The Hacker News | #1 Trusted Source for Cybersecurity News — Index Page

Google has revealed the various security guardrails that have been incorporated into its latest Pixel devices to counter the rising threat posed by baseband security attacks. The cellular baseband (i.e., modem) refers to a processor on the device that's responsible for handling all connectivity, such as LTE, 4G, and 5G, with a mobile phone cell tower or base station over a radio interface. "This function inherently involves processing external inputs, which may originate from untrusted sources," Sherk Chung and Stephan Chen from the Pixel team, and Roger Piqueras Jover and Ivan Lozano from the company's Android team said in a blog post shared with The Hacker News. "For instance, malicious actors can employ false base stations to inject fabricated or manipulated network packets. In certain protocols like IMS (IP Multimedia Subsystem), this can be executed remotely from any global location using an IMS client." What's more, the firmware powering the...

For years, securing a company's systems was synonymous with securing its "perimeter." There was what was safe "inside" and the unsafe outside world. We built sturdy firewalls and deployed sophisticated detection systems, confident that keeping the barbarians outside the walls kept our data and systems safe. The problem is that we no longer operate within the confines of physical on-prem installations and controlled networks. Data and applications now reside in distributed cloud environments and data centers, accessed by users and devices connecting from anywhere on the planet. The walls have crumbled, and the perimeter has dissolved, opening the door to a new battlefield: identity . Identity is at the center of what the industry has praised as the new gold standard of enterprise security: "zero trust." In this paradigm, explicit trust becomes mandatory for any interactions between systems, and no implicit trust shall subsist. Every access request, regardless of its origin,...

Misconfigured and vulnerable Linux servers are the target of an ongoing campaign that delivers a stealthy malware dubbed perfctl with the primary aim of running a cryptocurrency miner and proxyjacking software. "Perfctl is particularly elusive and persistent, employing several sophisticated techniques," Aqua security researchers Assaf Morag and Idan Revivo said in a report shared with The Hacker News. "When a new user logs into the server, it immediately stops all 'noisy' activities, lying dormant until the server is idle again. After execution, it deletes its binary and continues to run quietly in the background as a service." It's worth noting that some aspects of the campaign were disclosed last month by Cado Security, which detailed an activity cluster that targets internet-exposed Selenium Grid instances with both cryptocurrency mining and proxyjacking software. Specifically, the fileless perfctl malware has been found to exploit a security ...

SaaS Adoption is Skyrocketing, Resilience Hasn't Kept Pace SaaS platforms have revolutionized how businesses operate. They simplify collaboration, accelerate deployment, and reduce the overhead of managing infrastructure. But with their rise comes a subtle, dangerous assumption: that the convenience of SaaS extends to resilience. It doesn't. These platforms weren't built with full-scale data protection in mind . Most follow a shared responsibility model — wherein the provider ensures uptime and application security, but the data inside is your responsibility. In a world of hybrid architectures, global teams, and relentless cyber threats, that responsibility is harder than ever to manage. Modern organizations are being stretched across: Hybrid and multi-cloud environments with decentralized data sprawl Complex integration layers between IaaS, SaaS, and legacy systems Expanding regulatory pressure with steeper penalties for noncompliance Escalating ransomware threats and inside...

Threat actors with ties to North Korea have been observed delivering a previously undocumented backdoor and remote access trojan (RAT) called VeilShell as part of a campaign targeting Cambodia and likely other Southeast Asian countries. The activity, dubbed SHROUDED#SLEEP by Securonix, is believed to be the handiwork of APT37 , which is also known as InkySquid, Reaper, RedEyes, Ricochet Chollima, Ruby Sleet, and ScarCruft. Active since at least 2012, the adversarial collective is assessed to be part of North Korea's Ministry of State Security (MSS). Like with other state-aligned groups, those affiliated with North Korea, including the Lazarus Group and Kimsuky, vary in their modus operandi and likely have ever-evolving objectives based on state interests. A key malware in its toolbox is RokRAT (aka Goldbackdoor), although the group has also developed custom tools to facilitate covert intelligence gathering. It's currently not known how the first stage payload, a ZIP arc...

INTERPOL has announced the arrest of eight individuals in Côte d'Ivoire and Nigeria as part of a crackdown on phishing scams and romance cyber fraud. Dubbed Operation Contender 2.0, the initiative is designed to tackle cyber-enabled crimes in West Africa, the agency said. One such threat involved a large-scale phishing scam targeting Swiss citizens that resulted in financial losses to the tune of more than $1.4 million. The cybercriminals posed as buyers on small advertising websites and used QR codes to direct victims to fraudulent websites that mimicked a legitimate payment platform. This allowed victims to inadvertently enter personal information such as their credentials or card numbers. The perpetrators also impersonated the unnamed platform's customer service agents over the phone to further deceive them. As many as 260 scam reports are said to have been received by Swiss authorities between August 2023 and April 2024, prompting a collaborative investigation that ...

A new wave of international law enforcement actions has led to four arrests and the takedown of nine servers linked to the LockBit (aka Bitwise Spider) ransomware operation, marking the latest salvo against what was once a prolific financially motivated group. This includes the arrest of a suspected LockBit developer in France while on holiday outside of Russia, two individuals in the U.K. who allegedly supported an affiliate, and an administrator of a bulletproof hosting service in Spain used by the ransomware group, Europol said in a statement. In conjunction, authorities outed a Russian national named Aleksandr Ryzhenkov (aka Beverley, Corbyn_Dallas, G, Guester, and Kotosel) as one of the high-ranking members of the Evil Corp cybercrime group, while simultaneously painting him as a LockBit affiliate. Sanctions have also been announced against seven individuals and two entities linked to the e-crime gang. "The United States, in close coordination with our allies and part...

The U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) on Wednesday added a security flaw impacting Ivanti Endpoint Manager (EPM) that the company patched in May to its Known Exploited Vulnerabilities ( KEV ) catalog, based on evidence of active exploitation. The vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2024-29824 , carries a CVSS score of 9.6 out of a maximum of 10.0, indicating critical severity. "An unspecified SQL Injection vulnerability in Core server of Ivanti EPM 2022 SU5 and prior allows an unauthenticated attacker within the same network to execute arbitrary code," the software service provider said in an advisory released on May 21, 2024. Horizon3.ai, which released a proof-of-concept (PoC) exploit for the flaw in June, said the issue is rooted in a function called RecordGoodApp() within a DLL named PatchBiz.dll. Specifically, it concerns how the function handles an SQL query statement, thereby allowing an attacker to gain remote code execution via xp_cmdshe...

A large-scale fraud campaign leveraged fake trading apps published on the Apple App Store and Google Play Store, as well as phishing sites, to defraud victims, per findings from Group-IB. The campaign is part of a consumer investment fraud scheme that's also widely known as pig butchering , in which prospective victims are lured into making investments in cryptocurrency or other financial instruments after gaining their trust under the guise of a romantic relationship or an investment advisor. Such manipulative and social engineering operations often end with the victims losing their funds, and in some cases, the extraction of even more money from them by requesting various fees and other payments. The Singapore-headquartered company said the campaign has a global reach, with victims reported across Asia-Pacific, European, Middle East, and Africa. The bogus apps, built using the UniApp Framework, have been classified under the moniker UniShadowTrade . The activity cluster i...

A previously undocumented threat actor called CeranaKeeper has been linked to a string of data exfiltration attacks targeting Southeast Asia. Slovak cybersecurity firm ESET, which observed campaigns targeting governmental institutions in Thailand starting in 2023, attributed the activity cluster as aligned to China, leveraging tools previously identified as used by the Mustang Panda actor. "The group constantly updates its backdoor to evade detection and diversifies its methods to aid massive data exfiltration," security researcher Romain Dumont said in an analysis published today. "CeranaKeeper abuses popular, legitimate cloud and file-sharing services such as Dropbox and OneDrive to implement custom backdoors and extraction tools." Some of the other countries targeted by the adversary include Myanmar, the Philippines, Japan, and Taiwan, all of which have been targeted by Chinese state-sponsored threat actors in recent years. ESET described CeranaKeeper a...