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Learn about critical threats that can impact your organization and the bad actors behind them from Cybersixgill's threat experts. Each story shines a light on underground activities, the threat actors involved, and why you should care, along with what you can do to mitigate risk.  The deep and dark web, otherwise known as the cybercriminal underground, is where malicious actors gather to exchange plans, sell goods or services, and recruit others to help in their illicit activities. Grasping how it functions and the intelligence it offers is crucial for proactively safeguarding your environment against attacks, as it is in these spaces that threat actors frequently reveal their intentions prior to launching an attack. The State of the Underground 2024 Our annual State of the Underground 2024 is a detailed report that sheds light on the evolving underworld of cybercrime, exploring trends and behaviors observed within the deep, dark web during 2023. This comprehensive analysis, c...

The nation-state threat actor known as SideWinder has been attributed to a new cyber espionage campaign targeting ports and maritime facilities in the Indian Ocean and Mediterranean Sea. The BlackBerry Research and Intelligence Team, which discovered the activity, said targets of the spear-phishing campaign include countries like Pakistan, Egypt, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, Myanmar, Nepal, and the Maldives. SideWinder , which is also known by the names APT-C-17, Baby Elephant, Hardcore Nationalist, Leafperforator, Rattlesnake, and Razor Tiger, is assessed to be affiliated with India. It has been operational since 2012, often making use of spear-phishing as a vector to deliver malicious payloads that trigger the attack chains. "SideWinder makes use of email spear-phishing, document exploitation and DLL side-loading techniques in an attempt to avoid detection and deliver targeted implants," the Canadian cybersecurity company said in an analysis published last week. The latest...

Cybersecurity researchers are warning about a new phishing campaign that targets Microsoft OneDrive users with the aim of executing a malicious PowerShell script. "This campaign heavily relies on social engineering tactics to deceive users into executing a PowerShell script, thereby compromising their systems," Trellix security researcher Rafael Pena said in a Monday analysis. The cybersecurity company is tracking the "crafty" phishing and downloader campaign under the name OneDrive Pastejacking. The attack unfolds via an email containing an HTML file that, when opened, displays an image simulating an OneDrive page and includes the error message that says: "Failed to connect to the 'OneDrive' cloud service. To fix the error, you need to update the DNS cache manually." The message also comes with two options, namely "How to fix" and "Details," with the latter directing the email recipient to a legitimate Microsoft Learn pag...

A recently patched security flaw impacting VMware ESXi hypervisors has been actively exploited by "several" ransomware groups to gain elevated permissions and deploy file-encrypting malware. The attacks involve the exploitation of CVE-2024-37085 (CVSS score: 6.8), an Active Directory integration authentication bypass that allows an attacker to obtain administrative access to the host. "A malicious actor with sufficient Active Directory (AD) permissions can gain full access to an ESXi host that was previously configured to use AD for user management by re-creating the configured AD group ('ESXi Admins' by default) after it was deleted from AD," Broadcom-owned VMware noted in an advisory released in late June 2024. In other words, escalating privileges on ESXi to the administrator was as simple as creating a new AD group named "ESX Admins" and adding any user to it, or renaming any group in the domain to "ESX Admins" and adding a user...

Cybersecurity company Acronis is warning that a now-patched critical security flaw impacting its Cyber Infrastructure (ACI) product has been exploited in the wild. The vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2023-45249 (CVSS score: 9.8), concerns a case of remote code execution that stems from the use of default passwords. The flaw impacts the following versions of Acronis Cyber Infrastructure (ACI) - < build 5.0.1-61 < build 5.1.1-71 < build 5.2.1-69 < build 5.3.1-53, and  < build 5.4.4-132 It has been addressed in versions 5.4 update 4.2, 5.2 update 1.3, 5.3 update 1.3, 5.0 update 1.4, and 5.1 update 1.2 released in late October 2023. There are currently no details on how the vulnerability is being weaponized in real-world cyber attacks and the identity of the threat actors that may be exploiting it. However, the Swiss-headquartered company acknowledged reports of active exploitation in an updated advisory last week. "This vulnerability is known to be exploi...

An unknown threat actor has been linked to a massive scam campaign that exploited an email routing misconfiguration in email security vendor Proofpoint's defenses to send millions of messages spoofing various popular companies like Best Buy, IBM, Nike, and Walt Disney, among others. "These emails echoed from official Proofpoint email relays with authenticated SPF and DKIM signatures , thus bypassing major security protections — all to deceive recipients and steal funds and credit card details," Guardio Labs researcher Nati Tal said in a detailed report shared with The Hacker News. The cybersecurity company has given the campaign the name EchoSpoofing . The activity is believed to have commenced in January 2024, with the threat actor exploiting the loophole to send as many as three million emails per day on average, a number that hit a peak of 14 million in early June as Proofpoint began to enact countermeasures. "The most unique and powerful part of this domain ...

Searchable Encryption has long been a mystery. An oxymoron. An unattainable dream of cybersecurity professionals everywhere. Organizations know they must encrypt their most valuable, sensitive data to prevent data theft and breaches. They also understand that organizational data exists to be used. To be searched, viewed, and modified to keep businesses running. Unfortunately, our Network and Data Security Engineers were taught for decades that you just can't search or edit data while in an encrypted state. The best they could do was to wrap that plaintext, unencrypted data within a cocoon of complex hardware, software, policies, controls, and governance. And how has that worked to date? Just look at the T-Mobile breach, the United Healthcare breach, Uber, Verizon, Kaiser Foundation Health Plan, Bank of America, Prudential… and the list goes on. All the data that was stolen in those breaches remained unencrypted to support day-to-day operations. It's safe to conclude that the way we...

A threat actor known as Stargazer Goblin has set up a network of inauthentic GitHub accounts to fuel a Distribution-as-a-Service (DaaS) that propagates a variety of information-stealing malware and netting them $100,000 in illicit profits over the past year. The network, which comprises over 3,000 accounts on the cloud-based code hosting platform, spans thousands of repositories that are used to share malicious links or malware, per Check Point, which has dubbed it "Stargazers Ghost Network." Some of the malware families propagated using this method include Atlantida Stealer, Rhadamanthys, RisePro, Lumma Stealer, and RedLine, with the bogus accounts also engaged in starring, forking, watching, and subscribing to malicious repositories to give them a veneer of legitimacy. The network is believed to have been active since August 2022 in some preliminary form, although an advertisement for the DaaS wasn't spotted in the dark until early July 2023. "Threat actors no...

The remote access trojan known as Gh0st RAT has been observed being delivered by an "evasive dropper" called Gh0stGambit as part of a drive-by download scheme targeting Chinese-speaking Windows users. These infections stem from a fake website ("chrome-web[.]com") serving malicious installer packages masquerading as Google's Chrome browser, indicating that users searching for the software on the web are being singled out. Gh0st RAT is a long-standing malware that has been observed in the wild since 2008, manifesting in the form of different variants over the years in campaigns primarily orchestrated by China-nexus cyberespionage groups. Some iterations of the trojan have also been previously deployed by infiltrating poorly-secured MS SQL server instances, using it as a conduit to install the Hidden open-source rootkit. According to cybersecurity firm eSentire, which discovered the latest activity, the targeting of Chinese-speaking users is based on ...