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Note — Don't miss an important update at the bottom of this article, which includes an official statement from Xiaomi . Do you own an Android Smartphone from Xiaomi, HTC, Samsung, or OnePlus? If yes, then you must be aware that almost all smartphone manufacturers provide custom ROMs like CyanogenMod, Paranoid Android, MIUI and others with some pre-loaded themes and applications to increase the device's performance. But do you have any idea about the pre-installed apps and services your manufacturer has installed on your device?, What are their purposes? And, Do they pose any threat to your security or privacy? With the same curiosity to find answers to these questions, a Computer Science student and security enthusiast from Netherlands who own a Xiaomi Mi4 smartphone started an investigation to know the purpose of a mysterious pre-installed app, dubbed AnalyticsCore.apk , that runs 24x7 in the background and reappeared even if you delete it. Xiaomi is one of the

A previously undocumented and mostly undetected variant of a Linux backdoor called  BPFDoor  has been spotted in the wild, cybersecurity firm Deep Instinct said in a technical report published this week. " BPFDoor  retains its reputation as an extremely stealthy and difficult-to-detect malware with this latest iteration," security researchers Shaul Vilkomir-Preisman and Eliran Nissan said . BPFDoor (aka JustForFun), first documented by  PwC  and  Elastic Security Labs  in May 2022, is a passive Linux backdoor associated with a Chinese threat actor called  Red Menshen (aka  DecisiveArchitect  or Red Dev 18), which is known to single out telecom providers across the Middle East and Asia since at least 2021. The malware is specifically geared towards  establishing persistent remote access  to compromised target environments for extended periods of time, with evidence pointing to the hacking crew operating the backdoor undetected for years. BPFDoor gets its name from the u

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

Multiple backdoors have been discovered during a penetration test in the firmware of a widely used voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) appliance from Auerswald, a German telecommunications hardware manufacturer, that could be abused to gain full administrative access to the devices. "Two backdoor passwords were found in the firmware of the  COMpact 5500R PBX ," researchers from RedTeam Pentesting said in a  technical   analysis  published Monday. "One backdoor password is for the secret user ' Schandelah ', the other can be used for the highest-privileged user ' admin .' No way was discovered to disable these backdoors." The vulnerability has been assigned the identifier  CVE-2021-40859  and carries a critical severity rating of 9.8. Following responsible disclosure on September 10, Auerswald addressed the problem in a firmware update (version 8.2B) released in November 2021. "Firmware Update 8.2B contains important security updates that you

Threat actors associated with the hacking crew known as Patchwork have been spotted targeting universities and research organizations in China as part of a recently observed campaign. The activity, according to  KnownSec 404 Team , entailed the use of a backdoor codenamed  EyeShell . Patchwork , also known by the names Operation Hangover and Zinc Emerson, is suspected to be a threat group that operates on behalf of India. Active since at least December 2015, attack chains mounted by the outfit have a narrow focus and tend to single out Pakistan and China with custom implants such as BADNEWS via spear-phishing and watering hole attacks. The adversarial collective has been found to share tactical overlaps with other cyber-espionage groups with an Indian connection, including  SideWinder  and the  DoNot Team . Earlier this May, Meta  disclosed  that it took down 50 accounts on Facebook and Instagram operated by Patchwork, which took advantage of rogue messaging apps uploaded to the

The Chinese nation-state group known as  Camaro Dragon  has been linked to yet another backdoor that's designed to meet its intelligence-gathering goals. Israeli cybersecurity firm Check Point, which  dubbed  the Go-based malware TinyNote, said it functions as a first-stage payload capable of "basic machine enumeration and command execution via PowerShell or Goroutines." What the malware lacks in terms of sophistication, it makes up for it when it comes to establishing redundant methods to retain access to the compromised host by means of multiple persistency tasks and varied methods to communicate with different servers. Camaro Dragon overlaps with a threat actor widely tracked as Mustang Panda, a state-sponsored group from China that is known to be active since at least 2012. The adversarial collective was recently in the spotlight for a custom bespoke firmware implant called  Horse Shell  that co-opts TP-Link routers into a mesh network capable of transmitting co

Last week Craig Heffner, specialized on the embedded device hacking exposed a serious backdoor in number of D-Link routers allows unauthorized backdoor access. Recently he published his another researcher, Titled ' From China, With Love ', exposed that D-Link is not only the vendor who puts backdoors in their products. According to him, China based networking device and equipment manufacturer - Tenda Technology  (www.tenda.cn) also added potential backdoors into their Wireless Routers. He unpacked the software framework update and locate the httpd binary an found that the manufacturer is using GoAhead server, which has been substantially modified. These routers are protected with standard Wi-Fi Protected Setup (WPS) and WPA encryption key, but still by sending a UDP packet with a special string , an attacker could take over the router. Routers contain a flaw in the httpd component, as the MfgThread() function spawns a backdoor service that listens fo

Russian anti-virus company Doctor Web reported about the first cross-platform backdoor to run under Linux and Mac OS X identified as " BackDoor.Wirenet.1 ". This malicious program designed to steals passwords entered by the user in Opera, Firefox, Chrome, and Chromium, and passwords stored by such applications as Thunderbird, SeaMonkey, and Pidgin. BackDoor.Wirenet.1 is the first-ever Trojan that can simultaneously work on these operating systems. BackDoor.Wirenet.1 is still under investigation. At launch BackDoor.Wirenet.1 creates a copy in the user's home directory. To interact with the command server located at 212.7.208.65, the malware uses a special encryption algorithm Advanced Encryption Standard (AES). BackDoor.

Video Demonstration : Vsftpd backdoor discovered by Mathias Kresin 2.3.4 of vsftpd's downloadable source code was compromised and a backdoor added to the code. Evans, the author of vsftpd . This module exploits a malicious backdoor that was added to the VSFTPD download archive. This backdoor was present in the vsftpd-2.3.4.tar.gz archive sometime before July 3rd 2011. The bad tarball included a backdoor in the code which would respond to a user logging in with a user name ":)" by listening on port 6200 for a connection and launching a shell when someone connects. Read more here Affected versions : vsftpd-2.3.4 from 2011-06-30 Metasploit demo : use exploit/unix/ftp/vsftpd_234_backdoor set RHOST localhost set PAYLOAD cmd/unix/interact exploit id uname -a Video Demonstration :

Multiple China-nexus threat actors have been linked to the zero-day exploitation of three security flaws impacting Ivanti appliances (CVE-2023-46805, CVE-2024-21887, and CVE-2024-21893). The clusters are being tracked by Mandiant under the uncategorized monikers  UNC5221 , UNC5266, UNC5291,  UNC5325 , UNC5330, and UNC5337. Also previously linked to the exploitation spree is a Chinese hacking crew called UNC3886 , whose tradecraft is notable for weaponizing zero-day bugs in Fortinet and VMware to breach target networks. The Google Cloud subsidiary said it has also observed financially motivated actors exploiting CVE-2023-46805 and CVE-2024-21887, likely in an attempt to conduct cryptocurrency mining operations. "UNC5266 overlaps in part with UNC3569, a China-nexus espionage actor that has been observed exploiting vulnerabilities in Aspera Faspex, Microsoft Exchange, and Oracle Web Applications Desktop Integrator, among others, to gain initial access to target environments,"

An unnamed government entity associated with the United Arab Emirates (U.A.E.) was targeted by a likely Iranian threat actor to breach the victim's Microsoft Exchange Server with a "simple yet effective" backdoor dubbed  PowerExchange . According to a new report from Fortinet FortiGuard Labs, the intrusion relied on email phishing as an initial access pathway, leading to the execution of a .NET executable contained with a ZIP file attachment. The binary, which masquerades as a PDF document, functions as a dropper to execute the final payload, which then launches the backdoor. PowerExchange, written in PowerShell, employs text files attached to emails for command-and-control (C2) communication. It allows the threat actor to run arbitrary payloads and upload and download files from and to the system. The custom implant achieves this by making use of the Exchange Web Services ( EWS ) API to connect to the victim's Exchange Server and uses a mailbox on the server to

An advanced persistent threat group with links to Iran has updated its malware toolset to include a novel PowerShell-based implant called PowerLess Backdoor , according to new research published by Cybereason. The Boston-headquartered cybersecurity company attributed the malware to a hacking group known as Charming Kitten (aka Phosphorous, APT35, or  TA453 ), while also calling out the backdoor's evasive PowerShell execution. "The PowerShell code runs in the context of a .NET application, thus not launching 'powershell.exe' which enables it to evade security products," Daniel Frank, senior malware researcher at Cybereason,  said . "The toolset analyzed includes extremely modular, multi-staged malware that decrypts and deploys additional payloads in several stages for the sake of both stealth and efficacy." The threat actor, which is active since at least 2017, has been behind a series of campaigns in recent years, including those wherein the adversa

The use of small Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) called Drones is rapidly transforming the way we go to war. Drones were once used for land surveillance, Delivering Pizza's, then equipped with bombs that changed the way nations conduct war and last year, these hovering drones were also used to hack Smartphones. Recently, a security researcher has found a backdoor in the Parrot AR Drones manufactured by a French-based company, that could allow a malicious hacker to remotely hijacked the radio controlled flying quadcopter helicopter. The Parrot AR Drone, revealed at the International CES 2010 in Las Vegas, is a quadricopter helicopter which you can control with your smartphone or tablet. It features two built-in cameras, is easy to fly, and can be controlled without too much danger of it flipping over or smashing into things. FIRST EVER MALWARE FOR DRONES Security researcher, Rahul Sasi claimed to have developed the first ever backdoor malware for AR drone ARM L

Thousands of computers and web servers running Linux and FreeBSD operating systems have been infected over past five years with sophisticated malware that turn the machines into spambots. The new Linux malware, discovered by the security researchers from the antivirus provider Eset, has been dubbed " Mumblehard " because it is Muttering spam from your servers , says Eset 23-page long report (PDF) titled "Unboxing Linux/Mumblehard." Researchers have logged more than 8,500 unique IP addresses during the seven months period of research that were hit by Mumblehard Linux malware and found over 3,000 machines joined them in the past three weeks. Mumblehard features two basic components: Backdoor  Spamming daemon  Both written in the Perl programming language and "feature the same custom packer written in assembly language." The backdoor allows hackers to infiltrate into the system and control the command and control servers, and t

Cybersecurity researchers with Qihoo 360's NetLab today unveiled details of two recently spotted zero-day cyberattack campaigns in the wild targeting enterprise-grade networking devices manufactured by Taiwan-based DrayTek. According to the report , at least two separate groups of hackers exploited two critical remote command injection vulnerabilities ( CVE-2020-8515 ) affecting DrayTek Vigor enterprise switches, load-balancers, routers and VPN gateway devices to eavesdrop on network traffic and install backdoors. The zero-day attacks started somewhere at the end of last November or at the beginning of December and are potentially still ongoing against thousands of publicly exposed DrayTek switche s, Vigor 2960, 3900, 300B devices that haven't yet been patched with the latest firmware updates released last month. The zero-day vulnerabilities in question can be exploited by any unauthorized remote attackers to inject and execute arbitrary commands on the system, as als

A previously undocumented China-aligned threat actor has been linked to a set of adversary-in-the-middle (AitM) attacks that hijack update requests from legitimate software to deliver a sophisticated implant named NSPX30. Slovak cybersecurity firm ESET is tracking the advanced persistent threat (APT) group under the name  Blackwood . It's said to be active since at least 2018. The NSPX30 implant has been observed deployed via the update mechanisms of known software such as Tencent QQ, WPS Office, and Sogou Pinyin, with the attacks targeting Chinese and Japanese manufacturing, trading, and engineering companies as well as individuals located in China, Japan, and the U.K. "NSPX30 is a multistage implant that includes several components such as a dropper, an installer, loaders, an orchestrator, and a backdoor," security researcher Facundo Muñoz  said . "Both of the latter two have their own sets of plugins." "The implant was designed around the attackers

Cybersecurity researchers on Wednesday disclosed a previously undocumented backdoor likely designed and developed by the Nobelium advanced persistent threat (APT) behind last year's  SolarWinds supply chain attack , joining the threat actor's ever-expanding arsenal of hacking tools. Moscow-headquartered firm Kaspersky codenamed the malware " Tomiris ," calling out its similarities to another second-stage malware used during the campaign, SUNSHUTTLE (aka GoldMax), targeting the IT management software provider's Orion platform. Nobelium is also known by the monikers UNC2452, SolarStorm, StellarParticle, Dark Halo, and Iron Ritual. "While supply-chain attacks were already a documented attack vector leveraged by a number of APT actors, this specific campaign stood out due to the extreme carefulness of the attackers and the high-profile nature of their victims," Kaspersky researchers  said . "Evidence gathered so far indicates that Dark Halo spent si

Cybersecurity researchers, for the first time, may have found a potential connection between the backdoor used in  the SolarWinds hack  to a previously known malware strain. In new  research  published by Kaspersky researchers today, the cybersecurity firm said it discovered several features that overlap with another backdoor known as  Kazuar , a .NET-based malware first documented by Palo Alto Networks in 2017. Disclosed early last month, the  espionage campaign  was notable for its scale and stealth, with the attackers leveraging the trust associated with SolarWinds Orion software to infiltrate government agencies and other companies so as to deploy a custom malware codenamed "Sunburst." Shared Features Between Sunburst and Kazuar Attribution for the SolarWinds supply-chain compromise has been difficult in part due to little-to-no clues linking the attack infrastructure to previous campaigns or other well-known threat groups. But Kaspersky's latest analysis of th