actors are already working on a second version that's expected to be "rewritten from scratch and optimized." But the void left by the malware's exit is being filled by other information stealers such as RedLine Stealer and Vidar. ...

An advanced persistent threat (APT) actor codenamed ToddyCat has been linked to a string of attacks aimed at government and military entities in Europe and Asia since at least December 2020. The relatively new adversarial collective is said to have commenced its operations by targeting Microsoft Exchange servers in Taiwan and Vietnam using an unknown exploit to deploy the China Chopper web shell and activate a multi-stage infection chain. Other prominent countries singled out include Afghanistan, India, Indonesia, Iran, Kyrgyzstan, Malaysia, Pakistan, Russia, Slovakia, Thailand, the U.K., and Uzbekistan, the swift escalation in targeting marked by improvements to its toolset over the course of successive campaigns. "The first wave of attacks exclusively targeted Microsoft Exchange Servers, which were compromised with Samurai, a sophisticated passive backdoor that usually works on ports 80 and 443," Russian cybersecurity company Kaspersky  said  in a report published toda...

Nearly five dozen security vulnerabilities have been disclosed in devices from 10 operational technology (OT) vendors due to what researchers call are "insecure-by-design practices." Collectively dubbed  OT:ICEFALL  by Forescout, the 56 issues span as many as 26 device models from Bently Nevada, Emerson, Honeywell, JTEKT, Motorola, Omron, Phoenix Contact, Siemens, and Yokogawa. "Exploiting these vulnerabilities, attackers with network access to a target device could remotely execute code, change the logic, files or firmware of OT devices, bypass authentication, compromise credentials, cause denials of service or have a variety of operational impacts," the company said in a technical report. These vulnerabilities could have disastrous consequences considering the impacted products are widely employed in critical infrastructure industries such as oil and gas, chemical, nuclear, power generation and distribution, manufacturing, water treatment and distribution, min...