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The China-aligned Mustang Panda actor has been observed using a hitherto unseen custom backdoor called  MQsTTang  as part of an ongoing social engineering campaign that commenced in January 2023. "Unlike most of the group's malware, MQsTTang doesn't seem to be based on existing families or publicly available projects," ESET researcher Alexandre Côté Cyr  said  in a new report. Attack chains orchestrated by the group have stepped up targeting of European entities in the wake of  Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine  last year. The victimology of the current activity is unclear, but the Slovak cybersecurity company said the decoy filenames are in line with the group's previous campaigns that target European political organizations. That said, ESET also observed attacks against unknown entities in Bulgaria and Australia, as well as a governmental institution in Taiwan, indicating a broader focus on Europe and Asia. Mustang Panda has a  history ...

The U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) has  released  a new advisory about  Royal ransomware , which emerged in the threat landscape last year. "After gaining access to victims' networks, Royal actors disable antivirus software and exfiltrate large amounts of data before ultimately deploying the ransomware and encrypting the systems," CISA  said . The custom  ransomware program , which has targeted U.S. and international organizations since September 2022, is believed to have evolved from earlier iterations that were dubbed Zeon.  What's more, it's said to be  operated  by seasoned threat actors who used to be part of Conti Team One, cybersecurity company Trend Micro disclosed in December 2022. The ransomware group employs call back phishing as a means of delivering their ransomware to victims, a technique  widely adopted  by criminal groups that splintered from the Conti enterprise last year following its...

A sophisticated attack campaign dubbed  SCARLETEEL  is targeting containerized environments to perpetrate theft of proprietary data and software. "The attacker exploited a containerized workload and then leveraged it to perform privilege escalation into an AWS account in order to steal proprietary software and credentials," Sysdig  said  in a new report. The advanced cloud attack also entailed the deployment of crypto miner software, which the cybersecurity company said is either an attempt to generate illicit profits or a ploy to distract defenders and throw them off the trail. The initial infection vector banked on exploiting a vulnerable public-facing service in a self-managed Kubernetes cluster hosted on Amazon Web Services (AWS). Upon gaining a successful foothold, an XMRig crypto miner was launched and a bash script was used to obtain credentials that could be used to further burrow into the AWS cloud infrastructure and exfiltrate sensitive data. "Either...

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Misconfigured Redis database servers are the target of a novel cryptojacking campaign that leverages a legitimate and open source command-line file transfer service to implement its attack. "Underpinning this campaign was the use of transfer[.]sh," Cado Security  said  in a report shared with The Hacker News. "It's possible that it's an attempt at evading detections based on other common code hosting domains (such as pastebin[.]com)." The cloud cybersecurity firm said the command line interactivity associated with transfer[.]sh has made it an ideal tool for hosting and delivering malicious payloads. The attack chain commences with targeting insecure Redis deployments, followed by registering a  cron job  that leads to arbitrary code execution when parsed by the scheduler. The job is designed to retrieve a payload hosted at transfer[.]sh. It's worth noting that  similar   attack mechanisms  have been employed by other threat actors like TeamTNT an...

As a primary working interface, the browser plays a significant role in today's corporate environment. The browser is constantly used by employees to access websites, SaaS applications and internal applications, from both managed and unmanaged devices. A new report published by LayerX, a browser security vendor, finds that attackers are exploiting this reality and are targeting it in increasing numbers ( download report here ). The key report findings  Over half of all the browsers in the enterprise environment are misconfigured.  While a configured browser is nearly impossible to compromise, stealing data from misconfigured browsers is like taking candy from a baby. The Leading misconfigurations are improper use of personal browser profiles on work devices (29%), poor patching routine (50%), and the use of corporate browser profiles on unmanaged devices. 3 of every 10 SaaS applications are non-corporate shadow SaaS,  and no SaaS discovery/security solution can addre...

A malicious Python package uploaded to the Python Package Index (PyPI) has been found to contain a fully-featured information stealer and remote access trojan. The package, named  colourfool , was identified by Kroll's Cyber Threat Intelligence team, with the company calling the malware  Colour-Blind . "The 'Colour-Blind' malware points to the democratization of cybercrime that could lead to an intensified threat landscape, as multiple variants can be spawned from code sourced from others," Kroll researchers Dave Truman and George Glass  said  in a report shared with The Hacker News. colourfool, like  other rogue Python modules  discovered in recent months, conceals its malicious code in the setup script, which points to a ZIP archive payload hosted on Discord. The file contains a Python script (code.py) that comes with different modules designed to log keystrokes, steal cookies, and even disable security software. The malware, besides performing def...

The threat actor known as  Lucky Mouse  has developed a Linux version of a malware toolkit called SysUpdate, expanding on its ability to target devices running the operating system. The oldest version of the updated artifact dates back to July 2022, with the malware incorporating new features designed to evade security software and resist reverse engineering. Cybersecurity company Trend Micro  said  it observed the equivalent Windows variant in June 2022, nearly one month after the command-and-control (C2) infrastructure was set up. Lucky Mouse is also  tracked  under the monikers APT27, Bronze Union, Emissary Panda, and Iron Tiger, and is known to utilize a variety of malware such as  SysUpdate , HyperBro, PlugX, and a Linux backdoor dubbed rshell. Over the past two years, campaigns orchestrated by the threat group have embraced supply chain compromises of legitimate apps like  Able Desktop  and  MiMi Chat  to obtain remote a...

Cisco on Wednesday rolled out  security updates  to address a critical flaw impacting its IP Phone 6800, 7800, 7900, and 8800 Series products. The vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2023-20078, is rated 9.8 out of 10 on the CVSS scoring system and is described as a command injection bug in the web-based management interface arising due to insufficient validation of user-supplied input. Successful exploitation of the bug could allow an unauthenticated, remote attacker to inject arbitrary commands that are executed with the highest privileges on the underlying operating system. "An attacker could exploit this vulnerability by sending a crafted request to the web-based management interface," Cisco  said  in an alert published on March 1, 2023. Also patched by the company is a high-severity denial-of-service (DoS) vulnerability affecting the same set of devices, as well as the Cisco Unified IP Conference Phone 8831 and Unified IP Phone 7900 Series. CVE-2023-20079 (CVSS...

Six different law firms were targeted in January and February 2023 as part of two disparate threat campaigns distributing  GootLoader  and  FakeUpdates  (aka SocGholish) malware strains. GootLoader , active since late 2020, is a first-stage downloader that's capable of delivering a wide range of secondary payloads such as Cobalt Strike and ransomware. It notably  employs  search engine optimization (SEO) poisoning to funnel victims searching for business-related documents toward drive-by download sites that drop the JavaScript malware. In the  campaign  detailed by cybersecurity company eSentire, the threat actors are said to have compromised legitimate, but vulnerable, WordPress websites and added new blog posts without the owners' knowledge. "When the computer user navigates to one of these malicious web pages and hits the link to download the purported business agreement, they are unknowingly downloading GootLoader," eSentire researcher K...