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

A previously undocumented Android banking trojan dubbed  MMRat  has been observed targeting mobile users in Southeast Asia since late June 2023 to remotely commandeer the devices and perform financial fraud. "The malware, named after its distinctive package name com.mm.user, can capture user input and screen content, and can also remotely control victim devices through various techniques, enabling its operators to carry out bank fraud on the victim's device," Trend Micro  said . What makes MMRat stand apart from others of its kind is the use of a customized command-and-control (C2) protocol based on protocol buffers (aka  protobuf ) to efficiently transfer large volumes of data from compromised handsets, demonstrating the growing sophistication of Android malware. Possible targets based on the language used in the phishing pages include Indonesia, Vietnam, Singapore, and the Philippines. The entry point of the attacks is a network of phishing sites that mimic o...

Cybersecurity researchers have discovered malicious Android apps for Signal and Telegram distributed via the Google Play Store and Samsung Galaxy Store that are engineered to deliver the BadBazaar spyware on infected devices. Slovakian company ESET attributed the campaign to a China-linked actor called  GREF . "Most likely active since July 2020 and since July 2022, respectively, the campaigns have distributed the Android BadBazaar espionage code through the Google Play store, Samsung Galaxy Store, and dedicated websites representing the malicious apps Signal Plus Messenger and FlyGram," security researcher Lukáš Štefanko  said  in a new report shared with The Hacker News. Victims have been primarily detected in Germany, Poland, and the U.S., followed by Ukraine, Australia, Brazil, Denmark, Congo-Kinshasa, Hong Kong, Hungary, Lithuania, the Netherlands, Portugal, Singapore, Spain, and Yemen. BadBazaar was  first documented  by Lookout in November 2022 as ta...

ChatGPT and similar large language models (LLMs) have added further complexity to the ever-growing online threat landscape. Cybercriminals no longer need advanced coding skills to execute fraud and other damaging attacks against online businesses and customers, thanks to bots-as-a-service, residential proxies, CAPTCHA farms, and other easily accessible tools.  Now, the latest technology damaging businesses' bottom line is  ChatGPT . Not only have ChatGPT, OpenAI, and other LLMs raised ethical issues by  training their models  on scraped data from across the internet. LLMs are negatively impacting enterprises' web traffic, which can be extremely damaging to business.  3 Risks Presented by LLMs, ChatGPT, & ChatGPT Plugins Among the threats ChatGPT and ChatGPT plugins can pose against online businesses, there are three key risks we will focus on: Content theft  (or republishing data without permission from the original source)can hurt the authority,...

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 ...

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...