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An advanced persistent threat (APT) group called Void Banshee has been observed exploiting a recently disclosed security flaw in the Microsoft MHTML browser engine as a zero-day to deliver an information stealer called Atlantida . Cybersecurity firm Trend Micro, which observed the activity in mid-May 2024, said the vulnerability – tracked as CVE-2024-38112 – was used as part of a multi-stage attack chain using specially crafted internet shortcut (URL) files. "Variations of the Atlantida campaign have been highly active throughout 2024 and have evolved to use CVE-2024-38112 as part of Void Banshee infection chains," security researchers Peter Girnus and Aliakbar Zahravi said . "The ability of APT groups like Void Banshee to exploit disabled services such as [Internet Explorer] poses a significant threat to organizations worldwide." The findings dovetail with prior disclosures from Check Point, which told The Hacker News of a campaign leveraging the same shortc...

Russian security vendor Kaspersky has said it's exiting the U.S. market nearly a month after the Commerce Department announced a ban on the sale of its software in the country citing a national security risk. News of the closure was first reported by journalist Kim Zetter. The company is expected to wind down its U.S. operations on July 20, 2024, the same day the ban comes into effect. It's also expected to lay off less than 50 employees in the U.S. "The company has carefully examined and evaluated the impact of the U.S. legal requirements and made this sad and difficult decision as business opportunities in the country are no longer viable," the company said in a statement. In late June 2024, the Commerce Department said it was enforcing a ban after what it said was an "extremely thorough investigation." The company was also added to the Entity List, preventing U.S. enterprises from conducting business with it. It's currently not known what was...

The U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) on Monday added a critical security flaw impacting OSGeo GeoServer GeoTools to its Known Exploited Vulnerabilities ( KEV ) catalog, based on evidence of active exploitation. GeoServer is an open-source software server written in Java that allows users to share and edit geospatial data. It is the reference implementation of the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) Web Feature Service (WFS) and Web Coverage Service (WCS) standards. The vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2024-36401 (CVSS score: 9.8), concerns a case of remote code execution that could be triggered through specially crafted input. "Multiple OGC request parameters allow Remote Code Execution (RCE) by unauthenticated users through specially crafted input against a default GeoServer installation due to unsafely evaluating property names as XPath expressions," according to an advisory released by the project maintainers earlier this month. The shortcom...

Cybersecurity researchers said they discovered an accidentally leaked GitHub token that could have granted elevated access to the GitHub repositories of the Python language, Python Package Index (PyPI), and the Python Software Foundation (PSF). JFrog, which found the GitHub Personal Access Token, said the secret was leaked in a public Docker container hosted on Docker Hub. "This case was exceptional because it is difficult to overestimate the potential consequences if it had fallen into the wrong hands – one could supposedly inject malicious code into PyPI packages (imagine replacing all Python packages with malicious ones), and even to the Python language itself," the software supply chain security company said . An attacker could have hypothetically weaponized their admin access to orchestrate a large-scale supply chain attack by poisoning the source code associated with the core of the Python programming language, or the PyPI package manager. JFrog noted that the aut...

Imagine you could gain access to any Fortune 100 company for $10 or less, or even for free. Terrifying thought, isn't it? Or exciting, depending on which side of the cybersecurity barricade you are on. Well, that's basically the state of things today. Welcome to the infostealer garden of low-hanging fruit. Over the last few years, the problem has grown bigger and bigger, and only now are we slowly learning its full destructive potential. In this article, we will describe how the entire cybercriminal ecosystem operates, the ways various threat actors exploit data originating from it, and most importantly, what you can do about it. Let's start with what infostealer malware actually is. As the name suggests, it's malware that... steals data. Depending on the specific type, the information it extracts might differ slightly, but most will try to extract the following: Cryptocurrency wallets Bank account information and saved credit card details Saved passwords from various apps Bro...

A threat actor that was previously observed using an open-source network mapping tool has greatly expanded their operations to infect over 1,500 victims. Sysdig, which is tracking the cluster under the name CRYSTALRAY , said the activities have witnessed a tenfold surge, adding it includes "mass scanning, exploiting multiple vulnerabilities, and placing backdoors using multiple [open-source software] security tools." The primary objective of the attacks is to harvest and sell credentials, deploy cryptocurrency miners, and maintain persistence in victim environments. A majority of the infections are concentrated in the U.S., China, Singapore, Russia, France, Japan, and India, among others. Prominent among the open-source programs used by the threat actor is SSH-Snake , which was first released in January 2024. It has been described as a tool to carry out automatic network traversal using SSH private keys discovered on systems. The abuse of the software by CRYSTALRAY was ...

Retail banking institutions in Singapore have three months to phase out the use of one-time passwords (OTPs) for authentication purposes when signing into online accounts to mitigate the risk of phishing attacks. The decision was announced by the Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) and the Association of Banks in Singapore (ABS) on July 9, 2024. "Customers who have activated their digital token on their mobile device will have to use their digital tokens for bank account logins via the browser or the mobile banking app," the MAS said . "The digital token will authenticate customers' login without the need for an OTP that scammers can steal, or trick customers into disclosing." The MAS is also urging customers to activate their digital tokens to safeguard against attacks that are designed to steal credentials and hijack their accounts for conducting financial fraud. "This measure provides customers with further protection against unauthorized access to ...

Cybersecurity researchers have shed light on a new version of a ransomware strain called HardBit that comes packaged with new obfuscation techniques to deter analysis efforts. "Unlike previous versions, HardBit Ransomware group enhanced the version 4.0 with passphrase protection," Cybereason researchers Kotaro Ogino and Koshi Oyama said in an analysis. "The passphrase needs to be provided during the runtime in order for the ransomware to be executed properly. Additional obfuscation hinders security researchers from analyzing the malware." HardBit, which first emerged in October 2022, is a financially motivated threat actor that, similar to other ransomware groups, operates with an aim to generate illicit revenues via double extortion tactics. What makes the threat group stand out is that it does not operate a data leak site, and instead pressurizes victims to pay up by threatening to conduct additional attacks in the future. Its primary mode of communication ...

American telecom service provider AT&T has confirmed that threat actors managed to access data belonging to "nearly all" of its wireless customers as well as customers of mobile virtual network operators (MVNOs) using AT&T's wireless network. "Threat actors unlawfully accessed an AT&T workspace on a third-party cloud platform and, between April 14 and April 25, 2024, exfiltrated files containing AT&T records of customer call and text interactions that occurred between approximately May 1 and October 31, 2022, as well as on January 2, 2023," it said . This comprises telephone numbers with which an AT&T or MVNO wireless number interacted – including telephone numbers of AT&T landline customers and customers of other carriers, counts of those interactions, and aggregate call duration for a day or month. A subset of these records also contained one or more cell site identification numbers , potentially allowing the threat actors to triang...