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Cybersecurity researchers have exposed the workings of a scam ring called CryptosLabs that's estimated to have made €480 million in illegal profits by targeting users in French-speaking individuals in France, Belgium, and Luxembourg since April 2018. The syndicate's massive fake investment schemes primarily involve impersonating 40 well-known banks, fin-techs, asset management firms, and crypto platforms, setting up a scam infrastructure spanning over 350 domains hosted on more than 80 servers, Group-IB  said  in a deep-dive report. The Singapore-headquartered company described the criminal outfit as "operated by a hierarchy of kingpins, sales agents, developers, and call center operators" who are recruited to ensnare potential victims by promising high returns on their capital. "CryptoLabs made their scam schemes more convincing through region-focused tactics, such as hiring French-speaking callers as 'managers' and creating fake landing pages, socia...

For too long the cybersecurity world focused exclusively on information technology (IT), leaving operational technology (OT) to fend for itself. Traditionally, few industrial enterprises had dedicated cybersecurity leaders. Any security decisions that arose fell to the plant and factory managers, who are highly skilled technical experts in other areas but often lack cybersecurity training or knowledge. In more recent years, an uptick in cyberattacks against industrial facilities and the trend of IT/OT convergence driven by Industry 4.0 have highlighted the vacuum of ownership around OT security.  According to a new Fortinet report , most organizations are looking to Chief Information Security Officers (CISOs) to solve the problem. Fortunately, CISOs are no strangers to change or difficult challenges. The position itself is less than 20 years old, yet in those two decades CISOs have navigated some of the most disruptive cybersecurity events that were truly watershed moments in te...

A ransomware threat called 8Base that has been operating under the radar for over a year has been attributed to a "massive spike in activity" in May and June 2023. "The group utilizes encryption paired with 'name-and-shame' techniques to compel their victims to pay their ransoms," VMware Carbon Black researchers Deborah Snyder and Fae Carlisle  said  in a report shared with The Hacker News. "8Base has an opportunistic pattern of compromise with recent victims spanning across varied industries." 8Base, according to statistics gathered by  Malwarebytes  and  NCC Group , has been linked to 67 attacks as of May 2023, with about 50% of the victims  operating  in the business services, manufacturing, and construction sectors. A majority of the targeted companies are located in the U.S. and Brazil. With very little known about the operators of the ransomware, its origins remain something of a cipher. What's evident is that it has been active sinc...

Multiple SQL injection vulnerabilities have been disclosed in Gentoo Soko that could lead to remote code execution (RCE) on vulnerable systems. "These SQL injections happened despite the use of an Object-Relational Mapping (ORM) library and prepared statements," SonarSource researcher Thomas Chauchefoin  said , adding they could result in RCE on Soko because of a "misconfiguration of the database." The  two   issues , which were discovered in the search feature of Soko, have been collectively tracked as CVE-2023-28424 (CVSS score: 9.1). They were addressed within 24 hours of responsible disclosure on March 17, 2023. Soko is a Go software module that powers  packages.gentoo.org , offering users an easy way to search through different Portage packages that are available for Gentoo Linux distribution. But the shortcomings identified in the service meant that it could have been possible for a malicious actor to  inject specially crafted code , resulting in the ...

A new process injection technique dubbed Mockingjay could be exploited by threat actors to bypass security solutions to execute malicious code on compromised systems. "The injection is executed without space allocation, setting permissions or even starting a thread," Security Joes researchers Thiago Peixoto, Felipe Duarte, and Ido Naor  said  in a report shared with The Hacker News. "The uniqueness of this technique is that it requires a vulnerable DLL and copying code to the right section." Process injection is an  attack method  that allows adversaries to inject code into processes in order to evade process-based defenses and elevate privileges. In doing so, it could allow for the execution of arbitrary code in the memory space of a separate live process. Some of the well-known process injection techniques include dynamic link library (DLL) injection, portable executable injection, thread execution hijacking, process hollowing, and process doppelgänging, amon...

Cybersecurity researchers have discovered a new ongoing campaign aimed at the npm ecosystem that leverages a unique execution chain to deliver an unknown payload to targeted systems. "The packages in question seem to be published in pairs, each pair working in unison to fetch additional resources which are subsequently decoded and/or executed," software supply chain security firm Phylum  said  in a report released last week. To that end, the order in which the pair of packages are installed is paramount to pulling off a successful attack, as the first of the two modules is designed to store locally a token retrieved from a remote server. The campaign was first discovered on June 11, 2023. The second package subsequently passes this token as a parameter alongside the operating system type to an  HTTP GET request  to acquire a second script from the remote server. A successful execution returns a Base64-encoded string that is immediately executed but only if t...

As the business environment becomes increasingly connected, organizations' attack surfaces continue to expand, making it challenging to map and secure both known and unknown assets. In particular, unknown assets present security challenges related to shadow IT, misconfigurations, ineffective scan coverage, among others. Given attack surface sprawl and evolving threats, many organizations are embracing  attack surface management (ASM)  tools to discover and address critical exposures. Asset discovery is an important capability to have, and one that's helping to drive the adoption of attack surface management tools and services. That said, asset discovery is only one aspect of effective attack surface management. Making the attack surface as impenetrable as possible takes offensive security that goes far beyond the discovery phase. Why Asset Discovery Isn't Enough  Given the complexity and ever-expanding scale of the digital infrastructure at most companies, cataloging...

Europol on Tuesday  announced  that the takedown of EncroChat in July 2020 led to 6,558 arrests worldwide and the seizure of €900 million in illicit criminal proceeds. The law enforcement agency said that a subsequent joint investigation initiated by French and Dutch authorities intercepted and analyzed over 115 million conversations that took place over the encrypted messaging platform between no less than 60,000 users. Now almost three years later, the information obtained from digital correspondence has resulted in - Arrests of 6,558 suspects, including 197 high-value targets 7,134 years of imprisonment of convicted criminals Confiscation of €739.7 million in cash Freeze of €154.1 million frozen in assets or bank accounts Seizure of 30.5 million pills of chemical drugs Seizure of 103.5 tonnes of cocaine, 163.4 tonnes of cannabis, and 3.3 tonnes of heroin Seizure of 971 vehicles, 83 boats, and 40 planes Seizure of 271 estates or homes, and Seizure of 923 weapons...

A new Android malware campaign has been observed pushing the Anatsa banking trojan to target banking customers in the U.S., U.K., Germany, Austria, and Switzerland since the start of March 2023. "The actors behind Anatsa aim to steal credentials used to authorize customers in mobile banking applications and perform Device-Takeover Fraud (DTO) to initiate fraudulent transactions," ThreatFabric  said  in an analysis published Monday. The Dutch cybersecurity company said Anatsa-infected Google Play Store  dropper apps  have accrued over 30,000 installations to date, indicating that the official app storefront has become an effective distribution vector for the malware. Anatsa, also known by the name TeaBot and Toddler, first  emerged  in  early 2021 , and has been observed  masquerading  as  seemingly innocuous utility apps  like PDF readers, QR code scanners, and two-factor authentication (2FA) apps on Google Play to siphon users...