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Cybersecurity researchers have discovered new infrastructure linked to a financially motivated threat actor known as FIN7 . The two clusters of potential FIN7 activity "indicate communications inbound to FIN7 infrastructure from IP addresses assigned to Post Ltd (Russia) and SmartApe (Estonia), respectively," Team Cymru said in a report published this week as part of a joint investigation with Silent Push and Stark Industries Solutions. The findings build on a recent report from Silent Push, which found several Stark Industries IP addresses that are solely dedicated to hosting FIN7 infrastructure. The latest analysis indicates that the hosts linked to the e-crime group were likely procured from one of Stark's resellers. "Reseller programs are common in the hosting industry; many of the largest VPS (virtual private server) providers offer such services," the cybersecurity company said. "Customers procuring infrastructure via resellers generally must ...

OpenAI on Friday said it banned a set of accounts linked to what it said was an Iranian covert influence operation that leveraged ChatGPT to generate content that, among other things, focused on the upcoming U.S. presidential election. "This week we identified and took down a cluster of ChatGPT accounts that were generating content for a covert Iranian influence operation identified as Storm-2035," OpenAI said . "The operation used ChatGPT to generate content focused on a number of topics — including commentary on candidates on both sides in the U.S. presidential election – which it then shared via social media accounts and websites." The artificial intelligence (AI) company said the content did not achieve any meaningful engagement, with a majority of the social media posts receiving negligible to no likes, shares, and comments. It further noted it had found little evidence that the long-form articles created using ChatGPT were shared on social media platforms....

A large-scale extortion campaign has compromised various organizations by taking advantage of publicly accessible environment variable files (.env) that contain credentials associated with cloud and social media applications. "Multiple security missteps were present in the course of this campaign, including the following: Exposing environment variables, using long-lived credentials, and absence of least privilege architecture," Palo Alto Networks Unit 42 said in a Thursday report. The campaign is notable for setting up its attack infrastructure within the infected organizations' Amazon Web Services (AWS) environments and using them as a launchpad for scanning more than 230 million unique targets for sensitive data. With 110,000 domains targeted, the malicious activity is said to have netted over 90,000 unique variables in the .env files, out of which 7,000 belonged to organizations' cloud services and 1,500 variables are linked to social media accounts. "T...

If you invite guest users into your Entra ID tenant, you may be opening yourself up to a surprising risk.  A gap in access control in Microsoft Entra's subscription handling is allowing guest users to create and transfer subscriptions into the tenant they are invited into, while maintaining full ownership of them.  All the guest user needs are the permissions to create subscriptions in their home tenant, and an invitation as a guest user into an external tenant. Once inside, the guest user can create subscriptions in their home tenant, transfer them into the external tenant, and retain full ownership rights. This stealthy privilege escalation tactic allows a guest user to gain a privileged foothold in an environment where they should only have limited access. Many organizations treat guest accounts as low-risk based on their temporary, limited access, but this behavior, which works as designed, opens the door to known attack paths and lateral movement within the resource t...

A 27-year-old Russian national has been sentenced to over three years in prison in the U.S. for peddling financial information, login credentials, and other personally identifying information (PII) on a now-defunct dark web marketplace called Slilpp . Georgy Kavzharadze, 27, of Moscow, Russia, pleaded guilty to one count of conspiracy to commit bank fraud and wire fraud earlier this February. In addition to a 40-month jail term, Kavzharadze has been ordered to pay $1,233,521.47 in restitution. The defendant, who went by the online monikers TeRorPP, Torqovec, and PlutuSS, is believed to have listed over 626,100 stolen login credentials for sale on Slilpp and sold more than 297,300 of them on the illicit marketplace between July 2016 and May 2021. "Those credentials were subsequently linked to $1.2 million in fraudulent transactions," the U.S. Department of Justice (DoJ) said . "On May 27, 2021, Kavzharadze's account on Slilpp listed 240,495 login credentials fo...

Cybersecurity researchers have shed light on a sophisticated information stealer campaign that impersonates legitimate brands to distribute malware like DanaBot and StealC . The activity cluster, orchestrated by Russian-speaking cybercriminals and collectively codenamed Tusk, is said to encompass several sub-campaigns, leveraging the reputation of the platforms to trick users into downloading the malware using bogus sites and social media accounts. "All the active sub-campaigns host the initial downloader on Dropbox," Kaspersky researchers Elsayed Elrefaei and AbdulRhman Alfaifi said . "This downloader is responsible for delivering additional malware samples to the victim's machine, which are mostly info-stealers (DanaBot and StealC) and clippers." Of the 19 sub-campaigns identified to date, three are said to be currently active. The name "Tusk" is a reference to the word "Mammoth" used by the threat actors in log messages associated with t...

Chinese-speaking users are the target of an ongoing campaign that distributes a malware known as ValleyRAT. "ValleyRAT is a multi-stage malware that utilizes diverse techniques to monitor and control its victims and deploy arbitrary plugins to cause further damage," Fortinet FortiGuard Labs researchers Eduardo Altares and Joie Salvio said . "Another noteworthy characteristic of this malware is its heavy usage of shellcode to execute its many components directly in memory, significantly reducing its file footprint in the victim's system." Details about the campaign first emerged in June 2024, when Zscaler ThreatLabz detailed attacks involving an updated version of the malware. Exactly how the latest iteration of ValleyRAT is distributed is currently not known, although previous campaigns have leveraged email messages containing URLs pointing to compressed executables. "Based on the filenames of the executables we found, they're likely using phis...

SaaS applications have become indispensable for organizations aiming to enhance productivity and streamline operations. However, the convenience and efficiency these applications offer come with inherent security risks, often leaving hidden gaps that can be exploited. Conducting thorough due diligence on SaaS apps is essential to identify and mitigate these risks, ensuring the protection of your organization's sensitive data. Understanding the Importance of Due Diligence Due diligence is a critical step in evaluating the security capabilities of SaaS applications. It involves a comprehensive assessment of the app's audit log events, system and activity audits, and integration capabilities to ensure proper logging and monitoring, helping to prevent costly incidents. Here are a few reasons why due diligence is non-negotiable: Identifying Critical Audit Log Gaps: A thorough review helps ensure that essential events, such as logins, MFA verifications, and user changes, are lo...

Cybersecurity researchers have uncovered new stealer malware that's designed to specifically target Apple macOS systems. Dubbed Banshee Stealer, it's offered for sale in the cybercrime underground for a steep price of $3,000 a month and works across both x86_64 and ARM64 architectures.  "Banshee Stealer targets a wide range of browsers, cryptocurrency wallets, and around 100 browser extensions, making it a highly versatile and dangerous threat," Elastic Security Labs said in a Thursday report. The web browsers and crypto wallets targeted by the malware comprise Safari, Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, Brave, Microsoft Edge, Vivaldi, Yandex, Opera, OperaGX, Exodus, Electrum, Coinomi, Guarda, Wasabi Wallet, Atomic, and Ledger. It's also equipped to harvest system information and data from iCloud Keychain passwords and Notes, as well as incorporate a slew of anti-analysis and anti-debugging measures to determine if it's running in a virtual environment in a...

A large percentage of Google's own Pixel devices shipped globally since September 2017 included dormant software that could be used to stage nefarious attacks and deliver various kinds of malware. The issue manifests in the form of a pre-installed Android app called "Showcase.apk" that comes with excessive system privileges, including the ability to remotely execute code and install arbitrary packages on the device, according to mobile security firm iVerify. "The application downloads a configuration file over an unsecure connection and can be manipulated to execute code at the system level," it said in an analysis published jointly with Palantir Technologies and Trail of Bits. "The application retrieves the configuration file from a single U.S.-based, AWS-hosted domain over unsecured HTTP, which leaves the configuration vulnerable and can make the device vulnerable." The app in question is called Verizon Retail Demo Mode ("com.customermob...