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

An unknown threat actor is leveraging malicious npm packages to target developers with an aim to steal source code and configuration files from victim machines, a sign of how threats lurk consistently in open-source repositories. "The threat actor behind this campaign has been linked to malicious activity dating back to 2021," software supply chain security firm Checkmarx  said  in a report shared with The Hacker News. "Since then, they have continuously published malicious packages." The latest report is a continuation of the  same campaign  that Phylum disclosed at the start of the month in which a number of npm modules were engineered to exfiltrate valuable information to a remote server. The packages, by design, are configured to execute immediately post-installation by means of a postinstall hook defined in the package.json file. It triggers the launch of preinstall.js, which spawns index.js to capture the system metadata as well as harvest source code and...

Recently disclosed security flaws impacting Juniper firewalls, Openfire, and Apache RocketMQ servers have come under active exploitation in the wild, according to multiple reports. The Shadowserver Foundation  said  that it's "seeing exploitation attempts from multiple IPs for Juniper J-Web CVE-2023-36844 (& friends) targeting /webauth_operation.php endpoint," the same day a proof-of-concept (PoC) became available. The  issues , tracked as CVE-2023-36844, CVE-2023-36845, CVE-2023-36846, and CVE-2023-36847, reside in the J-Web component of Junos OS on Juniper SRX and EX Series. They could be chained by an unauthenticated, network-based attacker to execute arbitrary code on susceptible installations. Patches for the flaw were released on August 17, 2023, a week after which watchTowr Labs published a proof-of-concept (PoC) by combining CVE-2023-36846 and CVE-2023-36845 to execute a PHP file containing malicious shellcode. Currently, there are  more than 8,200 ...

VMware has released software updates to correct two security vulnerabilities in Aria Operations for Networks that could be potentially exploited to bypass authentication and gain remote code execution. The most severe of the flaws is CVE-2023-34039 (CVSS score: 9.8), which relates to a case of authentication bypass arising as a result of a lack of unique cryptographic key generation. "A malicious actor with network access to Aria Operations for Networks could bypass SSH authentication to gain access to the Aria Operations for Networks CLI," the company  said  in an advisory. ProjectDiscovery researchers Harsh Jaiswal and Rahul Maini have been credited with discovering and reporting the issue. The second weakness, CVE-2023-20890 (CVSS score: 7.2), is an arbitrary file write vulnerability impacting Aria Operations for Networks that could be abused by an adversary with administrative access to write files to arbitrary locations and achieve remote code execution. Credited ...

Python supply chain attacks are surging in 2025. Join our webinar to learn how to secure your code, dependencies, and runtime with modern tools and strategies.

A coordinated law enforcement effort codenamed  Operation Duck Hunt  has felled  QakBot , a notorious Windows malware family that's estimated to have compromised over 700,000 computers globally and facilitated financial fraud as well as ransomware. To that end, the U.S. Justice Department (DoJ)  said  the malware is "being deleted from victim computers, preventing it from doing any more harm," adding it seized more than $8.6 million in cryptocurrency in illicit profits. The cross-border exercise involved the participation of France, Germany, Latvia, Romania, the Netherlands, the U.K., and the U.S., alongside technical assistance from cybersecurity company Zscaler. The dismantling has been hailed as "the largest U.S.-led financial and technical disruption of a botnet infrastructure leveraged by cybercriminals." No arrests were announced. QakBot, also known as QBot and Pinkslipbot, started its life as a banking trojan in 2007 before morphing into a general-pu...

A suspected Chinese-nexus hacking group exploited a  recently disclosed zero-day flaw  in Barracuda Networks Email Security Gateway (ESG) appliances to breach government, military, defense and aerospace, high-tech industry, and telecom sectors as part of a global espionage campaign. Mandiant, which is tracking the activity under the name  UNC4841 , described the threat actor as "highly responsive to defensive efforts" and capable of actively tweaking their modus operandi to maintain persistent access to targets. "UNC4841 deployed new and novel malware designed to maintain presence at a small subset of high priority targets that it compromised either before the patch was released, or shortly following Barracuda's remediation guidance," the Google-owned threat intelligence firm  said  in a new technical report published today. Almost a third of the identified affected organizations are government agencies. Interestingly enough, some of the earliest compromises...

A new malspam campaign has been observed deploying an off-the-shelf malware called DarkGate . "The current spike in DarkGate malware activity is plausible given the fact that the developer of the malware has recently started to rent out the malware to a limited number of affiliates," Telekom Security  said  in a report published last week. The latest report builds on  recent findings  from security researcher Igal Lytzki, who detailed a "high volume campaign" that leverages hijacked email threads to trick recipients into downloading the malware. The attack commences with a phishing URL that, when clicked, passes through a traffic direction system ( TDS ) to take the victim to an MSI payload subject to certain conditions. This includes the presence of a refresh header in the HTTP response. Opening the MSI file triggers a multi-stage process that incorporates an AutoIt script to execute shellcode that acts as a conduit to decrypt and launch DarkGate via a crypte...

Ask any security professional and they'll tell you that remediating risks from various siloed security scanning tools requires a tedious and labor-intensive series of steps focused on deduplication, prioritization, and routing of issues to an appropriate "fixer" somewhere in the organization. This burden on already resource-strapped security teams is an efficiency killer.  A new study , commissioned by Seemplicity and conducted by Dark Reading, provides fresh insight into how security pros handle the challenging remediation life cycle from discovery to resolution. The research reveals the obstacles security professionals face when coordinating remediation activities. The data exposes the outcomes — in increased workload and diminished risk posture — that arise from lengthy remediation times, inefficient and uncontrolled manual processes, the lack of managerial visibility and oversight across the risk life cycle.  Remediation Process Broken Down to Steps and Time Spent on Ea...

Unpatched Citrix NetScaler systems exposed to the internet are being targeted by unknown threat actors in what's suspected to be a ransomware attack. Cybersecurity company Sophos is  tracking  the activity cluster under the moniker  STAC4663 . Attack chains involve the exploitation of  CVE-2023-3519 , a critical code injection vulnerability impacting NetScaler ADC and Gateway servers that could facilitate unauthenticated remote code execution. In one intrusion detected in mid-August 2023, the security flaw is said to have been used to conduct a domain-wide attack, including injecting payloads into legitimate executables such as the Windows Update Agent (wuauclt.exe) and the Windows Management Instrumentation Provider Service (wmiprvse.exe). An analysis of the payload is underway. Other notable aspects include the distribution of obfuscated PowerShell scripts, PHP web shells, and the use of an Estonian service called BlueVPS for malware staging. Sophos said the...

Microsoft is warning of an increase in adversary-in-the-middle ( AiTM ) phishing techniques, which are being propagated as part of the phishing-as-a-service (PhaaS) cybercrime model. In addition to an uptick in AiTM-capable PhaaS platforms, the tech giant noted that existing phishing services like PerSwaysion are incorporating AiTM capabilities. "This development in the PhaaS ecosystem enables attackers to conduct high-volume phishing campaigns that attempt to circumvent MFA protections at scale," the Microsoft Threat Intelligence team  said  in a series of posts on X (formerly Twitter). Phishing kits with AiTM capabilities work in two ways, one of which concerns the use of reverse proxy servers (i.e., the phishing page) to relay traffic to and from the client and legitimate website and stealthily capture user credentials, two-factor authentication codes, and session cookies. A second method involves synchronous relay servers. "In AiTM through synchronous relay s...