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Foreign affairs ministries in the Americas have been targeted by a Chinese state-sponsored actor named  Flea  as part of a recent campaign that spanned from late 2022 to early 2023. The cyber attacks, per Broadcom's Symantec, involved a new backdoor codenamed Graphican. Some of the other targets included a government finance department and a corporation that markets products in the Americas as well as one unspecified victim in an European country. "Flea used a large number of tools in this campaign," the company  said  in a report shared with The Hacker News, describing the threat actor as "large and well-resourced." "As well as the new Graphican backdoor, the attackers leveraged a variety of living-off-the-land tools, as well as tools that have been previously linked to Flea." Flea, also called APT15, BackdoorDiplomacy, ke3chang, Nylon Typhoon (formerly Nickel), Playful Taurus, Royal APT, and Vixen Panda, is an advanced persistent threat group tha

Individuals in the Pakistan region have been targeted using two rogue Android apps available on the Google Play Store as part of a new targeted campaign. Cybersecurity firm Cyfirma attributed the campaign with moderate confidence to a threat actor known as  DoNot Team , which is also tracked as APT-C-35 and Viceroy Tiger. The espionage activity involves duping Android smartphone owners into downloading a program that's used to extract contact and location data from unwitting victims. "The motive behind the attack is to gather information via the stager payload and use the gathered information for the second-stage attack, using malware with more destructive features," the company  said . DoNot Team  is a suspected India-nexus threat actor that has a reputation for carrying out attacks against various countries in South Asia. It has been active since at least 2016. While an October 2021 report from Amnesty International linked the group's attack infrastructure to

The introduction of Open AI's ChatGPT was a defining moment for the software industry, touching off a GenAI race with its November 2022 release. SaaS vendors are now rushing to upgrade tools with enhanced productivity capabilities that are driven by generative AI. Among a wide range of uses, GenAI tools make it easier for developers to build software, assist sales teams in mundane email writing, help marketers produce unique content at low cost, and enable teams and creatives to brainstorm new ideas.  Recent significant GenAI product launches include Microsoft 365 Copilot, GitHub Copilot, and Salesforce Einstein GPT. Notably, these GenAI tools from leading SaaS providers are paid enhancements, a clear sign that no SaaS provider will want to miss out on cashing in on the GenAI transformation. Google will soon launch its SGE "Search Generative Experience" platform for premium AI-generated summaries rather than a list of websites.  At this pace, it's just a matter of a short time befo

An updated version of an Android remote access trojan dubbed  GravityRAT  has been found masquerading as messaging apps BingeChat and Chatico as part of a narrowly targeted campaign since June 2022. "Notable in the newly discovered campaign, GravityRAT can exfiltrate WhatsApp backups and receive commands to delete files," ESET researcher Lukáš Štefanko  said  in a new report published today. "The malicious apps also provide legitimate chat functionality based on the open-source  OMEMO  Instant Messenger app." GravityRAT is the name given to a  cross-platform malware  that's capable of targeting Windows, Android, and macOS devices. The Slovak cybersecurity firm is tracking the activity under the name SpaceCobra. The threat actor is suspected to be based in Pakistan, with recent attacks involving GravityRAT targeting military personnel in India and among the Pakistan Air Force by camouflaging it as cloud storage and entertainment apps, as  disclosed  by Meta

Microsoft has rolled out fixes for its Windows operating system and other software components to remediate major security shortcomings as part of  Patch Tuesday updates  for June 2023. Of the 73 flaws, six are rated Critical, 63 are rated Important, two are rated Moderate, and one is rated Low in severity. This also includes three issues the tech giant addressed in its Chromium-based Edge browser. It's worth noting that Microsoft also closed out  26 other flaws  in Edge – all of them rooted in Chromium itself – since the release of May Patch Tuesday updates. This comprises  CVE-2023-3079 , a zero-day bug that Google disclosed as being actively exploited in the wild last week. The June 2023 updates also mark the first time in several months that doesn't feature any zero-day flaw in Microsoft products that's publicly known or under active attack at the time of release. Topping the list of fixes is  CVE-2023-29357  (CVSS score: 9.8), a privilege escalation flaw in ShareP

Thousands of adware apps for Android have been found to masquerade as cracks or modded versions of popular applications to serve unwanted ads to users as part of a campaign ongoing since October 2022. "The campaign is designed to aggressively push adware to Android devices with the purpose to drive revenue," Bitdefender said in a technical report shared with The Hacker News. "However, the threat actors involved can easily switch tactics to redirect users to other types of malware such as banking Trojans to steal credentials and financial information or ransomware." The Romanian cybersecurity company said it has discovered 60,000 unique apps carrying the adware, with a majority of the detections located in the U.S., South Korea, Brazil, Germany, the U.K., France, Kazakhstan, Romania, and Italy. It's worth pointing out that none of the apps are distributed through the official Google Play Store. Instead, users searching for apps like Netflix, PDF viewers, se

Spanish-speaking users in Latin America have been at the receiving end of a new botnet malware dubbed  Horabot  since at least November 2020. "Horabot enables the threat actor to control the victim's Outlook mailbox, exfiltrate contacts' email addresses, and send phishing emails with malicious HTML attachments to all addresses in the victim's mailbox," Cisco Talos researcher Chetan Raghuprasad  said . The botnet program also delivers a Windows-based financial trojan and a spam tool to harvest online banking credentials as well as compromise Gmail, Outlook, and Yahoo! webmail accounts to blast spam emails. The cybersecurity firm said a majority of the infections are located in Mexico, with limited victims identified in Uruguay, Brazil, Venezuela, Argentina, Guatemala, and Panama. The threat actor behind the campaign is believed to be in Brazil. Targeted users of the ongoing campaign primarily span accounting, construction and engineering, wholesale distributio

Cybersecurity researchers have offered a closer look at the RokRAT remote access trojan that's employed by the North Korean state-sponsored actor known as  ScarCruft . "RokRAT is a sophisticated remote access trojan (RAT) that has been observed as a critical component within the attack chain, enabling the threat actors to gain unauthorized access, exfiltrate sensitive information, and potentially maintain persistent control over compromised systems," ThreatMon  said . ScarCruft , active since at least 2012, is a  cyber espionage group  that operates on behalf of the North Korean government, exclusively focusing on targets in its southern counterpart. The group is believed to be a subordinate element within North Korea's Ministry of State Security (MSS). Attack chains mounted by the group have leaned heavily on social engineering to spear-phish victims and deliver payloads onto target networks. This includes exploiting vulnerabilities in Hancom's Hangul Word

A new open source remote access trojan (RAT) called  DogeRAT  targets Android users primarily located in India as part of a sophisticated malware campaign. The malware is distributed via social media and messaging platforms under the guise of legitimate applications like Opera Mini, OpenAI ChatGPT, and Premium versions of YouTube, Netflix, and Instagram. "Once installed on a victim's device, the malware gains unauthorized access to sensitive data, including contacts, messages, and banking credentials," cybersecurity firm CloudSEK  said  in a Monday report. "It can also take control of the infected device, enabling malicious actions such as sending spam messages, making unauthorized payments, modifying files, and even remotely capturing photos through the device's cameras." DogeRAT, like many other malware-as-a-service ( MaaS ) offerings, is promoted by its India-based developer through a Telegram channel that has more than 2,100 subscribers since it wa

Researchers have discovered an inexpensive attack technique that could be leveraged to brute-force fingerprints on smartphones to bypass user authentication and seize control of the devices. The approach, dubbed  BrutePrint , bypasses limits put in place to counter failed biometric authentication attempts by weaponizing two zero-day vulnerabilities in the smartphone fingerprint authentication (SFA) framework. The flaws, Cancel-After-Match-Fail (CAMF) and Match-After-Lock (MAL), leverage logical defects in the authentication framework, which arises due to insufficient protection of fingerprint data on the Serial Peripheral Interface (SPI) of fingerprint sensors. The result is a "hardware approach to do man-in-the-middle (MitM) attacks for fingerprint image hijacking," researchers Yu Chen and Yiling He  said  in a research paper. "BrutePrint acts as a middleman between fingerprint sensor and  TEE  [Trusted Execution Environment]." The goal, at its core, is to be

A critical security vulnerability has been disclosed in the Open Authorization (OAuth) implementation of the application development framework Expo.io. The shortcoming, assigned the CVE identifier  CVE-2023-28131 , has a severity rating of 9.6 on the CVSS scoring system. API security firm Salt Labs  said  the issue rendered services using the framework susceptible to credential leakage, which could then be used to hijack accounts and siphon sensitive data. Under certain circumstances, a threat actor could have taken advantage of the flaw to perform arbitrary actions on behalf of a compromised user on various platforms such as Facebook, Google, or Twitter. Expo, similar to Electron, is an open source platform for developing universal native apps that run on Android, iOS, and the web. It's worth noting that for the attack to be successful, sites and applications using Expo should have configured the AuthSession Proxy setting for single sign-on (SSO) using a third-party provider

Security researchers have detailed the inner workings of the commercial Android spyware called Predator, which is marketed by the Israeli company Intellexa (previously Cytrox). Predator was  first documented  by Google's Threat Analysis Group (TAG) in May 2022 as part of attacks leveraging five different zero-day flaws in the Chrome web browser and Android. The spyware, which is delivered by means of another loader component known as Alien, is equipped to record audio from phone calls and VoIP-based apps as well as gather contacts and messages, including from Signal, WhatsApp, and Telegram. Its other functionalities allow it to hide applications and prevent applications from being executed upon rebooting the handset. "A deep dive into both spyware components indicates that Alien is more than just a loader for Predator and actively sets up the low-level capabilities needed for Predator to spy on its victims," Cisco Talos  said  in a technical report. Spyware like Pre

Google has removed a screen recording app named "iRecorder - Screen Recorder" from the Play Store after it was found to sneak in information stealing capabilities nearly a year after the app was published as an innocuous app. The app (APK package name "com.tsoft.app.iscreenrecorder"), which accrued over 50,000 installations, was first uploaded on September 19, 2021. The malicious functionality is believed to have been introduced in version 1.3.8, which was released on August 24, 2022. "It is rare for a developer to upload a legitimate app, wait almost a year, and then update it with malicious code," ESET security researcher Lukáš Štefanko  said  in a technical report. "The malicious code that was added to the clean version of iRecorder is based on the open source  AhMyth  Android RAT (remote access trojan) and has been customized into what we named AhRat." iRecorder was  first flagged  as harboring the AhMyth trojan on October 28, 2022, by

The U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) has warned of active exploitation of a medium-severity flaw affecting Samsung devices. The issue, tracked as  CVE-2023-21492  (CVSS score: 4.4), impacts select Samsung devices running Android versions 11, 12, and 13. The South Korean electronics giant described the issue as an information disclosure flaw that could be exploited by a privileged attacker to bypass address space layout randomization ( ASLR ) protections. ASLR is a  security technique  that's designed to thwart memory corruption and code execution flaws by obscuring the location of an executable in a device's memory. Samsung, in an  advisory  released this month, said it was "notified that an exploit for this issue had existed in the wild," adding it was privately disclosed to the company on January 17, 2023. Other details about how the flaw is being exploited are currently not known, but vulnerabilities in Samsung phones have been we

Google has announced plans to officially flip the switch on its twice-delayed  Privacy Sandbox  initiatives as it slowly works its way to deprecate support for third-party cookies in Chrome browser. To that end, the search and advertising giant said it intends to phase out third-party cookies for 1% of Chrome users globally in the first quarter of 2024. "This will support developers in conducting real world experiments that assess the readiness and effectiveness of their products without third-party cookies," Anthony Chavez, vice president of Privacy Sandbox at Google,  said . Prior to rolling this out, Google said it would introduce the ability for third-party developers to simulate the process for a configurable subset of their users (up to 10%) in Q4 2023. Google further emphasized that the plans have been designed and developed with regulatory oversight and input from the U.K.'s Competition and Markets Authority ( CMA ), which is overseeing the implementation to

A cybercrime enterprise known as  Lemon Group  is leveraging millions of pre-infected Android smartphones worldwide to carry out their malicious operations, posing significant supply chain risks. "The infection turns these devices into mobile proxies, tools for stealing and selling SMS messages, social media and online messaging accounts and monetization via advertisements and click fraud," cybersecurity firm Trend Micro  said . The activity encompasses no fewer than 8.9 million compromised Android devices, particularly budget phones, with the highest concentration of the infections discovered in the U.S., Mexico, Indonesia, Thailand, Russia, South Africa, India, Angola, the Philippines, and Argentina. The findings were  presented  by researchers Fyodor Yarochkin, Zhengyu Dong, Vladimir Kropotov, and Paul Pajares at the Black Hat Asia conference held in Singapore last week. Describing it as a  continuously evolving problem , the cybersecurity firm said the threat actors

A hacking group dubbed  OilAlpha  with suspected ties to Yemen's  Houthi movement  has been linked to a cyber espionage campaign targeting development, humanitarian, media, and non-governmental organizations in the Arabian peninsula. "OilAlpha used encrypted chat messengers like WhatsApp to launch social engineering attacks against its targets," cybersecurity company Recorded Future  said  in a technical report published Tuesday. "It has also used URL link shorteners. Per victimology assessment, it appears a majority of the targeted entities were Arabic-language speakers and operated Android devices." OilAlpha is the new cryptonym given by Recorded Future to two overlapping clusters previously tracked by the company under the names TAG-41 and TAG-62 since April 2022. TAG-XX (short for Threat Activity Group) is the temporary moniker assigned to emerging threat groups. The assessment that the adversary is acting in the interest of the Houthi movement is base