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Microsoft is warning of several phishing campaigns that are leveraging tax-related themes to deploy malware and steal credentials. "These campaigns notably use redirection methods such as URL shorteners and QR codes contained in malicious attachments and abuse legitimate services like file-hosting services and business profile pages to avoid detection," Microsoft said in a report shared with The Hacker News. A notable aspect of these campaigns is that they lead to phishing pages that are delivered via a phishing-as-a-service (PhaaS) platform codenamed RaccoonO365 , an e-crime platform that first came to light in early December 2024. Also delivered are remote access trojans (RATs) like Remcos RAT, as well as other malware and post-exploitation frameworks such as Latrodectus , AHKBot, GuLoader , and BruteRatel C4 (BRc4). One such campaign spotted by the tech giant on February 6, 2025, is estimated to have sent hundreds of emails targeting the United States ahead of the t...

Microsoft has released security updates for the month of April 2024 to remediate a record  149 flaws , two of which have come under active exploitation in the wild. Of the 149 flaws, three are rated Critical, 142 are rated Important, three are rated Moderate, and one is rated Low in severity. The update is aside from  21 vulnerabilities  that the company addressed in its Chromium-based Edge browser following the release of the  March 2024 Patch Tuesday fixes . The two shortcomings that have come under active exploitation are below - CVE-2024-26234  (CVSS score: 6.7) - Proxy Driver Spoofing Vulnerability CVE-2024-29988  (CVSS score: 8.8) - SmartScreen Prompt Security Feature Bypass Vulnerability While Microsoft's own advisory provides no information about CVE-2024-26234, cybersecurity firm Sophos said it discovered in December 2023 a malicious executable ("Catalog.exe" or "Catalog Authentication Client Service") that's  signed  by a valid M...

Cybersecurity researchers have called attention to a cyber attack in which unknown threat actors deployed an open-source endpoint monitoring and digital forensic tool called Velociraptor , illustrating ongoing abuse of legitimate software for malicious purposes. "In this incident, the threat actor used the tool to download and execute Visual Studio Code with the likely intention of creating a tunnel to an attacker-controlled command-and-control (C2) server," the Sophos Counter Threat Unit Research Team said in a report published this week.  While threat actors are known to adopt living-off-the-land (LotL) techniques or take advantage of legitimate remote monitoring and management (RMM) tools in their attacks, the use of Velociraptor signals a tactical evolution, where incident response programs are being used to obtain a foothold and minimize the need for having to deploy their own malware.  Further analysis of the incident has revealed that the attackers used the Wind...

Great news for hackers. Now you can download and install Kali Linux directly from the Microsoft App Store on Windows 10 just like any other application. I know it sounds crazy, but it's true! Kali Linux, a very popular, free, and open-source Linux-based operating system widely used for hacking and penetration testing, is now natively available on Windows 10, without requiring dual boot or virtualization. Kali Linux is the latest Linux distribution to be made available on the Windows App Store for one-click installation, joining the list of other popular distribution such as Ubuntu , OpenSUSE and SUSE Enterprise Linux . In Windows 10, Microsoft has provided a feature called " Windows Subsystem for Linux " (WSL) that allows users to run Linux applications directly on Windows. "For the past few weeks, we've been working with the Microsoft WSL team to get Kali Linux introduced into the Microsoft App Store as an official WSL distribution, and today we...

Windows 10 is built with the power features of Windows 7 and 8.1, which makes it a robust operating system. It gained 65 million users in the first three days after its release. Still counting and making Windows 10 as a universal platform for all the devices running the same operating system. By Introducing " Windows as a service " utility, The Microsoft is offering Windows 10 Free Upgrade to all the users running Windows 7 or 8.1 as a Windows update, and not as a separate product. From now on, the company will provide regular updates for Windows in the same manner Apple does with its Mac OS X operating system that gets regular updates on a yearly basis and has been known as OS X for over 15 years. Despite some privacy issues , including " Wi-Fi Sense " and " Bandwidth sharing for Windows Update ", and few more, Windows 10 offers a bevy of new and advanced features that makes the operating system unique from others. Also Read: How to Fix 35+ Windows 10 Privacy Iss...

Here we are with our weekly roundup, briefing this week's top cybersecurity threats, incidents, and challenges, just in case you missed any of them. Last week has been very short with big news from the theft of over 4,700 Bitcoins from the largest cryptocurrency mining marketplace to the discovery of a new malware evasion technique that works on all versions of Microsoft's Windows operating system. Besides this, the newly discovered Janus vulnerability in the Android operating system and a critical remote code execution (RCE) vulnerability in Malware Protection Engine (MPE) for which Microsoft released an emergency patch made their places in our weekly roundup. I recommend you to read the entire news (just click 'Read More' because there's some valuable advice in there as well). So, here we go with the list of this Week's Top Stories: Process Doppelgänging: New Malware Evasion Technique A team of researchers, who previously discovered AtomBombing...

The Iranian state-sponsored threat actor known as  OilRig  deployed three different downloader malware throughout 2022 to maintain persistent access to victim organizations located in Israel. The three new downloaders have been named ODAgent, OilCheck, and OilBooster by Slovak cybersecurity company ESET. The attacks also involved the use of an updated version of a known OilRig downloader dubbed  SampleCheck5000  (or SC5k). "These lightweight downloaders [...] are notable for using one of several legitimate cloud service APIs for [command-and-control] communication and data exfiltration: the Microsoft Graph OneDrive or Outlook APIs, and the Microsoft Office Exchange Web Services (EWS) API," security researchers Zuzana Hromcová and Adam Burgher  said  in a report shared with The Hacker News. By using well-known cloud service providers for command-and-control communication, the goal is to blend with authentic network traffic and cover up the group's attack...

Microsoft discloses vulnerabilities in Chrome and Opera Microsoft has issued two advisories on Chrome and Opera, detailing remote code execution and information disclosure vulnerabilities. The disclosure is the result of the Microsoft Vulnerability Research (MSVR) system going live, which is one of the core items within their Coordinated Vulnerability Disclosure (CVD) program. On Tuesday, Microsoft issued an MSRV Advisory related to use-after-free memory errors in Google's Chrome, which, if exploited, would have triggered a crash and allowed remote code execution in the browsers sandbox. "When attempting to parse specially crafted Web content, Google Chrome references memory that has been freed. An attacker could exploit the vulnerability to cause the browser to become unresponsive and/or exit unexpectedly, allowing an attacker to run arbitrary code within the Google Chrome Sandbox," the advisory explains. Google has addressed the issue in a patch delivered last September. Vers...

It seems Microsoft is planning to build its EMET anti-exploit tool into the kernel of Windows 10 Creator Update (also known as RedStone 3), which is expected to release in September/October 2017. So you may not have to separately download and install EMET in the upcoming version of the Windows 10. If true, this would be the second big change Microsoft is making in its Windows 10 Fall update after planning to remove SMBv1 to enhance its users security. EMET or Enhanced Mitigation Experience Toolkit, currently optional, is a free anti-exploit toolkit for Microsoft's Windows operating systems designed to boost the security of your computer against complex threats such as zero-day vulnerabilities. " EMET helps protect your computer systems even before new and undiscovered threats are formally addressed by security updates and antimalware software ," Microsoft site reads. Basically EMET detects and prevents buffer overflows and memory corruption vulnerabilities,...

Are you experiencing slow Internet speed on your MacBook today? — It's not just you! Here's Why: Following in Microsoft's footsteps , Apple has started " pre-downloading " the latest version of its desktop operating system, macOS 10.12 Sierra, in the background, if you are still running OS X El Capitan. If you have automatic downloads enabled on your Mac, a large file of around 5GB will mysteriously be downloaded to your computer in the background, using your Internet bandwidth for unrequested files. Apple justifies this move by saying that the automatic download would make it easier for users to get the newest operating system, encouraging them to update their Macs. The good news, however, is that the update will not install automatically without your permission. Once downloaded automatically in the background, users who are running OS X El Capitan version 10.11.5 or later will receive a notification that says macOS Sierra is ready to be installed....

The Russian nation-state actor tracked as Secret Blizzard has been observed leveraging malware associated with other threat actors to deploy a known backdoor called Kazuar on target devices located in Ukraine. The new findings come from the Microsoft threat intelligence team, which said it observed the adversary leveraging the Amadey bot malware to download custom malware onto "specifically selected" systems associated with the Ukrainian military between March and April 2024. The activity is assessed to be the second time since 2022 that Secret Blizzard, also known as Turla, has latched onto a cybercrime campaign to propagate its own tools in Ukraine. "Commandeering other threat actors' access highlights Secret Blizzard's approach to diversifying its attack vectors," the company said in a report shared with The Hacker News. Some of the other known methods employed by the hacking crew include adversary-in-the-middle ( AitM ) campaigns, strategic web compro...