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

A new backdoor associated with a malware downloader named  Wslink  has been discovered, with the tool likely used by the notorious North Korea-aligned Lazarus Group, new findings reveal. The payload, dubbed  WinorDLL64  by ESET, is a fully-featured implant that can exfiltrate, overwrite, and delete files; execute PowerShell commands; and obtain comprehensive information about the underlying machine. Its other features comprise listing active sessions, creating and terminating processes, enumerating drives, and compressing directories. Wslink was  first documented  by the Slovak cybersecurity firm in October 2021, describing it as a "simple yet remarkable" malware loader that's capable of executing received modules in memory. "The Wslink payload can be leveraged later for lateral movement, due to its specific interest in network sessions," ESET researcher Vladislav Hrčka  said . "The Wslink loader listens on a port specified in the configuration an...

An active malware campaign has set its sights on Facebook and YouTube users by leveraging a new information stealer to hijack the accounts and abuse the systems' resources to mine cryptocurrency. Bitdefender is calling the malware  S1deload Stealer  for its use of  DLL side-loading techniques  to get past security defenses and execute its malicious components. "Once infected, S1deload Stealer steals user credentials, emulates human behavior to artificially boost videos and other content engagement, assesses the value of individual accounts (such as identifying corporate social media admins), mines for BEAM cryptocurrency, and propagates the malicious link to the user's followers," Bitdefender researcher Dávid ÁCS  said . Put differently, the goal of the campaign is to take control of the users' Facebook and YouTube accounts and rent out access to raise view counts and likes for videos and posts shared on the platforms. More than 600 unique users are estima...

Cybersecurity researchers are warning of "imposter packages" mimicking popular libraries available on the Python Package Index (PyPI) repository. The 41 malicious PyPI packages have been found to pose as typosquatted variants of legitimate modules such as HTTP, AIOHTTP, requests, urllib, and urllib3. The names of the packages are as follows: aio5, aio6, htps1, httiop, httops, httplat, httpscolor, httpsing, httpslib, httpsos, httpsp, httpssp, httpssus, httpsus, httpxgetter, httpxmodifier, httpxrequester, httpxrequesterv2, httpxv2, httpxv3, libhttps, piphttps, pohttp, requestsd, requestse, requestst, ulrlib3, urelib3, urklib3, urlkib3, urllb, urllib33, urolib3, xhttpsp "The descriptions for these packages, for the most part, don't hint at their malicious intent," ReversingLabs researcher Lucija Valentić  said  in a new writeup. "Some are disguised as real libraries and make flattering comparisons between their capabilities and those of known, legitimate ...

Apple has revised the  security advisories  it released last month to include three new vulnerabilities impacting  iOS, iPadOS , and  macOS . The first flaw is a  race condition  in the Crash Reporter component (CVE-2023-23520) that could enable a malicious actor to read arbitrary files as root. The iPhone maker said it addressed the issue with additional validation. The two other vulnerabilities, credited to Trellix researcher Austin Emmitt, reside in the  Foundation framework  (CVE-2023-23530 and CVE-2023-23531) and could be weaponized to achieve code execution. "An app may be able to execute arbitrary code out of its sandbox or with certain elevated privileges," Apple said, adding it patched the issues with "improved memory handling." The medium to high-severity vulnerabilities have been patched in iOS 16.3, iPadOS 16.3, and macOS Ventura 13.2 that were shipped on January 23, 2023. Trellix, in its own report on Tuesday,  classified...

In what's a continuing assault on the open source ecosystem,  over 15,000 spam packages  have flooded the npm repository in an attempt to distribute phishing links. "The packages were created using automated processes, with project descriptions and auto-generated names that closely resembled one another," Checkmarx researcher Yehuda Gelb  said  in a Tuesday report. "The attackers referred to retail websites using referral IDs, thus profiting from the referral rewards they earned." The modus operandi involves poisoning the registry with rogue packages that include links to phishing campaigns in their README.md files, evocative of a  similar campaign  the software supply chain security firm exposed in December 2022. The fake modules masqueraded as cheats and free resources, with some packages named as "free-tiktok-followers," "free-xbox-codes," and "instagram-followers-free." The ultimate goal of the operation is to entice user...

If you Google "third-party data breaches" you will find many recent reports of data breaches that were either caused by an attack at a third party or sensitive information stored at a third-party location was exposed. Third-party data breaches don't discriminate by industry because almost every company is operating with some sort of vendor relationship – whether it be a business partner, contractor or reseller, or the use of IT software or platform, or another service provider. Organizations are now sharing data with an average of 730 third-party vendors, according to a  report by Osano , and with the acceleration of digital transformation, that number will only grow. The Importance of Third-Party Risk Management With more organizations sharing data with more third-party vendors, it shouldn't be surprising that more than 50% of security incidents in the past two years have stemmed from a third-party with access privileges, according to a  CyberRisk Alliance report....

Shipping companies and medical laboratories in Asia have been the subject of a suspected espionage campaign carried out by a never-before-seen threat actor dubbed Hydrochasma . The activity, which has been ongoing since October 2022, "relies exclusively on publicly available and living-off-the-land tools," Symantec, by Broadcom Software,  said  in a report shared with The Hacker News. There is no evidence available as yet to determine its origin or affiliation with known threat actors, but the cybersecurity company said the group may be having an interest in industry verticals that are involved in COVID-19-related treatments or vaccines. The standout aspects of the campaign is the absence of data exfiltration and custom malware, with the threat actor employing open source tools for intelligence gathering. By using already available tools, the goal, it appears, is to not only confuse attribution efforts, but also to make the attacks stealthier. The start of the infection...

An open source command-and-control (C2) framework known as Havoc is being adopted by threat actors as an alternative to other well-known legitimate toolkits like  Cobalt Strike ,  Sliver , and  Brute Ratel . Cybersecurity firm Zscaler said it observed a new campaign in the beginning of January 2023 targeting an unnamed government organization that utilized  Havoc . "While C2 frameworks are prolific, the open-source Havoc framework is an advanced post-exploitation command-and-control framework capable of bypassing the most current and updated version of Windows 11 defender due to the implementation of advanced evasion techniques such as indirect syscalls and sleep obfuscation," researchers Niraj Shivtarkar and Shatak Jain  said . The attack sequence documented by Zscaler begins with a ZIP archive that embeds a decoy document and a screen-saver file that's designed to download and launch the Havoc Demon agent on the infected host. Demon is the implant genera...

At the beginning of January, Gcore faced an incident involving several L3/L4 DDoS attacks with a peak volume of 650 Gbps. Attackers exploited over 2000 servers belonging to one of the top three cloud providers worldwide and targeted a client who was using a free CDN plan. However, due to Gcore's distribution of infrastructure and a large number of peering partners, the attacks were mitigated, and the client's web application remained available. Why was mitigating these attacks so significant? 1. These attacks were significant because they exceeded the average bandwidth of similar attacks by 60×.  The performed attacks relate to volume-based attacks targeted to saturate the attacked application's bandwidth in order to overflow it. Measuring total volume (bps)—rather than the number of requests—is the way these attacks are usually tabulated. The average bandwidth of this attack type is generally in the tens of Gbps (about 10 Gbps). Therefore, the specified attacks (at 650 Gb...