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A previously undocumented China-aligned threat actor has been linked to a set of adversary-in-the-middle (AitM) attacks that hijack update requests from legitimate software to deliver a sophisticated implant named NSPX30. Slovak cybersecurity firm ESET is tracking the advanced persistent threat (APT) group under the name  Blackwood . It's said to be active since at least 2018. The NSPX30 implant has been observed deployed via the update mechanisms of known software such as Tencent QQ, WPS Office, and Sogou Pinyin, with the attacks targeting Chinese and Japanese manufacturing, trading, and engineering companies as well as individuals located in China, Japan, and the U.K. "NSPX30 is a multistage implant that includes several components such as a dropper, an installer, loaders, an orchestrator, and a backdoor," security researcher Facundo Muñoz  said . "Both of the latter two have their own sets of plugins." "The implant was designed around the attackers...

A new Go-based malware loader called  CherryLoader  has been discovered by threat hunters in the wild to deliver additional payloads onto compromised hosts for follow-on exploitation. Arctic Wolf Labs, which discovered the new attack tool in two recent intrusions, said the loader's icon and name masquerades as the legitimate CherryTree note-taking application to dupe potential victims into installing it. "CherryLoader was used to drop one of two privilege escalation tools,  PrintSpoofer  or  JuicyPotatoNG , which would then run a batch file to establish persistence on the victim device," researchers Hady Azzam, Christopher Prest, and Steven Campbell  said . In another novel twist, CherryLoader also packs modularized features that allow the threat actor to swap exploits without recompiling code. It's currently not known how the loader is distributed, but the attack chains examined by the cybersecurity firm show that CherryLoader ("cherrytree.exe") and ...

Hackers with links to the Kremlin are suspected to have infiltrated information technology company Hewlett Packard Enterprise's (HPE) cloud email environment to exfiltrate mailbox data. "The threat actor accessed and exfiltrated data beginning in May 2023 from a small percentage of HPE mailboxes belonging to individuals in our cybersecurity, go-to-market, business segments, and other functions," the company  said  in a regulatory filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). The intrusion has been attributed to the Russian state-sponsored group known as APT29, and which is also tracked under the monikers BlueBravo, Cloaked Ursa, Cozy Bear, Midnight Blizzard (formerly Nobelium), and The Dukes. The disclosure arrives days after Microsoft  implicated the same threat actor  to the breach of its corporate systems in late November 2023 to steal emails and attachments from senior executives and other individuals in the company's cybersecurity and legal ...

Cybersecurity researchers have discovered a loophole impacting Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) that could be potentially exploited by threat actors with a Google account to take control of a Kubernetes cluster. The critical shortcoming has been codenamed Sys:All by cloud security firm Orca. As many as 250,000 active GKE clusters in the wild are estimated to be susceptible to the attack vector. In a report shared with The Hacker News, security researcher Roi Nisimi said it "stems from a likely widespread misconception that the system:authenticated group in Google Kubernetes Engine includes only verified and deterministic identities, whereas in fact, it includes any Google authenticated account (even outside the organization)." The system:authenticated group is a special group that includes all authenticated entities, counting human users and service accounts. As a result, this could have serious consequences when administrators inadvertently bestow it with overly permis...

The ransomware group known as Kasseika has become the latest to leverage the Bring Your Own Vulnerable Driver ( BYOVD ) attack to disarm security-related processes on compromised Windows hosts, joining the likes of other groups like Akira , AvosLocker, BlackByte, and RobbinHood . The tactic allows "threat actors to terminate antivirus processes and services for the deployment of ransomware," Trend Micro said in a Tuesday analysis. Kasseika, first discovered by the cybersecurity firm in mid-December 2023, exhibits overlaps with the now-defunct BlackMatter , which emerged in the aftermath of DarkSide's shutdown. There is evidence to suggest that the ransomware strain could be the handiwork of an experienced threat actor that acquired or purchased access to BlackMatter, given that the latter's source code has never publicly leaked post its demise in November 2021. Attack chains involving Kasseika commence with a phishing email for initial access, subsequently ...

In a world where more & more organizations are adopting open-source components as foundational blocks in their application's infrastructure, it's difficult to consider traditional SCAs as complete protection mechanisms against open-source threats. Using open-source libraries saves tons of coding and debugging time, and by that - shortens the time to deliver our applications. But, as codebases become increasingly composed of open-source software, it's time to respect the entire attack surface - including attacks on the supply chain itself - when choosing an  SCA platform  to depend upon. The Impact of One Dependency When a company adds an open-source library, they are probably adding not just the library they intended to, but also many other libraries as well. This is due to the way open-source libraries are built: just like every other application on the planet, they aim for a speed of delivery and development and, as such, rely on code other people built - i.e., ot...

Governments from Australia, the U.K., and the U.S. have imposed financial sanctions on a Russian national for his alleged role in the 2022 ransomware attack against health insurance provider Medibank. Alexander Ermakov (aka blade_runner, GistaveDore, GustaveDore, or JimJones), 33, has been tied to the breach of the Medibank network as well as the theft and release of Personally Identifiable Information (PII) belonging to the Australian company. The ransomware attack, which  took place in late October 2022  and attributed to the  now-defunct REvil ransomware crew , led to the unauthorized access of approximately 9.7 million of its current and former customers. The stolen information included names, dates of birth, Medicare numbers, and sensitive medical information, including records on mental health, sexual health and drug use. Some of these records were leaked on the dark web. As part of the trilateral action, the sanctions  make  it a criminal offense t...

A critical security flaw has been disclosed in Fortra's GoAnywhere Managed File Transfer (MFT) software that could be abused to create a new administrator user. Tracked as  CVE-2024-0204 , the issue carries a CVSS score of 9.8 out of 10. "Authentication bypass in Fortra's GoAnywhere MFT prior to 7.4.1 allows an unauthorized user to create an admin user via the administration portal," Fortra  said  in an advisory released on January 22, 2024. Users who cannot upgrade to version 7.4.1 can apply temporary workarounds in non-container deployments by deleting the InitialAccountSetup.xhtml file in the install directory and restarting the services. For container-deployed instances, it's recommended to replace the file with an empty file and restart. Mohammed Eldeeb and Islam Elrfai of Cairo-based Spark Engineering Consultants have been credited with discovering and reporting the flaw in December 2023. Cybersecurity firm Horizon3.ai, which published a  proof-of-co...

The threat actors behind ClearFake, SocGholish, and dozens of other e-crime outfits have established partnerships with another entity known as  VexTrio  as part of a massive "criminal affiliate program," new findings from Infoblox reveal. The latest development demonstrates the "breadth of their activities and depth of their connections within the cybercrime industry," the company said , describing VexTrio as the "single largest malicious traffic broker described in security literature." VexTrio, which is believed to be have been active since at least 2017, has been attributed to  malicious campaigns  that use domains generated by a dictionary domain generation algorithm ( DDGA ) to propagate scams, riskware, spyware, adware, potentially unwanted programs (PUPs), and pornographic content. This includes a 2022 activity cluster that  distributed the Glupteba malware  following an earlier attempt by Google to take down a significant chunk of its infrastru...