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Government entities in the Middle East have been targeted as part of a previously undocumented campaign to deliver a new backdoor dubbed CR4T. Russian cybersecurity company Kaspersky said it discovered the activity in February 2024, with evidence suggesting that it may have been active since at least a year prior. The campaign has been codenamed  DuneQuixote . "The group behind the campaign took steps to prevent collection and analysis of its implants and implemented practical and well-designed evasion methods both in network communications and in the malware code," Kaspersky  said . The starting point of the attack is a dropper, which comes in two variants -- a regular dropper that's either implemented as an executable or a DLL file and a tampered installer file for a legitimate tool named  Total Commander . Regardless of the method used, the primary function of the dropper is to extract an embed...

Select Ukrainian government networks have remained infected with a malware called OfflRouter since 2015. Cisco Talos said its findings are based on an analysis of over 100 confidential documents that were infected with the VBA macro virus and uploaded to the VirusTotal malware scanning platform since 2018. More than 20 such documents have been uploaded since 2022. "The documents contained VBA code to drop and run an executable with the name 'ctrlpanel.exe,'" security researcher Vanja Svajcer  said . "The virus is still active in Ukraine and is causing potentially confidential documents to be uploaded to publicly accessible document repositories." A striking aspect of OfflRouter is its inability to spread via email, necessitating that it be propagated via other means, such as sharing documents and removable media, including USB memory sticks containing the infected documents. "It would require manual user intervention to send an infected document as...

The infamous cybercrime syndicate known as FIN7 has been linked to a spear-phishing campaign targeting the U.S. automotive industry to deliver a known backdoor called Carbanak (aka Anunak). "FIN7 identified employees at the company who worked in the IT department and had higher levels of administrative rights," the BlackBerry research and intelligence team  said  in a new write-up. "They used the lure of a free IP scanning tool to run their well-known Anunak backdoor and gain an initial foothold utilizing living off the land binaries, scripts, and libraries ( LOLBAS )." FIN7, also known as Carbon Spider, Elbrus, Gold Niagara, ITG14, and Sangria Tempest, is a well-known  financially motivated e-crime group  that has a track record of striking a wide range of industry verticals to deliver malware capable of stealing information from point-of-sale (PoS) systems since 2012. In recent years, the threat actor has  transitioned  to  conducting ransomwar...

Is Managing Customer Logins and Data Giving You Headaches? You're Not Alone! Today, we all expect super-fast, secure, and personalized online experiences. But let's be honest, we're also more careful about how our data is used. If something feels off, trust can vanish in an instant. Add to that the lightning-fast changes AI is bringing to everything from how we log in to spotting online fraud, and it's a whole new ball game! If you're dealing with logins, data privacy, bringing new users on board, or building digital trust, this webinar is for you . Join us for " Navigating Customer Identity in the AI Era ," where we'll dive into the Auth0 2025 Customer Identity Trends Report . We'll show you what's working, what's not, and how to tweak your strategy for the year ahead. In just one session, you'll get practical answers to real-world challenges like: How AI is changing what users expect – and where they're starting to push ba...

Super Low RPO with Continuous Data Protection: Dial Back to Just Seconds Before an Attack Zerto , a Hewlett Packard Enterprise company, can help you detect and recover from ransomware in near real-time. This solution leverages continuous data protection (CDP) to ensure all workloads have the lowest recovery point objective (RPO) possible. The most valuable thing about CDP is that it does not use snapshots, agents, or any other periodic data protection methodology. Zerto has no impact on production workloads and can achieve RPOs in the region of 5-15 seconds across thousands of virtual machines simultaneously. For example, the environment in the image below has nearly 1,000 VMs being protected with an average RPO of just six seconds! Application-Centric Protection: Group Your VMs to Gain Application-Level Control   You can protect your VMs with the Zerto application-centric approach using Virtual Protection Groups (VPGs). This logical grouping of VMs ensures that your whole app...

A new Android trojan called  SoumniBot  has been detected in the wild targeting users in South Korea by leveraging weaknesses in the manifest extraction and parsing procedure. The malware is "notable for an unconventional approach to evading analysis and detection, namely obfuscation of the Android manifest," Kaspersky researcher Dmitry Kalinin  said  in a technical analysis. Every Android app comes with a  manifest XML file  ("AndroidManifest.xml") that's located in the root directory and declares the various components of the app, as well as the permissions and the hardware and software features it requires. Knowing that threat hunters typically commence their analysis by inspecting the app's manifest file to determine its behavior, the threat actors behind the malware have been found to leverage three different techniques to make the process a lot more challenging. The first method involves the use of an invalid Compression method value when unpacki...

Sandboxes are synonymous with dynamic malware analysis. They help to execute malicious files in a safe virtual environment and observe their behavior. However, they also offer plenty of value in terms of static analysis. See these five scenarios where a sandbox can prove to be a useful tool in your investigations. Detecting Threats in PDFs PDF files are frequently exploited by threat actors to deliver payloads. Static analysis in a sandbox makes it possible to expose any threat a malicious PDF contains by extracting its structure. The presence of JavaScript or Bash scripts can reveal a possible mechanism for downloading and executing malware.  Sandboxes like ANY.RUN also allows users to scrutinize URLs found in PDFs to identify suspicious domains, potential command and control (C2) servers, or other indicators of compromise. Example: Static analysis of a PDF file in ANY.RUN Interactivity allows our users to manipulate files within a VM as they wish, but static Discovery off...

As many as 37 individuals have been arrested as part of an international crackdown on a cybercrime service called  LabHost  that has been used by criminal actors to steal personal credentials from victims around the world. Described as one of the largest Phishing-as-a-Service ( PhaaS ) providers, LabHost offered phishing pages targeting banks, high-profile organizations, and other service providers located primarily in Canada, the U.S., and the U.K. As part of the operation, codenamed PhishOFF and Nebulae (referring to the Australian arm of the probe), two LabHost users from Melbourne and Adelaide were arrested on April 17, with three others arrested and charged with drug-related offenses. "Australian offenders are allegedly among 10,000 cybercriminals globally who have used the platform, known as LabHost, to trick victims into providing their personal information, such as online banking logins, credit card details and passwords, through persistent phishing attacks sent vi...

Threat actors are actively exploiting critical vulnerabilities in OpenMetadata to gain unauthorized access to Kubernetes workloads and leverage them for cryptocurrency mining activity. That's according to the Microsoft Threat Intelligence team, which  said  the flaws have been weaponized since the start of April 2024. OpenMetadata is an  open-source platform  that operates as a metadata management tool, offering a unified solution for data asset discovery, observability, and governance. The flaws in question – all discovered and credited to security researcher Alvaro Muñoz – are listed below - CVE-2024-28847  (CVSS score: 8.8) - A Spring Expression Language (SpEL) injection vulnerability in PUT /api/v1/events/subscriptions (fixed in version 1.2.4) CVE-2024-28848  (CVSS score: 8.8) - A SpEL injection vulnerability in GET /api/v1/policies/validation/condition/<expr> (fixed in version 1.2.4) CVE-2024-28253  (CVSS score: 8.8) - A SpEL injecti...

A new Google malvertising campaign is leveraging a cluster of domains mimicking a legitimate IP scanner software to deliver a previously unknown backdoor dubbed  MadMxShell . "The threat actor registered multiple look-alike domains using a typosquatting technique and leveraged Google Ads to push these domains to the top of search engine results targeting specific search keywords, thereby luring victims to visit these sites," Zscaler ThreatLabz researchers Roy Tay and Sudeep Singh  said . As many as 45 domains are said to have been registered between November 2023 and March 2024, with the sites masquerading as port scanning and IT management software such as Advanced IP Scanner, Angry IP Scanner, IP scanner PRTG, and ManageEngine. While this is  not the first time  threat actors are  banking  on  malvertising techniques  to serve malware via lookalike sites, the development marks the first time the delivery vehicle is being used to propagate a ...