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The operators associated with the QakBot (aka QBot) malware have set up 15 new command-and-control (C2) servers as of late June 2023. The findings are a continuation of the malware's infrastructure analysis from Team Cymru, and arrive a little over two months after Lumen Black Lotus Labs  revealed  that 25% of its C2 servers are only active for a single day. "QakBot has a history of taking an extended break each summer before returning sometime in September, with this year's spamming activities ceasing around 22 June 2023," the cybersecurity firm  said . "But are the QakBot operators actually on vacation when they aren't spamming, or is this 'break' a time for them to refine and update their infrastructure and tools?" QakBot's C2 network, like in the case of Emotet and IcedID, is  characterized  by a tiered architecture in which C2 nodes communicate with upstream Tier 2 (T2) C2 nodes hosted on VPS providers geolocated in Russia. A majo...

New research has revealed that threat actors are abusing Cloudflare Tunnels to establish covert communication channels from compromised hosts and retain persistent access. "Cloudflared is functionally very similar to ngrok," Nic Finn, a senior threat intelligence analyst at GuidePoint Security, said . "However, Cloudflared differs from ngrok in that it provides a lot more usability for free, including the ability to host TCP connectivity over cloudflared." A command-line tool for Cloudflare Tunnel, cloudflared allows users to create secure connections between an origin web server and Cloudflare's nearest data center so as to hide the web server IP addresses as well as block volumetric distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) and brute-force login attacks. For a threat actor with elevated access on an infected host, this feature presents a lucrative approach to set up a foothold by generating a token required to establish the tunnel from the victim machine....

Introduced in 1999, Microsoft Active Directory is the default identity and access management service in Windows networks, responsible for assigning and enforcing security policies for all network endpoints. With it, users can access various resources across networks. As things tend to do, times, they are a'changin' – and a few years back, Microsoft introduced Azure Active Directory, the cloud-based version of AD to extend the AD paradigm, providing organizations with an Identity-as-a-Service (IDaaS) solution across both the cloud and on-prem apps. (Note that as of July 11th 2023, this service was renamed to  Microsoft Entra ID , but for the sake of simplicity, we'll refer to it as Azure AD in this post) Both Active Directory and Azure AD are critical to the functioning of on-prem, cloud-based, and hybrid ecosystems, playing a key role in uptime and business continuity. And with 90% of organizations using the service for employee authentication, access control and ID manag...

An unknown threat actor is using a variant of the Yashma ransomware to target various entities in English-speaking countries, Bulgaria, China, and Vietnam at least since June 4, 2023. Cisco Talos, in a new write-up, attributed the operation with moderate confidence to an adversary of likely Vietnamese origin. "The threat actor uses an uncommon technique to deliver the ransom note," security researcher Chetan Raghuprasad  said . "Instead of embedding the ransom note strings in the binary, they download the ransom note from the actor-controlled GitHub repository by executing an embedded batch file." Yashma,  first described  by the BlackBerry research and intelligence team in May 2022, is a rebranded version of another ransomware strain called Chaos. A month prior to its emergence, the Chaos ransomware builder was leaked in the wild. A notable aspect of the ransom note is its resemblance to the well-known WannaCry ransomware, possibly done so in an attempt to ob...

Cybersecurity researchers have discovered a set of 11 living-off-the-land binaries-and-scripts ( LOLBAS ) that could be maliciously abused by threat actors to conduct post-exploitation activities.  "LOLBAS is an attack method that uses binaries and scripts that are already part of the system for malicious purposes," Pentera security researcher Nir Chako  said . "This makes it hard for security teams to distinguish between legitimate and malicious activities, since they are all performed by trusted system utilities." To that end, the Israeli cybersecurity company said it uncovered nine LOLBAS downloaders and three executors that could enable adversaries to download and execute "more robust malware" on infected hosts. This includes: MsoHtmEd.exe, Mspub.exe, ProtocolHandler.exe, ConfigSecurityPolicy.exe, InstallUtil.exe, Mshta.exe, Presentationhost.exe, Outlook.exe, MSAccess.exe, scp.exe, and sftp.exe.  "In a complete attack chain, a hacker will us...

A new malware campaign has been observed making use of malicious OpenBullet configuration files to target inexperienced cyber criminals with the goal of delivering a remote access trojan (RAT) capable of stealing sensitive information. Bot mitigation company Kasada  said  the activity is designed to "exploit trusted criminal networks," describing it as an instance of advanced threat actors "preying on beginner hackers." OpenBullet  is a legitimate  open-source pen testing tool  used for automating credential stuffing attacks. It takes in a  configuration file  that's tailored to a specific website and can combine it with a password list procured through other means to log successful attempts. "OpenBullet can be used with Puppeteer, which is a headless browser that can be used for automating web interactions," the company  said . "This makes it very easy to launch credential stuffing attacks without having to deal with browser windows popping u...

Two different North Korean nation-state actors have been linked to a cyber intrusion against NPO Mashinostroyeniya, a major Russian missile engineering company. Cybersecurity firm SentinelOne  said  it identified "two instances of North Korea related compromise of sensitive internal IT infrastructure," including a case of an email server compromise and the deployment of a Windows backdoor dubbed OpenCarrot. The breach of the Linux email server has been attributed to  ScarCruft . OpenCarrot, on the other hand, is a known implant  previously identified  as used by the Lazarus Group. The attacks were flagged in mid-May 2022. A rocket design bureau based in Reutov, NPO Mashinostroyeniya was  sanctioned  by the U.S. Treasury Department in July 2014 in  connection  to "Russia's continued attempts to destabilize eastern Ukraine and its ongoing occupation of Crimea." While both ScarCruft (aka APT37) and the Lazarus Group are affiliated to North...

In today's interconnected world, evolving security solutions to meet growing demand is more critical than ever. Collaboration across multiple solutions for intelligence gathering and information sharing is indispensable. The idea of multiple-source intelligence gathering stems from the concept that threats are rarely isolated. Hence, their detection and prevention require a comprehensive understanding of the broader landscape. A comprehensive and robust security framework should be established by aggregating resources, knowledge, and expertise from various sources. This collaborative effort allows for the analysis of diverse data sets, the identification of emerging patterns, and the timely dissemination of crucial information.  In this article, we discuss a versatile security platform that can operate in two distinct roles within a security ecosystem. This platform can function as a subscriber, actively collecting and aggregating security data from various endpoints and other so...

A group of academics has devised a "deep learning-based acoustic side-channel attack" that can be used to classify laptop keystrokes that are recorded using a nearby phone with 95% accuracy. "When trained on keystrokes recorded using the video conferencing software Zoom, an accuracy of 93% was achieved, a new best for the medium," researchers Joshua Harrison, Ehsan Toreini, and Maryam Mehrnezhad  said  in a new study published last week. Side-channel attacks  refer  to a class of  security exploits  that aim to glean insights from a system by monitoring and measuring its physical effects during the processing of sensitive data. Some of the common observable effects include runtime behavior, power consumption, electromagnetic radiation, acoustics, and cache accesses. Although a completely side-channel-free implementation does not exist, practical attacks of this kind can have damaging consequences for user privacy and security as they could be weaponize...