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The first-ever Linux variant of the Clop ransomware has been detected in the wild, but with a faulty encryption algorithm that has made it possible to reverse engineer the process. "The ELF executable contains a flawed encryption algorithm making it possible to decrypt locked files without paying the ransom," SentinelOne researcher Antonis Terefos  said  in a report shared with The Hacker News. The cybersecurity firm, which has made available a decryptor , said it observed the ELF version on December 26, 2022, while also noting its similarities to the Windows flavor when it comes using the same encryption method. The detected sample is said to be part of a larger attack targeting educational institutions in Colombia, including La Salle University, around the same time. The university was added to the criminal group's leak site in early January 2023, per  FalconFeedsio . Known to have been active since 2019, the Clop (stylized as Cl0p) ransomware operation  suff...

VMware on Monday said it found no evidence that threat actors are leveraging an unknown security flaw, i.e., a zero-day, in its software as part of an  ongoing ransomware attack spree  worldwide. "Most reports state that End of General Support (EoGS) and/or significantly out-of-date products are being targeted with known vulnerabilities which were previously addressed and disclosed in VMware Security Advisories (VMSAs)," the virtualization services provider  said . The company is further recommending users to upgrade to the latest available supported releases of vSphere components to mitigate known issues and  disable the OpenSLP service  in ESXi. "In 2021, ESXi 7.0 U2c and ESXi 8.0 GA began shipping with the service disabled by default," VMware added. The announcement comes as unpatched and unsecured VMware ESXi servers around the world have been targeted in a  large-scale   ransomware campaign  dubbed ESXiArgs by likely exploiting a two-ye...

E-commerce industries in South Korea and the U.S. are at the receiving end of an ongoing GuLoader malware campaign, cybersecurity firm Trellix disclosed late last month. The malspam activity is notable for transitioning away from malware-laced Microsoft Word documents to NSIS executable files for loading the malware. Other countries targeted as part of the campaign include Germany, Saudi Arabia, Taiwan and Japan. NSIS , short for Nullsoft Scriptable Install System, is a script-driven open source tool used to develop installers for the Windows operating system. While attack chains in 2021 leveraged a ZIP archive containing a macro-laced Word document to drop an executable file tasked with loading GuLoader, the new phishing wave employs NSIS files embedded within ZIP or ISO images to activate the infection. "Embedding malicious executable files in archives and images can help threat actors evade detection," Trellix researcher Nico Paulo Yturriaga  said . Over the cours...

An Iranian nation-state group sanctioned by the U.S. government has been attributed to the hack of the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo in early January 2023. Microsoft, which disclosed details of the incident, is tracking the activity cluster under its chemical element-themed moniker  NEPTUNIUM , which is an Iran-based company known as Emennet Pasargad. In January 2022, the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI)  tied  the state-backed cyber unit to a sophisticated influence campaign carried out to  interfere  with the 2020 presidential elections. Two Iranian nationals have been indicted for their role in the disinformation and threat campaign. Microsoft's disclosure comes after a "hacktivist" group named Holy Souls (now identified as NEPTUNIUM) claimed to be in possession of the personal information of more than 200,000 Charlie Hebdo customers, including their full names, telephone numbers, and home and email addresses. The breach, which allow...

When SaaS applications started growing in popularity, it was unclear who was responsible for securing the data. Today, most security and IT teams understand the shared responsibility model, in which the SaaS vendor is responsible for securing the application, while the organization is responsible for securing their data.  What's far murkier, however, is where the data responsibility lies on the organization's side. For large organizations, this is a particularly challenging question. They store terabytes of customer data, employee data, financial data, strategic data, and other sensitive data records online.  SaaS data breaches and SaaS ransomware attacks can lead to the loss or public exposure of that data. Depending on the industry, some businesses could face stiff regulatory penalties for data breaches on top of the negative PR and loss of faith these breaches bring with them.  Finding the right security model is the first step before deploying any type of SSPM or ...

The maintainers of OpenSSH have released OpenSSH 9.2 to address a number of security bugs, including a memory safety vulnerability in the OpenSSH server (sshd). Tracked as  CVE-2023-25136 , the shortcoming has been classified as a pre-authentication double free vulnerability that was introduced in version 9.1. "This is not believed to be exploitable, and it occurs in the unprivileged pre-auth process that is subject to chroot(2) and is further sandboxed on most major platforms," OpenSSH disclosed in its  release notes  on February 2, 2023. Credited with  reporting  the flaw to OpenSSH in July 2022 is security researcher Mantas Mikulenas. OpenSSH is the open source implementation of the secure shell ( SSH ) protocol that offers a suite of services for encrypted communications over an unsecured network in a client-server architecture. "The exposure occurs in the chunk of memory freed twice, the 'options.kex_algorithms,'" Saeed Abbasi, manager of vulnera...

An ongoing malvertising campaign is being used to distribute virtualized .NET loaders that are designed to deploy the FormBook information-stealing malware. "The loaders, dubbed MalVirt, use obfuscated virtualization for anti-analysis and evasion along with the Windows Process Explorer driver for terminating processes," SentinelOne researchers Aleksandar Milenkoski and Tom Hegel  said  in a technical write-up. The shift to Google malvertising is the latest example of how crimeware actors are  devising alternate delivery routes  to distribute malware ever since Microsoft announced plans to block the execution of macros in Office by default from files downloaded from the internet. Malvertising entails placing rogue search engine advertisements in hopes of tricking users searching for popular software like Blender into downloading the trojanized software. The MalVirt loaders, which are implemented in .NET, use the legitimate  KoiVM  virtualizing protector...

A new Android banking trojan has set its eyes on Brazilian financial institutions to commit fraud by leveraging the PIX payments platform. Italian cybersecurity company Cleafy, which discovered the malware between the end of 2022 and the beginning of 2023, is tracking it under the name PixPirate. "PixPirate belongs to the newest generation of Android banking trojan, as it can perform ATS ( Automatic Transfer System ), enabling attackers to automate the insertion of a malicious money transfer over the instant payment platform PIX, adopted by multiple Brazilian banks," researchers Francesco Iubatti and Alessandro Strino  said . It is also the latest addition in a long list of Android banking malware to abuse the operating system's accessibility services API to carry out its nefarious functions, including disabling Google Play Protect, intercepting SMS messages, preventing uninstallation, and serving rogue ads via push notifications. Besides stealing passwords entered ...

VMware ESXi hypervisors are the target of a new wave of attacks designed to deploy ransomware on compromised systems. "These attack campaigns appear to exploit CVE-2021-21974, for which a patch has been available since February 23, 2021," the Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT) of France  said  in an advisory on Friday. VMware, in its own alert released at the time, described the issue as an  OpenSLP  heap-overflow vulnerability that could lead to the execution of arbitrary code. "A malicious actor residing within the same network segment as ESXi who has access to port 427 may be able to trigger the heap-overflow issue in OpenSLP service resulting in remote code execution," the virtualization services provider  noted . French cloud services provider OVHcloud  said  the attacks are being detected globally with a specific focus on Europe. It's being suspected that the intrusions are related to a new Rust-based ransomware strain called Nevada th...