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Cyber criminals are becoming more adept, innovative, and stealthy with each passing day. They are now adopting more clandestine techniques that come with limitless attack vectors and are harder to detect. Recently, cyber crooks managed to infiltrate the update mechanism for a popular server management software package and altered it to include an advanced backdoor, which lasts for at least 17 days until researchers discovered it. Dubbed ShadowPad , the secret backdoor gave attackers complete control over networks hidden behind legit cryptographically signed software sold by NetSarang —used by hundreds of banks, media firms, energy companies, and pharmaceutical firms, telecommunication providers, transportation and logistics and other industries—for 17 days starting last month. Important Note — If you are using any of the affected product (listed below), we highly recommend you stop using it until you update them. Hacker Injected Backdoor Through Software Update Mechani...

Incapsula announced this week that they're offering an intriguing Backdoor Protection feature for sites using their cloud-based website security and performance services. What's a Backdoor? A backdoor is a malicious function that enables hackers to remotely operate a site or server, even after whatever exploit they used for initial access has been patched. Installing a backdoor is often the first thing a hacker will do after gaining access to your site - so if you've been hacked before, there's a good chance you've already got one. Hackers love backdoors because they provide easy return access to the site. Once installed, backdoors can used to distribute spam and malware, launch distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks, or to help steal valuable data like credit card numbers. Recently, Incapsula reported how during the ongoing DDoS attacks against United States banks, a backdoor was used to turn a compromised site into a unwilling foot-soldier in the hackers Zombie Bo...

What is a backdoor? By definition: "Backdoor is a feature or defect of a computer system that allows surreptitious unauthorized access to data, " either the backdoor is in encryption algorithm, a server or in an implementation, and doesn't matter whether it has previously been used or not. Yesterday, we published a story based on findings reported by security researcher Tobias Boelter that suggests WhatsApp has a backdoor that "could allow" an attacker, and of course the company itself, to intercept your encrypted communication. The story involving the world's largest secure messaging platform that has over a billion users worldwide went viral in few hours, attracting reactions from security experts, WhatsApp team, and Open Whisper Systems, who partnered with Facebook to implement end-to-end encryption in WhatsApp. Note: I would request readers to read complete article before reaching out for a conclusion. And also, suggestions and opinions are ...

A previously undocumented "flexible" backdoor called  Kapeka  has been "sporadically" observed in cyber attacks targeting Eastern Europe, including Estonia and Ukraine, since at least mid-2022. The findings come from Finnish cybersecurity firm WithSecure, which attributed the malware to the Russia-linked advanced persistent threat (APT) group tracked as  Sandworm  (aka APT44 or Seashell Blizzard). Microsoft is tracking the same malware under the name KnuckleTouch. "The malware [...] is a flexible backdoor with all the necessary functionalities to serve as an early-stage toolkit for its operators, and also to provide long-term access to the victim estate," security researcher Mohammad Kazem Hassan Nejad  said . Kapeka comes fitted with a dropper that's designed to launch and execute a backdoor component on the infected host, after which it removes itself. The dropper is also responsible for setting up persistence for the backdoor either as a schedul...

Security researchers have discovered thousands of backdoored plugins and themes for the popular content management systems (CMS) that could be used by attackers to compromise web servers on a large scale. The Netherlands-based security firm Fox-IT has published a whitepaper revealing a new Backdoor named "CryptoPHP . " Security researchers have uncovered malicious plugins and themes for WordPress, Joomla and Drupal . However, there is a slight relief for Drupal users, as only themes are found to be infected from CryptoPHP backdoor. In order to victimize site administrators, miscreants makes use of a simple social engineering trick. They often lured site admins to download pirated versions of commercial CMS plugins and themes for free. Once downloaded, the malicious theme or plugin included backdoor installed on the admins' server. "By publishing pirated themes and plug-ins free for anyone to use instead of having to pay for them, the CryptoPHP actor is...

Chinese smartphone manufacturers have been criticized many times for suspected backdoors in its products, the popular Chinese smartphone brands, Xiaomi and Star N9500 smartphones are the top examples. Now, the China's third-largest mobile and world's sixth-largest phone manufacturer 'Coolpad' , has joined the list. Millions of Android smartphones sold by Chinese smartphone maker Coolpad Group Ltd. may contain an extensive "backdoor" from its manufacturer that is being able to track users, push unwanted pop-up advertisements and install unauthorized apps onto users' phones without their knowledge, alleged a U.S. security firm. OVER 10 MILLION USERS AT RISK Researchers from Silicon Valley online security firm Palo Alto Networks discovered the backdoor, dubbed " CoolReaper ," pre-installed on two dozens of Coolpad Android handset models, including high-end devices, sold exclusively in China and Taiwan. The backdoor can let attacke...

"Test files" associated with the  XZ Utils backdoor  have made their way to a Rust crate known as  liblzma-sys , new  findings  from Phylum reveal. liblzma-sys, which has been downloaded over 21,000 times to date, provides Rust developers with bindings to the liblzma implementation, an underlying library that is part of the  XZ Utils  data compression software. The impacted version in question is 0.3.2. "The current distribution (v0.3.2) on Crates.io contains the test files for XZ that contain the backdoor," Phylum  noted  in a GitHub issue raised on April 9, 2024. "The test files themselves are not included in either the .tar.gz nor the .zip tags  here on GitHub  and are only present in liblzma-sys_0.3.2.crate that is installed from Crates.io." Following responsible disclosure, the files in question ("tests/files/bad-3-corrupt_lzma2.xz" and "tests/files/good-large_compressed.lzma") have since been removed from liblzma-sys vers...

Important Update — Most Security Experts argued, " It's not a backdoor, rather it's a feature ," but none of them denied the fact that, if required, WhatsApp or a hacker can intercept your end-to-end encrypted chats. Read detailed explanation on arguments in my latest article. Most people believe that end-to-end encryption is the ultimate way to protect your secret communication from snooping, and it does, but it can be intercepted if not implemented correctly. After introducing " end-to-end encryption by default " last year, WhatsApp has become the world's largest secure messaging platform with over a billion users worldwide. But if you think your conversations are completely secure in a way that no one, not even Facebook, the company that owned WhatsApp, can intercept your messages then you are highly mistaken, just like most of us and it's not a new concept. Here's the kick: End-to-end encrypted messaging service, such as WhatsApp and Te...

Buying popular plugins with a large user-base and using it for effortless malicious campaigns have become a new trend for bad actors. One such incident happened recently when the renowned developer BestWebSoft sold a popular Captcha WordPress plugin to an undisclosed buyer, who then modified the plugin to download and install a hidden backdoor. In a blog post published on Tuesday, WordFence security firm revealed why WordPress recently kicked a popular Captcha plugin with more than 300,000 active installations out of its official plugin store. While reviewing the source code of the Captcha plugin, WordFence folks found a severe backdoor that could allow the plugin author or attackers to remotely gain administrative access to WordPress websites without requiring any authentication. The plugin was configured to automatically pull an updated "backdoored" version from a remote URL — https[://]simplywordpress[dot]net/captcha/captcha_pro_update.php — after installati...

Cybersecurity researchers have disclosed a stealthy new backdoor called MystRodX that comes with a variety of features to capture sensitive data from compromised systems. "MystRodX is a typical backdoor implemented in C++, supporting features like file management, port forwarding, reverse shell, and socket management," QiAnXin XLab said in a report published last week. "Compared to typical backdoors, MystRodX stands out in terms of stealth and flexibility." MystRodX, also called ChronosRAT, was first documented by Palo Alto Networks Unit 42 last month in connection with a threat activity cluster called CL-STA-0969 that it said exhibits overlaps with a China-nexus cyber espionage group dubbed Liminal Panda. The malware's stealth stems from the use of various levels of encryption to obscure source code and payloads, while its flexibility allows it to dynamically enable different functions based on a configuration, such as choosing TCP or HTTP for network co...

The threat actors behind the BianLian ransomware have been observed exploiting security flaws in JetBrains TeamCity software to conduct their extortion-only attacks. According to a  new report  from GuidePoint Security, which responded to a recent intrusion, the incident "began with the exploitation of a TeamCity server which resulted in the deployment of a PowerShell implementation of BianLian's Go backdoor." BianLian  emerged  in June 2022, and has since pivoted exclusively to exfiltration-based extortion following the  release of a decryptor  in January 2023. The attack chain observed by the cybersecurity firm entails the exploitation of a vulnerable TeamCity instance using  CVE-2024-27198  or  CVE-2023-42793  to gain initial access to the environment, followed by creating new users in the build server and executing malicious commands for post-exploitation and lateral movement. It's currently not clear which of the two flaws wer...

Are millions of enterprise users, who rely on the next-generation firewalls for protection, actually protected from hackers? Probably Not. Just less than a month after an unauthorized backdoor found in Juniper Networks firewalls, an anonymous security researcher has discovered highly suspicious code in FortiOS firewalls from enterprise security vendor Fortinet. According to the leaked information, FortiOS operating system, deployed on Fortinet's FortiGate firewall networking equipment, includes an SSH backdoor that can be used to access its firewall equipment. Anyone can Access FortiOS SSH Backdoor Anyone with " Fortimanager_Access " username and a hashed version of the " FGTAbc11*xy+Qqz27 " password string, which is hard coded into the firewall, can login into Fortinet's FortiGate firewall networking equipment. However, according to the company's product details, this SSH user is created for challenge-and-response authenti...

At the beginning of this year, we reported about the secret backdoor 'TCP 32764' discovered in several routers including, Linksys, Netgear, Cisco and Diamond that allowed an attacker to send commands to the vulnerable routers at TCP port 32764 from a command-line shell without being authenticated as the administrator. The Reverse-engineer from France Eloi Vanderbeken , who discovered this backdoor has found that although the flaw has been patched in the latest firmware release, but SerComm has added the same backdoor again in another way. To verify the released patch, recently he downloaded the patched firmware version 1.1.0.55 of Netgear DGN1000 and unpacked it using binwalk tool. He found that the file 'scfgmgr' which contains the backdoor is still present there with a new option " -l ", that limits it only for a local socket interprocess communication (Unix domain socket), or only for the processes running on the same device. On further investigation via reverse en...

Those innocent-looking apps in your smartphone can secretly spy on your communications or could allow hackers to do so. Hard to believe, but it's true. Recently, Trustwave's SpiderLabs analysts discovered a hidden backdoor in Skype for Apple's macOS and Mac OS X operating systems that could be used to spy on users' communications without their knowledge. The backdoor actually resides in the desktop Application Programming Interface (API) that allows third-party plugins and apps to communicate with Microsoft-owned Skype — the popular video chat and messaging service. Appeared to have been around since at least 2010, the backdoor could allow any malicious third-party app to bypass authentication procedure and provide nearly complete access to Skype on Mac OS X. How an Attacker can Take Complete Control of Your Skype The malicious app could bypass authentication process if they "identified themselves as the program responsible for interfacing with th...

Unlike specially crafted malware specifically developed to take advantage of Windows operating system platform, cyber attackers have started creating cross-platform malware for wider exploitation. Due to the rise in popularity of Mac OS X and other Windows desktop alternatives, hackers have begun designing cross-platform malware modularly for wide distribution. Cross-platform malware is loaded with specialized payloads and components, allowing it to run on multiple platforms. One such malware family has recently been discovered by researchers at Kaspersky Lab, which run on all the key operating systems, including Windows, Linux, and Mac OS X. Stefan Ortloff, a researcher from Kaspersky Lab's Global Research and Analysis Team, first discovered the Linux and Windows variants of this family of cross-platform backdoor, dubbed Mokes , in January this year. Now, the researcher today confirmed the existence of an OS X variant of this malware family, explaining a technical breakd...

Security researchers have revealed the existence of an advanced persistent threat that has been making the rounds since April 2011.  Backdoor.Hikit  is a dangerous backdoor Trojan that will damage infected system and files. Usually, Backdoor. Hikit will open backdoor to allow remote attackers to connect to the infected system and carry out harmful activities, such as stealing information or destroying files and programs. It is really stubborn those antiviruses often fail to delete it for good, for it runs secretly and automatically when Windows boots without your knowledge or consent and can disguise it as fake system files or processes. Besides, many other threats, such as adware, redirecting virus, Trojan variants from family, such as Trojan Horse Generic 27.PN, BackDoor.Hupigon5.CJMY, Trojan.Zeroaccess.C, Trojan:win64/Sirefef.E and so on, which is really a threat to system and data security. According to experts from security firm Symantec , it all starts with the unknow...