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Cybersecurity researchers have uncovered a new botnet called Zergeca that's capable of conducting distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks. Written in Golang, the botnet is so named for its reference to a string named "ootheca" present in the command-and-control (C2) servers ("ootheca[.]pw" and "ootheca[.]top"). "Functionally, Zergeca is not just a typical DDoS botnet; besides supporting six different attack methods, it also has capabilities for proxying, scanning, self-upgrading, persistence, file transfer, reverse shell, and collecting sensitive device information," the QiAnXin XLab team said in a report. Zergeca is also notable for using DNS-over-HTTPS ( DoH ) to perform Domain Name System (DNS) resolution of the C2 server and using a lesser-known library known as Smux for C2 communications. There is evidence to suggest that the attackers behind the botnet are actively developing and updating the malware to support new commands...

Microsoft has revealed two security flaws in Rockwell Automation PanelView Plus that could be weaponized by remote, unauthenticated attackers to execute arbitrary code and trigger a denial-of-service (DoS) condition. "The [remote code execution] vulnerability in PanelView Plus involves two custom classes that can be abused to upload and load a malicious DLL into the device," security researcher Yuval Gordon said . "The DoS vulnerability takes advantage of the same custom class to send a crafted buffer that the device is unable to handle properly, thus leading to a DoS." The list of shortcomings is as follows - CVE-2023-2071 (CVSS score: 9.8) - An improper input validation vulnerability that allows unauthenticated attackers to achieve remote code executed via crafted malicious packets. CVE-2023-29464 (CVSS score: 8.2) - An improper input validation vulnerability that allows an unauthenticated threat actor to read data from memory via crafted malicious pac...

Brazil's data protection authority, Autoridade Nacional de Proteção de Dados (ANPD), has temporarily banned Meta from processing users' personal data to train the company's artificial intelligence (AI) algorithms. The ANPD said it found "evidence of processing of personal data based on inadequate legal hypothesis, lack of transparency, limitation of the rights of data subjects, and risks to children and adolescents." The decision follows the social media giant's update to its terms that allow it to use public content from Facebook, Messenger, and Instagram for AI training purposes. A recent report published by Human Rights Watch found that LAION-5B , one of the largest image-text datasets used to train AI models, contained links to identifiable photos of Brazilian children, putting them at risk of malicious deepfakes that could place them under even more exploitation and harm. Brazil has about 102 million active users, making it one of the largest ma...

A coordinated law enforcement operation codenamed MORPHEUS has felled close to 600 servers that were used by cybercriminal groups and were part of an attack infrastructure associated with the Cobalt Strike tool.  The crackdown targeted older, unlicensed versions of the Cobalt Strike red teaming framework between June 24 and 28, according to Europol. Of the 690 IP addresses that were flagged to online service providers in 27 countries as associated with criminal activity, 590 are no longer accessible. The joint operation, which commenced in 2021, was led by the U.K. National Crime Agency (NCA) and involved authorities from Australia, Canada, Germany, the Netherlands, Poland, and the U.S. Officials from Bulgaria, Estonia, Finland, Lithuania, Japan, and South Korea provided additional support. Cobalt Strike is a popular adversary simulation and penetration testing tool developed by Fortra (formerly Help Systems), offering IT security experts a way to identify weaknesses in secur...

Cloud communications provider Twilio has revealed that unidentified threat actors took advantage of an unauthenticated endpoint in Authy to identify data associated with Authy accounts, including users' cell phone numbers. The company said it took steps to secure the endpoint to no longer accept unauthenticated requests. The development comes days after an online persona named ShinyHunters published on BreachForums a database comprising 33 million phone numbers allegedly pulled from Authy accounts. Authy, owned by Twilio since 2015, is a popular two-factor authentication (2FA) app that adds an additional layer of account security. "We have seen no evidence that the threat actors obtained access to Twilio's systems or other sensitive data," it said in a July 1, 2024, security alert. But out of an abundance of caution, it's recommending that users upgrade their Android (version 25.1.0 or later) and iOS (version 26.1.0 or later) apps to the latest version. It...

Recently the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) unveiled a new strategy for open-source intelligence (OSINT) and referred to OSINT as the "INT of first resort". Public and private sector organizations are realizing the value that the discipline can provide but are also finding that the exponential growth of digital data in recent years has overwhelmed many traditional OSINT methods. Thankfully, Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) are starting to provide a transformative impact on the future of information gathering and analysis.  What is Open-Source Intelligence (OSINT)? Open-Source Intelligence refers to the collection and analysis of information from publicly available sources. These sources can include traditional media, social media platforms, academic publications, government reports, and any other data that is openly accessible. The key characteristic of OSINT is that it does not involve covert or clandestine methods of information ga...

Unknown threat actors have been observed exploiting a now-patched security flaw in Microsoft MSHTML to deliver a surveillance tool called MerkSpy as part of a campaign primarily targeting users in Canada, India, Poland, and the U.S. "MerkSpy is designed to clandestinely monitor user activities, capture sensitive information, and establish persistence on compromised systems," Fortinet FortiGuard Labs researcher Cara Lin said in a report published last week. The starting point of the attack chain is a Microsoft Word document that ostensibly contains a job description for a software engineer role. But opening the file triggers the exploitation of CVE-2021-40444 , a high-severity flaw in MSHTML that could result in remote code execution without requiring any user interaction. It was addressed by Microsoft as part of Patch Tuesday updates released in September 2021. In this case, it paves the way for the download of an HTML file ("olerender.html") from a remote s...

The loader-as-a-service (LaaS) known as FakeBat has become one of the most widespread loader malware families distributed using the drive-by download technique this year, findings from Sekoia reveal. "FakeBat primarily aims to download and execute the next-stage payload, such as IcedID , Lumma , RedLine , SmokeLoader , SectopRAT , and Ursnif ," the company said in a Tuesday analysis. Drive-by attacks entail the use of methods like search engine optimization (SEO) poisoning, malvertising, and nefarious code injections into compromised sites to entice users into downloading bogus software installers or browser updates. The use of malware loaders over the past few years dovetails with the growing use of landing pages impersonating legitimate software websites by passing them off as legitimate installers. This ties into the larger aspect that phishing and social engineering remain one of the threat actors' main ways to acquire initial access. FakeBat , also known as Eu...

Cybersecurity researchers have discovered an attack campaign that targets various Israeli entities with publicly-available frameworks like Donut and Sliver. The campaign, believed to be highly targeted in nature, "leverage target-specific infrastructure and custom WordPress websites as a payload delivery mechanism, but affect a variety of entities across unrelated verticals, and rely on well-known open-source malware," HarfangLab said in a report last week. The French company is tracking the activity under the name Supposed Grasshopper. It's a reference to an attacker-controlled server ("auth.economy-gov-il[.]com/SUPPOSED_GRASSHOPPER.bin"), to which a first-stage downloader connects to. This downloader, written in Nim, is rudimentary and is tasked with downloading the second-stage malware from the staging server. It's delivered by means of a virtual hard disk (VHD) file that's suspected to be propagated via custom WordPress sites as part of a drive-...