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

Elite hackers associated with  Russia's military intelligence service  have been linked to large-volume phishing campaigns aimed at hundreds of users in Ukraine to extract intelligence and influence public discourse related to the war. Google's Threat Analysis Group (TAG), which is  monitoring  the activities of the actor under the name  FROZENLAKE , said the  attacks   continue  the "group's 2022 focus on targeting webmail users in Eastern Europe." The state-sponsored cyber actor, also tracked as APT28, Fancy Bear, Forest Blizzard, Iron Twilight, Sednit, and Sofacy, is both highly prolific and proficient. It has been active since at least 2009, targeting media, governments, and military entities for espionage. The latest intrusion set, starting in early February 2023, involved the use of reflected cross-site scripting ( XSS ) attacks on various Ukrainian government websites to redirect users to phishing domains and capture their credentials. ...

The cyber espionage actor tracked as  Blind Eagle  has been linked to a new multi-stage attack chain that leads to the deployment of the NjRAT remote access trojan on compromised systems. "The group is known for using a variety of sophisticated attack techniques, including custom malware, social engineering tactics, and spear-phishing attacks," ThreatMon  said  in a Tuesday report. Blind Eagle, also referred to as APT-C-36, is a suspected Spanish-speaking group that chiefly strikes private and public sector entities in Colombia. Attacks orchestrated by the group have also targeted Ecuador, Chile, and Spain. Infection chains documented by  Check Point  and  BlackBerry  this year have revealed the use of spear-phishing lures to deliver commodity malware families like BitRAT and AsyncRAT, as well as in-memory Python loaders capable of launching a Meterpreter payload. The latest discovery from ThreatMon entails the use of a JavaScript downloader...

Google on Tuesday rolled out emergency fixes to address another actively exploited high-severity zero-day flaw in its Chrome web browser. The flaw, tracked as  CVE-2023-2136 , is  described  as a case of  integer overflow  in  Skia , an open source 2D graphics library. Clément Lecigne of Google's Threat Analysis Group (TAG) has been credited with discovering and reporting the flaw on April 12, 2023. "Integer overflow in Skia in Google Chrome prior to 112.0.5615.137 allowed a remote attacker who had compromised the renderer process to potentially perform a sandbox escape via a crafted HTML page,"  according  to the NIST's National Vulnerability Database (NVD). The tech giant, which also fixed seven other security issues with the latest update, said it's aware of active exploitation of the flaw, but did not disclose additional details to prevent further abuse. The development marks the second Chrome zero-day vulnerability to be exploited by ma...

SaaS Adoption is Skyrocketing, Resilience Hasn't Kept Pace SaaS platforms have revolutionized how businesses operate. They simplify collaboration, accelerate deployment, and reduce the overhead of managing infrastructure. But with their rise comes a subtle, dangerous assumption: that the convenience of SaaS extends to resilience. It doesn't. These platforms weren't built with full-scale data protection in mind . Most follow a shared responsibility model — wherein the provider ensures uptime and application security, but the data inside is your responsibility. In a world of hybrid architectures, global teams, and relentless cyber threats, that responsibility is harder than ever to manage. Modern organizations are being stretched across: Hybrid and multi-cloud environments with decentralized data sprawl Complex integration layers between IaaS, SaaS, and legacy systems Expanding regulatory pressure with steeper penalties for noncompliance Escalating ransomware threats and inside...

Recent data breaches across CircleCI, LastPass, and Okta underscore a common theme: The enterprise SaaS stacks connected to these industry-leading apps can be at serious risk for compromise. CircleCI, for example, plays an integral, SaaS-to-SaaS role for SaaS app development. Similarly, tens of thousands of organizations rely on Okta and LastPass security roles for SaaS identity and access management. Enterprise and niche SaaS apps alike have effectively introduced multitudes of unmonitored endpoints into organizations of all sizes.  While  spending for SaaS security  is trending up, it lags behind categories such as cloud infrastructure protection and network security. According to Statista, the average organization employs 100+ SaaS apps, many of which are unsanctioned by IT, creating a glaring gap in SaaS security.  Why Users Flock to SaaS Apps — And Often Bypass IT in the Process As productivity tools for tasks such as marketing automation, document signatur...

The Pakistan-based advanced persistent threat (APT) actor known as  Transparent Tribe  used a two-factor authentication (2FA) tool used by Indian government agencies as a ruse to deliver a new Linux backdoor called Poseidon. "Poseidon is a second-stage payload malware associated with Transparent Tribe," Uptycs security researcher Tejaswini Sandapolla said in a technical report published this week. "It is a general-purpose backdoor that provides attackers with a wide range of capabilities to hijack an infected host. Its functionalities include logging keystrokes, taking screen captures, uploading and downloading files, and remotely administering the system in various ways." Transparent Tribe  is also tracked as APT36, Operation C-Major, PROJECTM, and Mythic Leopard, and has a track record of targeting Indian government organizations, military personnel, defense contractors, and educational entities. It has also repeatedly leveraged trojanized versions of Kavac...

U.K. and U.S. cybersecurity and intelligence agencies have  warned  of Russian nation-state actors exploiting now-patched flaws in networking equipment from Cisco to conduct reconnaissance and deploy malware against select targets. The  intrusions , per the authorities, took place in 2021 and targeted a small number of entities in Europe, U.S. government institutions, and about 250 Ukrainian victims. The activity has been attributed to a threat actor tracked as  APT28 , which is also known as Fancy Bear, Forest Blizzard (formerly Strontium), FROZENLAKE, and Sofacy, and is affiliated with the Russian General Staff Main Intelligence Directorate (GRU). "APT28 has been known to access vulnerable routers by using default and weak SNMP community strings, and by exploiting CVE-2017-6742," the National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) said. CVE-2017-6742  (CVSS score: 8.8) is part of a set of remote code execution flaws that stem from a  buffer overflow conditio...

An Iranian government-backed actor known as  Mint Sandstorm  has been linked to attacks aimed at critical infrastructure in the U.S. between late 2021 to mid-2022. "This Mint Sandstorm subgroup is technically and operationally mature, capable of developing bespoke tooling and quickly weaponizing N-day vulnerabilities, and has demonstrated agility in its operational focus, which appears to align with Iran's national priorities," the Microsoft Threat Intelligence team  said  in an analysis. Targeted entities consist of seaports, energy companies, transit systems, and a major U.S. utility and gas company. The activity is suspected to be retaliatory and in response to attacks targeting its maritime,  railway , and  gas station payment systems  that took place between May 2020 and late 2021. It's worth noting here that Iran subsequently  accused  Israel and the U.S. of masterminding the attacks on the gas stations in a bid to create unrest in ...

A fresh round of patches has been made available for the vm2 JavaScript library to address two critical flaws that could be exploited to break out of sandbox protections and achieve code execution. Both the flaws –  CVE-2023-29199  and  CVE-2023-30547  – are rated 9.8 out of 10 on the CVSS scoring system and have been addressed in versions 3.9.16 and 3.9.17, respectively. Successful  exploitation  of the  bugs , which allow an attacker to raise an unsanitized host exception, could be weaponized to escape the sandbox and run arbitrary code in the host context. "A threat actor can bypass the sandbox protections to gain remote code execution rights on the host running the sandbox," the maintainers of the vm2 library said in an alert. Credited with discovering and reporting the vulnerabilities is security researcher  SeungHyun Lee , who has also  released   proof-of-concept  (PoC) exploits for the two issues in question. The disc...

Cybersecurity researchers have detailed the inner workings of a highly evasive loader named " in2al5d p3in4er " (read: invalid printer) that's used to deliver the Aurora information stealer malware. "The in2al5d p3in4er loader is compiled with  Embarcadero RAD Studio  and targets endpoint workstations using advanced anti-VM (virtual machine) technique," cybersecurity firm Morphisec  said  in a report shared with The Hacker News. Aurora  is a Go-based information stealer that emerged on the threat landscape in late 2022. Offered as a commodity malware to other actors, it's distributed through  YouTube videos  and SEO-poised fake cracked software download websites. Clicking the links present in YouTube video descriptions redirects the victim to decoy websites where they are enticed into downloading the malware under the garb of a seemingly-legitimate utility. The loader analyzed by Morphisec is designed to query the vendor ID of the graphics card i...