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Cyber attacks using infected USB infection drives as an initial access vector have witnessed a three-fold increase in the first half of 2023,  That's according to new findings from Mandiant, which detailed two such campaigns – SOGU and SNOWYDRIVE – targeting both public and private sector entities across the world. SOGU is the "most prevalent USB-based cyber espionage attack using USB flash drives and one of the most aggressive cyber espionage campaigns targeting both public and private sector organizations globally across industry verticals," the Google-owned threat intelligence firm  said . The activity has been attributed to a China-based cluster called TEMP.Hex, which is also tracked under the names Camaro Dragon, Earth Preta, and Mustang Panda. Targets include construction and engineering, business services, government, health, transportation, and retail in Europe, Asia, and the U.S. The infection chain detailed by Mandiant exhibits tactical commonalities with...

Microsoft Word documents exploiting known remote code execution flaws are being used as phishing lures to drop malware called  LokiBot  on compromised systems. "LokiBot, also known as Loki PWS, has been a well-known information-stealing Trojan active since 2015," Fortinet FortiGuard Labs researcher Cara Lin  said . "It primarily targets Windows systems and aims to gather sensitive information from infected machines." The cybersecurity company, which spotted the campaign in May 2023, said the attacks take advantage of  CVE-2021-40444  and  CVE-2022-30190  (aka Follina) to achieve code execution. The Word file that weaponizes CVE-2021-40444 contains an external GoFile link embedded within an XML file that leads to the download of an HTML file, which exploits Follina to download a next-stage payload, an injector module written in Visual Basic that decrypts and launches LokiBot. The injector also features evasion techniques to check for the presence ...

The Russia-linked threat actor known as Gamaredon has been observed conducting data exfiltration activities within an hour of the initial compromise. "As a vector of primary compromise, for the most part, emails and messages in messengers (Telegram, WhatsApp, Signal) are used, in most cases, using previously compromised accounts," the Computer Emergency Response Team of Ukraine (CERT-UA)  said  in an analysis of the group published last week. Gamaredon , also called Aqua Blizzard, Armageddon, Shuckworm, or UAC-0010, is a  state-sponsored actor  with ties to the SBU Main Office in the Autonomous Republic of Crimea, which was annexed by Russia in 2014. The group is estimated to have infected thousands of government computers. It is also one of the  many Russian hacking crews  that have maintained an  active presence  since the start of the Russo-Ukrainian war in February 2022, leveraging phishing campaigns to deliver PowerShell backdoors such a...

With generative artificial intelligence (AI) becoming all the rage these days, it's perhaps not surprising that the technology has been repurposed by malicious actors to their own advantage, enabling avenues for accelerated cybercrime. According to findings from SlashNext, a new generative AI cybercrime tool called  WormGPT  has been advertised on underground forums as a way for adversaries to launch sophisticated phishing and business email compromise ( BEC ) attacks. "This tool presents itself as a blackhat alternative to GPT models, designed specifically for malicious activities," security researcher Daniel Kelley  said . "Cybercriminals can use such technology to automate the creation of highly convincing fake emails, personalized to the recipient, thus increasing the chances of success for the attack." The author of the software has described it as the "biggest enemy of the well-known ChatGPT" that "lets you do all sorts of illegal stuff....

Microsoft on Friday said a validation error in its source code allowed for Azure Active Directory (Azure AD) tokens to be forged by a malicious actor known as  Storm-0558  using a Microsoft account (MSA) consumer signing key to breach two dozen organizations. "Storm-0558 acquired an inactive MSA consumer signing key and used it to forge authentication tokens for Azure AD enterprise and MSA consumer to access OWA and Outlook.com," the tech giant  said  in a deeper analysis of the campaign. "The method by which the actor acquired the key is a matter of ongoing investigation." "Though the key was intended only for MSA accounts, a validation issue allowed this key to be trusted for signing Azure AD tokens. This issue has been corrected." It's not immediately clear if the token validation issue was exploited as a "zero-day vulnerability" or if Microsoft was already aware of the problem before it came under in-the-wild abuse. The attacks singl...

Multiple security vulnerabilities have been discovered in various services, including Honeywell Experion distributed control system (DCS) and QuickBlox, that, if successfully exploited, could result in severe compromise of affected systems. Dubbed Crit.IX, the nine flaws in the Honeywell Experion DCS platform allow for "unauthorized remote code execution, which means an attacker would have the power to take over the devices and alter the operation of the DCS controller, whilst also hiding the alterations from the engineering workstation that manages the controller," Armis said in a statement shared with The Hacker News. Put differently, the issues relate to lack of encryption and adequate authentication mechanisms in a proprietary protocol called Control Data Access (CDA) that's used to communicate between Experion Servers and C300 controllers, effectively enabling a threat actor to take over the devices and alter the operation of the DCS controller. "As a resul...

As security practices continue to evolve, one primary concern persists in the minds of security professionals—the risk of employees unintentionally or deliberately exposing vital information. Insider threats, whether originating from deliberate actions or accidental incidents, pose a significant challenge to safeguarding sensitive data. To effectively address insider risks, organizations must adopt a holistic approach that encompasses technical, procedural, and human elements. While access controls, encryption, and monitoring systems are crucial for identifying and mitigating unauthorized access and suspicious activities, the increasing prevalence of cloud-based environments and the surge in SaaS application usage demand a fresh perspective on Insider Risk Management from a SaaS security standpoint. Stay ahead of the game by embracing the SaaS security lens. Join us for an enlightening webinar where we will demonstrate how security practitioners can proactively adapt their approach...

All-In-One Security (AIOS), a WordPress plugin installed on over one million sites, has issued a security update after a bug introduced in version 5.1.9 of the software caused users' passwords being added to the database in plaintext format. "A malicious site administrator (i.e. a user already logged into the site as an admin) could then have read them," UpdraftPlus, the maintainers of AIOS,  said . "This would be a problem if those site administrators were to try out those passwords on other services where your users might have used the same password. If those other services' logins are not protected by two-factor authentication, this could be a risk to the affected website." The issue surfaced nearly three weeks ago when a user of the plugin  reported  the behavior, stating they were "absolutely shocked that a security plugin is making such a basic security 101 error." AIOS also noted that the updates remove the existing logged data from th...

A malicious actor has been linked to a cloud credential stealing campaign in June 2023 that's focused on Azure and Google Cloud Platform (GCP) services, marking the adversary's expansion in targeting beyond Amazon Web Services (AWS). The findings come from  SentinelOne  and  Permiso , which said the "campaigns share similarity with tools attributed to the notorious TeamTNT cryptojacking crew," although it emphasized that "attribution remains challenging with script-based tools." They also overlap with an ongoing TeamTNT campaign  disclosed  by Aqua called Silentbob that leverages misconfigured cloud services to drop malware as part of what's said to be a testing effort, while also linking  SCARLETEEL  attacks to the threat actor, citing infrastructure commonalities. "TeamTNT is scanning for credentials across multiple cloud environments, including AWS, Azure, and GCP," Aqua noted. The attacks, which single out public-facing Docker instanc...