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The China-linked nation-state hacking group referred to as  Mustang Panda  is using lures related to the ongoing Russo-Ukrainian War to attack entities in Europe and the Asia Pacific. That's according to the BlackBerry Research and Intelligence Team, which  analyzed  a RAR archive file titled "Political Guidance for the new EU approach towards Russia.rar." Some of the targeted countries include Vietnam, India, Pakistan, Kenya, Turkey, Italy, and Brazil. Mustang Panda is a prolific cyber-espionage group from China that's also tracked under the names Bronze President, Earth Preta, HoneyMyte, RedDelta, and Red Lich. It's believed to be active since at least July 2018, per Secureworks'  threat profile , although indications are that the threat actor has been targeting entities worldwide as early as 2012. Mustang Panda is known to heavily rely on sending weaponized attachments via phishing emails to achieve initial infection, with the intrusions eventually le

The US Department of Defense has cleared Apple's iPhone and iPad for use on its military networks, along with the Samsung Galaxy S4 and BlackBerry 10 devices, the agency said in a statement Friday. The entire DOD is much, much larger, of course, and mobile devices are increasing in importance for the military just as much as they are for we civilians. The report notes that out of more than 600,000 mobile devices used by the Defense Department, only about 41,000 of those are Apple products, with most of those not connected directly to the military's networks. But because these platforms have previously not been certified or cleared for use, such devices had not been connected to secure military networks, except for testing. The move was hardly shocking, but Samsung devices running the Knox security suite and BlackBerry 10 already trickling into the hands of Pentagon employees, the decision sets the stage for a three-way bout for military market supremacy. Offic

In today's digital world, where connectivity is rules all, endpoints serve as the gateway to a business's digital kingdom. And because of this, endpoints are one of hackers' favorite targets.  According to the IDC,  70% of successful breaches start at the endpoint . Unprotected endpoints provide vulnerable entry points to launch devastating cyberattacks. With IT teams needing to protect more endpoints—and more kinds of endpoints—than ever before, that perimeter has become more challenging to defend. You need to improve your endpoint security, but where do you start? That's where this guide comes in.  We've curated the top 10 must-know endpoint security tips that every IT and security professional should have in their arsenal. From identifying entry points to implementing EDR solutions, we'll dive into the insights you need to defend your endpoints with confidence.  1. Know Thy Endpoints: Identifying and Understanding Your Entry Points Understanding your network's

A new variant of Vega ransomware family, dubbed Zeppelin , has recently been spotted in the wild targeting technology and healthcare companies across Europe, the United States, and Canada. However, if you reside in Russia or some other ex-USSR countries like Ukraine, Belorussia, and Kazakhstan, breathe a sigh of relief, as the ransomware terminates its operations if found itself on machines located in these regions. It's notable and interesting because all previous variants of the Vega family, also known as VegaLocker, were primarily targeting Russian speaking users, which indicates Zeppelin is not the work of the same hacking group behind the previous attacks. Since Vega ransomware and its previous variants were offered as a service on underground forums, researchers at BlackBerry Cylance believes either Zeppelin "ended up in the hands of different threat actors" or "redeveloped from bought/stolen/leaked sources." According to a report BlackBerry Cyl

A previously undocumented initial access broker has been unmasked as providing entry points to three different threat actors for mounting intrusions that range from financially motivated ransomware attacks to phishing campaigns. BlackBerry's research and intelligence team dubbed the entity " Zebra2104 ," with the group responsible for offering a means of a digital approach to ransomware syndicates such as MountLocker and Phobos, as well as the advanced persistent threat (APT) tracked under the moniker  StrongPity  (aka Promethium). The threat landscape as we know it has been increasingly dominated by a category of players known as the initial access brokers ( IABs ), who are known to provide other cyber-criminal groups, including ransomware affiliates, with a  foothold to an infinite pool of potential organizations  belonging to diverse geographies and sectors via persistent backdoors into the victim networks, effectively building a pricing model for remote access. &

A financially motivated campaign has been targeting online payment businesses in the Asia Pacific, North America, and Latin America with web skimmers for more than a year. The BlackBerry Research and Intelligence Team is tracking the activity under the name  Silent Skimmer , attributing it to an actor who is knowledgeable in the Chinese language. Prominent victims include online businesses and point-of-sale (PoS) service providers. "The campaign operators exploit vulnerabilities in web applications, particularly those hosted on Internet Information Services (IIS)," the Canadian cybersecurity firm  said . "Their primary objective is to compromise the payment checkout page, and swipe visitors' sensitive payment data." A successful initial foothold is followed by the threat actors leveraging multiple open-source tools and living-off-the-land (LotL) techniques for privilege escalation, post-exploitation, and code execution. The attack chain leads to the deploy

An initial access broker group tracked as Prophet Spider has been linked to a set of malicious activities that exploits the Log4Shell vulnerability in unpatched VMware Horizon Servers. According to new research published by BlackBerry Research & Intelligence and Incident Response (IR) teams today, the cybercrime actor has been opportunistically weaponizing the shortcoming to download a second-stage payload onto the victimized systems. The payloads observed include cryptocurrency miners, Cobalt Strike Beacons, and web shells, corroborating a previous advisory from the U.K. National Health Service (NHS) that  sounded the alarm  on active exploitation of the vulnerabilities in VMware Horizon servers to drop malicious web shells and establish persistence on affected networks for follow-on attacks. Log4Shell  is a moniker used to refer to an exploit affecting the popular Apache Log4j library that results in remote code execution by logging a specially crafted string. Since public

The infamous cybercrime syndicate known as FIN7 has been linked to a spear-phishing campaign targeting the U.S. automotive industry to deliver a known backdoor called Carbanak (aka Anunak). "FIN7 identified employees at the company who worked in the IT department and had higher levels of administrative rights," the BlackBerry research and intelligence team  said  in a new write-up. "They used the lure of a free IP scanning tool to run their well-known Anunak backdoor and gain an initial foothold utilizing living off the land binaries, scripts, and libraries ( LOLBAS )." FIN7, also known as Carbon Spider, Elbrus, Gold Niagara, ITG14, and Sangria Tempest, is a well-known  financially motivated e-crime group  that has a track record of striking a wide range of industry verticals to deliver malware capable of stealing information from point-of-sale (PoS) systems since 2012. In recent years, the threat actor has  transitioned  to  conducting ransomware operations ,

In nearly every segment of our lives, AI (artificial intelligence) now makes a significant impact: It can deliver better healthcare diagnoses and treatments; detect and reduce the risk of financial fraud; improve inventory management; and serve up the right recommendation for a streaming movie on Friday night. However, one can also make a strong case that some of AI's most significant impacts are in cybersecurity. AI's ability to learn, adapt, and predict rapidly evolving threats has made it an indispensable tool in protecting the world's businesses and governments. From basic applications like spam filtering to advanced predictive analytics and AI-assisted response, AI serves a critical role on the front lines, defending our digital assets from cyber criminals. The future for AI in cybersecurity is not all rainbows and roses, however. Today we can see the early signs of a significant shift, driven by the democratization of AI technology. While AI continues to empower organizations

The recent hacking of CBI's website by a group called ' Pakistani Cyber Army ' has raised questions over the safety regulations of servers provided by National Informatics Centre (NIC) , the organisation responsible for maintaining government servers. While the NIC maintains a studied silence over the entire issue, sources in the security establishment say that the safety mechanism of the NIC was not up to the mark and several reminders were being sent to them for upgrading their hardware. The official website of the CBI was hacked by the ' Pakistani Cyber Army ' on the intervening night of December 3 and 4. The CBI had yesterday registered a case against unknown persons in this connection. A report " Shadows in the Cloud " by a Canadian think-tank comprising " Information Warfare Monitor " and " Shadows Server " earlier this year said there was evidence of a cyber espionage network that compromised government, business

An unknown cybercrime threat actor has been observed targeting Spanish- and Portuguese-speaking victims to compromise online banking accounts in Mexico, Peru, and Portugal. "This threat actor employs tactics such as LOLBaS (living-off-the-land binaries and scripts), along with CMD-based scripts to carry out its malicious activities," the BlackBerry Research and Intelligence Team  said  in a report published last week. The cybersecurity company attributed the campaign, dubbed Operation CMDStealer , to a Brazilian threat actor based on an analysis of the artifacts. The attack chain primarily leverages social engineering, banking on Portuguese and Spanish emails containing tax- or traffic violation-themed lures to trigger the infections and gain unauthorized access to victims' systems. The emails come fitted with an HTML attachment that contains obfuscated code to fetch the next-stage payload from a remote server in the form of a RAR archive file. The files, which are

Indian Security Research Atul Alex presented his surprise paper at the International Malware Conference, MalCon on what can be termed as the onset of next generation of hardware based malware that can target mobile devices irrespective of Platforms. Typically, one of the largest challenges for malware coders are to target multiple platforms. A malware for Android will not work in Windows phone, Symbian or Apple iOS, which come in way of malware coders. Also, devices such as iPhone are extremely secure and there is little that can be extracted from a locked / secure iPhone, unless they are jailbroken. Atul Alex's research abuses voice dialing feature which is enabled by default on all mobile platforms - and combines a bugged headset with a micro controller and code to steal private data. The bugged headset can also dial a pre-defined number by detecting if the device is in use or not and turn the phone into a spy device. Further, it can steal contacts from all devices -

On Tuesday, the Dutch Police arrested a 36-year-old man, Danny Manupassa , on suspicion of money laundering and involvement in selling encrypted smartphones to criminals. Manupassa owns a company called Ennetcom , which provides customized Blackberry Phones with the secure PGP-encrypted network. Reportedly, Ennetcom sold nearly 19,000 encrypted cell phones at 1500 euros each in last few years. Police have seized Ennetcom servers based in the Netherlands and Canada and pulled them offline. The seized servers contain data of encrypted communications belong to a large number of criminals. According to a press release , the investigation is ongoing and seized data from the servers will be analyzed soon. Police believe this operation would result in collecting evidence required for solving numerous ongoing investigations involving drug trafficking, assassinations, and other serious crimes. Moreover, Canadian Police is also involved in this investigation and surprisingly, i

A nascent information-stealing malware sold and distributed on underground Russian underground forums has been written in Rust, signalling a new trend where threat actors are increasingly adopting  exotic programming languages  to bypass security protections, evade analysis, and hamper reverse engineering efforts. Dubbed " Ficker Stealer ," it's notable for being propagated via Trojanized web links and compromised websites, luring in victims to scam landing pages purportedly offering free downloads of  legitimate paid services  like Spotify Music, YouTube Premium, and other Microsoft Store applications. "Ficker is sold and distributed as Malware-as-a-Service (MaaS), via underground Russian online forums," BlackBerry's research and intelligence team said in a report published today. "Its creator, whose alias is @ficker, offers several paid packages, with different levels of subscription fees to use their malicious program." First seen in the wi

The threat actors behind  RomCom RAT  are leveraging a network of fake websites advertising rogue versions of popular software at least since July 2022 to infiltrate targets. Cybersecurity firm Trend Micro is tracking the activity cluster under the name Void Rabisu, which is also known as Tropical Scorpius (Unit 42) and UNC2596 (Mandiant). "These lure sites are most likely only meant for a small number of targets, thus making discovery and analysis more difficult," security researchers Feike Hacquebord, Stephen Hilt, Fernando Merces, and Lord Alfred Remorin  said . Some of the impersonated apps spotted so far include AstraChat, Devolutions' Remote Desktop Manager, Gimp, GoTo Meeting, KeePass, OpenAI ChatGPT, Signal, Veeam Backup & Replication, and WinDirStat. RomCom RAT was  first chronicled  by Palo Alto Networks Unit 42 in August 2022, linking it to a financially motivated group deploying  Cuba Ransomware  (aka COLDDRAW). It's worth noting that there is no

Managed Detection and Response (MDR) has emerged as a crucial solution for organizations looking to bolster their security measures. MDR allows businesses to outsource the management of Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR) products deployed across their network domain. With real-time threat-hunting capabilities, MDR services detect and mitigate malicious activities on individual endpoints while promptly alerting the service provider's Security Operations Center (SOC) for further investigation. By leveraging the expertise of security specialists, MDR services relieve organizations of the complexities and criticality associated with security operations. Types of MDR Solutions: MDR services come in various forms, tailored to an organization's technology environment and risk requirements.  These include: Bring-Your-Own Security Stack / Hybrid Solution: MDR solutions that integrate with existing security products deployed within an environment. Full Vendor-Supplied MDR Sta

Mexican financial institutions are under the radar of a new spear-phishing campaign that delivers a modified version of an open-source remote access trojan called  AllaKore RAT . The BlackBerry Research and Intelligence Team attributed the activity to an unknown Latin America-based financially motivated threat actor. The campaign has been active since at least 2021. "Lures use Mexican Social Security Institute (IMSS) naming schemas and links to legitimate, benign documents during the installation process," the Canadian company  said  in an analysis published earlier this week. "The AllaKore RAT payload is heavily modified to allow the threat actors to send stolen banking credentials and unique authentication information back to a command-and-control (C2) server for the purposes of financial fraud." The attacks appear to be designed to particularly single out large companies with gross revenues over $100 million. Targeted entities span retail, agriculture, publ

A relatively new ransomware strain behind a series of breaches on corporate networks has developed new capabilities that allow it to broaden the scope of its targeting and evade security software—as well as with ability for its affiliates to launch double extortion attacks. The MountLocker ransomware, which only began making the rounds in July 2020, has already gained notoriety for stealing files before encryption and demanding ransom amounts in the millions to prevent public disclosure of stolen data, a tactic known as  double extortion . "The MountLocker Operators are clearly just warming up. After a slow start in July they are rapidly gaining ground, as the high-profile nature of extortion and data leaks drive ransom demands ever higher," researchers from BlackBerry Research and Intelligence Team said. "MountLocker affiliates are typically fast operators, rapidly exfiltrating sensitive documents and encrypting them across key targets in a matter of hours."