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The Lazarus Group threat actor has been observed leveraging fake cryptocurrency apps as a lure to deliver a previously undocumented version of the AppleJeus malware, according to new findings from Volexity. "This activity notably involves a campaign likely targeting cryptocurrency users and organizations with a variant of the AppleJeus malware by way of malicious Microsoft Office documents," researchers Callum Roxan, Paul Rascagneres, and Robert Jan Mora  said . The North Korean government is known to adopt a three-pronged approach by employing malicious cyber activity that's orchestrated to collect intelligence, conduct attacks, and generate illicit revenue for the sanctions hit nation. The threats are collectively tracked under the name  Lazarus Group  (aka Hidden Cobra or  Zinc ). "North Korea has conducted cyber theft against financial institutions and cryptocurrency exchanges worldwide, potentially stealing hundreds of millions of dollars, probably to fund ...

The maintainers of the FreeBSD operating system have released updates to remediate a security vulnerability impacting the ping module that could be potentially exploited to crash the program or trigger remote code execution. The issue, assigned the identifier  CVE-2022-23093 , impacts all supported versions of FreeBSD and concerns a  stack-based buffer overflow  vulnerability in the  ping service . "ping reads raw IP packets from the network to process responses in the pr_pack() function," according to an  advisory  published last week. "The pr_pack() copies received IP and  ICMP  headers into stack buffers for further processing. In so doing, it fails to take into account the possible presence of IP option headers following the IP header in either the response or the quoted packet." As a consequence, the destination buffer could be overflowed by up to 40 bytes when the IP option headers are present. The FreeBSD Project noted that the ping ...

Search giant Google on Friday released an out-of-band security update to fix a new actively exploited zero-day flaw in its Chrome web browser. The high-severity flaw, tracked as  CVE-2022-4262 , concerns a type confusion bug in the V8 JavaScript engine. Clement Lecigne of Google's Threat Analysis Group (TAG) has been credited with reporting the issue on November 29, 2022. Type confusion vulnerabilities could be weaponized by threat actors to perform out-of-bounds memory access, or lead to a crash and arbitrary code execution. According to the NIST's National Vulnerability Database, the flaw  permits  a "remote attacker to potentially exploit heap corruption via a crafted HTML page." Google acknowledged active exploitation of the vulnerability but stopped short of sharing additional specifics to prevent further abuse. CVE-2022-4262 is the fourth actively exploited type confusion flaw in Chrome that Google has addressed since the start of the year. It's also ...

Platform certificates used by Android smartphone vendors like Samsung, LG, and MediaTek have been found to be abused to sign malicious apps. The findings were first  discovered and reported  by Google reverse engineer Łukasz Siewierski on Thursday. "A platform certificate is the application signing certificate used to sign the 'android' application on the system image," a report filed through the Android Partner Vulnerability Initiative ( AVPI )  reads . "The 'android' application runs with a highly privileged user id – android.uid.system – and holds system permissions, including permissions to access user data." This effectively means that a rogue application signed with the same certificate can gain the highest level of privileges as the Android operating system, permitting it to harvest all kinds of sensitive information from a compromised device. The list of malicious Android app packages that have abused the certificates is below - com....

The U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) this week released an Industrial Control Systems (ICS) advisory warning of multiple vulnerabilities in Mitsubishi Electric GX Works3 engineering software. "Successful exploitation of these vulnerabilities could allow unauthorized users to gain access to the MELSEC iQ-R/F/L series CPU modules and the MELSEC iQ-R series OPC UA server module or to view and execute programs," the agency  said . GX Works3  is an  engineering workstation  software used in ICS environments, acting as a mechanism for uploading and downloading programs from/to the controller, troubleshooting software and hardware issues, and performing maintenance operations. The wide range of functions also makes the platform an attractive target for threat actors looking to compromise such systems to commandeer the  managed PLCs . Three of the 10 shortcomings relate to cleartext storage of sensitive data, four relate to the use of a...

Old technology solutions – every organization has a few of them tucked away somewhere.  It could be an old and unsupported storage system or a tape library holding the still-functional backups from over 10 years ago.  This is a common scenario with software too. For example, consider an accounting software suite that was extremely expensive when it was purchased. If the vendor eventually went under, then there's no longer any support for the software – which means that the accounting solution only works on some older operating system that isn't supplied with updates either. How valuable is it to  keep older solutions like this running ? Well, organizations don't enjoy running old legacy systems just for the pleasure of it, but they're often forced to keep them running because it's their only option, or at least the only cost-effective option available to them. If it works, it works…? From a purely functional perspective, there is usually no problem with old te...

IBM has fixed a high-severity security vulnerability affecting its Cloud Databases (ICD) for PostgreSQL product that could be potentially exploited to tamper with internal repositories and run unauthorized code. The privilege escalation flaw (CVSS score: 8.8), dubbed " Hell's Keychain " by cloud security firm Wiz, has been described as a "first-of-its-kind supply-chain attack vector impacting a cloud provider's infrastructure." Successful exploitation of the bug could enable a malicious actor to remotely execute code in customers' environments and even read or modify data stored in the PostgreSQL database. "The vulnerability consists of a chain of three exposed secrets (Kubernetes service account token, private container registry password, CI/CD server credentials) coupled with overly permissive network access to internal build servers," Wiz researchers Ronen Shustin and Shir Tamari  said . Hell's Keychain commences with an SQL inject...

A previously undocumented Go-based malware is targeting Redis servers with the goal of taking control of the infected systems and likely building a botnet network. The attacks involve taking advantage of a critical security vulnerability in the open source, in-memory, key-value store that was disclosed earlier this year to deploy  Redigo , according to cloud security firm  Aqua . Tracked as CVE-2022-0543 (CVSS score: 10.0), the weakness pertains to a case of sandbox escape in the Lua scripting engine that could be leveraged to attain remote code execution. This is not the first time the flaw has come under active exploitation, what with Juniper Threat Labs uncovering attacks perpetrated by the  Muhstik botnet  in March 2022 to execute arbitrary commands. The Redigo infection chain is similar in that the adversaries scan for exposed Redis servers on port 6379 to establish initial access, following it up by downloading a shared library "exp_lin.so" from a remote...

The new  Cyber Incident Reporting for Critical Infrastructure Act of 2022 (CIRCIA)  requires CISA to create rules regarding cyber incident reporting by critical infrastructure organizations. The RFI and hearings precede a Notice of Proposed Rulemaking (NPRM) that CISA must publish sooner than  24 months  from the enactment of CIRCIA, which the President signed into law  in March . The sessions and NPRM are steps toward creating the new rule.  CISA is  soliciting expert opinion on what to include  in a report but is taking steps to implement the change soon. Here's what that change means for businesses in the US and what you can do about it now.  Overview of the CISA reporting rule  Owners and operators of critical infrastructure must file cyber incident reports with CISA  within 72 hours . They must report ransom payments for ransomware attacks  within 24 hours . Other businesses can take part voluntarily.  The CISA D...