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A suspected Pakistan-aligned advanced persistent threat (APT) group known as  Transparent Tribe  has been linked to an ongoing cyber espionage campaign targeting Indian and Pakistani Android users with a backdoor called  CapraRAT . "Transparent Tribe distributed the Android CapraRAT backdoor via trojanized secure messaging and calling apps branded as MeetsApp and MeetUp," ESET  said  in a report shared with The Hacker News. As many as 150 victims, likely with military or political leanings, are estimated to have been targeted, with the malware (APK package name " com.meetup.chat ") available to download from fake websites that masquerade as the official distribution centers of these apps. It's being suspected that the targets are lured through a honeytrap romance scam wherein the threat actor approaches the victims via another platform and persuades them to install the malware-laced apps under the pretext of "secure" messaging and calling. Howeve...

Investing in digital identity can improve security, increase clinical productivity, and boost healthcare's bottom line.  —  b y Gus Malezis, CEO of Imprivata Digitalization has created immeasurable opportunities for businesses over the past two decades. But the growth of hybrid work and expansion of Internet of Things (IoT) has outpaced traditional 'castle and moat' cybersecurity, introducing unprecedented vulnerabilities, especially in the healthcare industry. Although all organizations have important data to secure, healthcare holds some of the public's most sensitive personal health information (PHI) – not to mention insurance and financial data, as well.  We all expect this information to be secured and protected, especially with HIPAA laws in place. However, due to increasing IT fragmentation and the growing sophistication of cyberattacks, this is no longer guaranteed. In fact, the number of individuals affected by health data breaches in the U.S. since 2009 is ...

An older version of Shein's  Android application  suffered from a bug that periodically captured and transmitted clipboard contents to a remote server. The Microsoft 365 Defender Research Team said it  discovered  the problem in  version 7.9.2  of the app that was released on December 16, 2021. The issue has since been addressed as of May 2022. Shein, originally named ZZKKO, is a Chinese online fast fashion retailer based in Singapore. The app, which is currently at version 9.0.0, has over 100 million downloads on the Google Play Store. The tech giant  said  it's not "specifically aware of any malicious intent behind the behavior," but noted that the function isn't necessary to perform tasks on the app. It further pointed out that launching the application after copying any content to the device clipboard automatically triggered an HTTP POST request containing the data to the server "api-service[.]shein[.]com." To mitigate such privacy ris...

The massive breach at LastPass was the result of one of its engineers failing to update Plex on their home computer, in what's a sobering reminder of the dangers of failing to keep software up-to-date. The embattled password management service last week  revealed  how unidentified actors leveraged information stolen from an earlier incident that took place prior to August 12, 2022, along with details "available from a third-party data breach and a vulnerability in a third-party media software package to launch a coordinated second attack" between August and October 2022. The intrusion ultimately enabled the adversary to steal partially encrypted password vault data and customer information. The second attack specifically singled out one of the four DevOps engineers, targeting their home computer with a keylogger malware to obtain the credentials and breach the cloud storage environment. This, in turn, is said to have been made possible by exploiting a nearly three-y...

A never-before-seen complex malware is targeting business-grade routers to covertly spy on victims in Latin America, Europe, and North America at least since July 2022. The elusive campaign, dubbed  Hiatus  by Lumen Black Lotus Labs, has been found to deploy two malicious binaries, a remote access trojan dubbed HiatusRAT and a  variant of tcpdump  that makes it possible to capture packet capture on the target device. "Once a targeted system is infected, HiatusRAT allows the threat actor to remotely interact with the system, and it utilizes prebuilt functionality [...] to convert the compromised machine into a covert proxy for the threat actor," the company  said  in a report shared with The Hacker News. "The packet-capture binary enables the actor to monitor router traffic on ports associated with email and file-transfer communications." The threat cluster primarily singles out end-of-life (EoL) DrayTek Vigor router models 2960 and 3900, with approxim...

Deep fakes are expected to become a more prominent attack vector. Here's how to identify them. What are Deep Fakes? A deep fake is the act of maliciously replacing real images and videos with fabricated ones to perform information manipulation. To create images, video and audio that are high quality enough to be used in deep fakes, AI and ML are required. Such use of AI, ML and image replacement are unlike other types of information manipulation, which use less extreme manipulation techniques, like misrepresentation of information, isolating parts of the information or editing it in a deceptive manner. Etay Maor, Senior Director of Security Strategy at Cato Networks adds "To add complications, the recent advancements and accessibility to AI generated text, such as GPT3, have already been used in combination with deepfakes (as a proof of concept) to create interactive, human looking conversation bots" What Do Deep Fakes Look Like? Deep fakes come in all shapes and siz...

Law enforcement authorities from Germany and Ukraine have targeted suspected core members of a cybercrime group that has been behind large-scale attacks using DoppelPaymer ransomware. The operation, which took place on February 28, 2023, was carried out with support from the Dutch National Police (Politie) and the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), according to Europol. This encompassed a raid of a German national's house as well as searches in the Ukrainian cities of Kiev and Kharkiv. A Ukrainian national was also interrogated. Both individuals are believed to have taken up crucial positions in the DoppelPaymer group. "Forensic analysis of the seized equipment is still ongoing to determine the exact role of the suspects and their links to other accomplices," the agency further  said . In a related development, German authorities issued arrest warrants against three alleged DoppelPaymer operatives – lgor Olegovich Turashev , Igor Garshin (aka Igor Garschin...

Malicious actors can take advantage of "insufficient" forensic visibility into Google Cloud Platform (GCP) to exfiltrate sensitive data, a new research has found. "Unfortunately, GCP does not provide the level of visibility in its storage logs that is needed to allow any effective forensic investigation, making organizations blind to potential data exfiltration attacks," cloud incident response firm Mitiga  said  in a report. The attack banks on the prerequisite that the adversary is able to gain control of an identity and access management (IAM) entity in the targeted organization by methods like social engineering to access the GCP environment. The crux of the problem is that GCP's  storage access logs  do not provide adequate transparency with regards to potential file access and read events, instead grouping them all as a single "Object Get" activity. "The same event is used for a wide variety of types of access, including: Reading a fil...

A group of researchers has revealed what it says is a vulnerability in a specific implementation of  CRYSTALS-Kyber , one of the encryption algorithms chosen by the U.S. government as quantum-resistant last year. The exploit relates to "side-channel attacks on up to the fifth-order masked implementations of CRYSTALS-Kyber in ARM Cortex-M4 CPU," Elena Dubrova, Kalle Ngo, and Joel Gärtner of KTH Royal Institute of Technology  said  in a paper. CRYSTALS-Kyber is one of four post-quantum algorithms  selected  by the U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) after a rigorous multi-year effort to identify a set of next-generation encryption standards that can withstand huge leaps in computing power. A side-channel attack, as the name implies, involves extracting secrets from a cryptosystem through measurement and analysis of physical parameters. Some examples of such parameters include supply current, execution time, and electromagnetic emission. ...