Search results for Outlook Commands | Breaking Cybersecurity News | The Hacker News

The Russian state-sponsored hacking group tracked as APT28 has been attributed to a new Microsoft Outlook backdoor called NotDoor in attacks targeting multiple companies from different sectors in NATO member countries. NotDoor "is a VBA macro for Outlook designed to monitor incoming emails for a specific trigger word," S2 Grupo's LAB52 threat intelligence team said . "When such an email is detected, it enables an attacker to exfiltrate data, upload files, and execute commands on the victim’s computer." The artifact gets its name from the use of the word "Nothing" within the source code, the Spanish cybersecurity company added. The activity highlights the abuse of Outlook as a stealthy communication, data exfiltration, and malware delivery channel. The exact initial access vector used to deliver the malware is currently not known, but analysis shows that it's deployed via Microsoft's OneDrive executable ("onedrive.exe") using a t...

Threat hunters have shed light on a new campaign targeting the foreign ministry of an unnamed South American nation with bespoke malware capable of granting remote access to infected hosts. The activity, detected in November 2024, has been attributed by Elastic Security Labs to a threat cluster it tracks as REF7707 . Some of the other targets include a telecommunications entity and a university, both located in Southeast Asia. "While the REF7707 campaign is characterized by a well-engineered, highly capable, novel intrusion set, the campaign owners exhibited poor campaign management and inconsistent evasion practices," security researchers Andrew Pease and Seth Goodwin said in a technical analysis. The exact initial access vector used in the attacks is currently not clear, although it has been observed that Microsoft's certutil application is used to download additional payloads from a web server associated with the Foreign Ministry. The certutil commands used to ...

The threat actors behind the Windows-based  Grandoreiro  banking trojan have returned in a global campaign since March 2024 following a law enforcement takedown in January. The large-scale phishing attacks, likely facilitated by other cybercriminals via a malware-as-a-service (MaaS) model, target over 1,500 banks across the world, spanning more than 60 countries in Central and South America, Africa, Europe, and the Indo-Pacific, IBM X-Force said. While  Grandoreiro  is known primarily for its focus in Latin America, Spain, and Portugal, the expansion is likely a shift in strategy after attempts to  shut down its infrastructure  by Brazilian authorities. Going hand-in-hand with the broader targeting footprint are significant improvements to the malware itself, which indicates active development. "Analysis of the malware revealed major updates within the string decryption and domain generating algorithm (DGA), as well as the ability to use Mic...

An unnamed European Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MFA) and its three diplomatic missions in the Middle East were targeted by two previously undocumented backdoors tracked as LunarWeb and LunarMail. ESET, which identified the activity, attributed it with medium confidence to the Russia-aligned cyberespionage group Turla (aka Iron Hunter, Pensive Ursa, Secret Blizzard, Snake, Uroburos, and Venomous Bear), citing tactical overlaps with prior campaigns identified as orchestrated by the threat actor. "LunarWeb, deployed on servers, uses HTTP(S) for its C&C [command-and-control] communications and mimics legitimate requests, while LunarMail, deployed on workstations, is persisted as an Outlook add-in and uses email messages for its C&C communications," security researcher Filip Jurčacko  said . An analysis of the Lunar artifacts shows that they may have been used in targeted attacks since early 2020, or even earlier. Turla, assessed to be affiliated with Russia's Fe...

The Computer Emergency Response Team of Ukraine (CERT-UA) has disclosed details of a phishing campaign that's designed to deliver a malware codenamed LAMEHUG . "An obvious feature of LAMEHUG is the use of LLM (large language model), used to generate commands based on their textual representation (description)," CERT-UA said in a Thursday advisory. The activity has been attributed with medium confidence to a Russian state-sponsored hacking group tracked as APT28 , which is also known as Fancy Bear, Forest Blizzard, Sednit, Sofacy, and UAC-0001. The cybersecurity agency said it found the malware after receiving reports on July 10, 2025, about suspicious emails sent from compromised accounts and impersonating ministry officials. The emails targeted executive government authorities. Present within these emails was a ZIP archive that, in turn, contained the LAMEHUG payload in the form of three different variants named "Додаток.pif, "AI_generator_uncensored_Can...

The Computer Emergency Response Team of Ukraine (CERT-UA) has warned of a new phishing campaign orchestrated by the  Russia-linked APT28 group  to deploy previously undocumented malware such as OCEANMAP, MASEPIE, and STEELHOOK to harvest sensitive information. The activity, which was  detected  by the agency between December 15 and 25, 2023, targeted Ukrainian government entities and Polish organizations with email messages urging recipients to click on a link to view a document. However, to the contrary, the links redirect to malicious web resources that abuse JavaScript and the  "search-ms:" URI protocol handler  to drop a Windows shortcut file (LNK) that launches PowerShell commands to activate an infection chain for a new malware known as MASEPIE. MASEPIE is a Python-based tool to download/upload files and execute commands, with communications with the command-and-control (C2) server taking place over an encrypted channel using the TCP pr...

Microsoft 365 (M365), formerly called Office 365 (O365), is Microsoft's cloud strategy flagship product with major changes ahead, such as the deprecation of their legacy authentication protocols. Often stored on or saved to the device, Basic Authentication protocols rely on sending usernames and passwords with every request, increasing the risk of attackers capturing users' credentials, particularly if not TLS protected. Basic Authentication, while necessary for companies using legacy software, is unable to enforce MFA and is superseded by Modern Authentication. The legacy settings have been on Microsoft's radar to fix for years. In 2018,  Microsoft announced  it would introduce a series of changes — and ultimately deprecation — to its authentication controls as a means to help organizations mitigate the risk. These changes were set to take place over a number of years, and in September 2021,  they announced  that they will begin to permanently disable Basic Auth ...

A China-aligned threat actor codenamed UTA0388 has been attributed to a series of spear-phishing campaigns targeting North America, Asia, and Europe that are designed to deliver a Go-based implant known as GOVERSHELL . "The initially observed campaigns were tailored to the targets, and the messages purported to be sent by senior researchers and analysts from legitimate-sounding, completely fabricated organizations," Volexity said in a Wednesday report. "The goal of these spear phishing campaigns was to socially engineer targets into clicking links that led to a remotely hosted archive containing a malicious payload." Since then, the threat actor behind the attacks is said to have leveraged different lures and fictional identities, spanning several languages, including English, Chinese, Japanese, French, and German. Early iterations of the campaigns have been found to embed links to phishing content either hosted on a cloud-based service or their own infrastruc...

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...

Some of the biggest security problems start quietly. No alerts. No warnings. Just small actions that seem normal but aren't. Attackers now know how to stay hidden by blending in, and that makes it hard to tell when something’s wrong. This week’s stories aren’t just about what was attacked—but how easily it happened. If we’re only looking for the obvious signs, what are we missing right in front of us? Here’s a look at the tactics and mistakes that show how much can go unnoticed. ⚡ Threat of the Week Apple Zero-Click Flaw in Messages Exploited to Deliver Paragon Spyware — Apple disclosed that a security flaw in its Messages app was actively exploited in the wild to target civil society members in sophisticated cyber attacks. The vulnerability, CVE-2025-43200, was addressed by the company in February as part of iOS 18.3.1, iPadOS 18.3.1, iPadOS 17.7.5, macOS Sequoia 15.3.1, macOS Sonoma 14.7.4, macOS Ventura 13.7.4, watchOS 11.3.1, and visionOS 2.3.1. The Citizen Lab said it u...

The Iranian state-sponsored threat actor known as APT42 has been observed targeting individuals and organizations that are of interest to the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) as part of a new espionage-focused campaign. The activity, detected in early September 2025 and assessed to be ongoing, has been codenamed  SpearSpecter by the Israel National Digital Agency (INDA). "The campaign has systematically targeted high-value senior defense and government officials using personalized social engineering tactics," INDA researchers Shimi Cohen, Adi Pick, Idan Beit-Yosef, Hila David, and Yaniv Goldman said. "These include inviting targets to prestigious conferences or arranging significant meetings." What's notable about the effort is that it also extends to the targets' family members, creating a broader attack surface that exerts more pressure on the primary targets. APT42 was first publicly documented in late 2022 by Google Mandiant, detailing its...

Microsoft Copilot has been called one of the most powerful productivity tools on the planet. Copilot is an AI assistant that lives inside each of your Microsoft 365 apps — Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Teams, Outlook, and so on. Microsoft's dream is to take the drudgery out of daily work and let humans focus on being creative problem-solvers. What makes Copilot a different beast than ChatGPT and other AI tools is that it has access to everything you've ever worked on in 365. Copilot can instantly search and compile data from across your documents, presentations, email, calendar, notes, and contacts. And therein lies the problem for information security teams. Copilot can access all the sensitive data that a user can access, which is often far too much. On average, 10% of a company's M365 data is open to all employees. Copilot can also rapidly generate  net new  sensitive data that must be protected. Prior to the AI revolution, humans' ability to create and share data ...

Cybersecurity researchers have shed light on a Russian-speaking cyber espionage group called Nebulous Mantis that has deployed a remote access trojan known as RomCom RAT since mid-2022. RomCom "employs advanced evasion techniques, including living-off-the-land (LOTL) tactics and encrypted command and control (C2) communications, while continuously evolving its infrastructure – leveraging bulletproof hosting to maintain persistence and evade detection," Swiss cybersecurity company PRODAFT said in a report shared with The Hacker News. Nebulous Mantis, also tracked by the cybersecurity community under the names CIGAR , Cuba , Storm-0978, Tropical Scorpius, UAC-0180, UNC2596 , and Void Rabisu , is known to target critical infrastructure, government agencies, political leaders, and NATO-related defense organizations. Attack chains mounted by the group typically involve the use of spear-phishing emails with weaponized document links to distribute RomCom RAT. The domains and c...