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A hacking group related to a Chinese-speaking threat actor has been linked to an advanced cyberespionage campaign targeting government and military organizations in Vietnam. The attacks have been attributed with low confidence to the advanced persistent threat (APT) called  Cycldek  (or Goblin Panda, Hellsing, APT 27, and Conimes), which is known for using spear-phishing techniques to compromise diplomatic targets in Southeast Asia, India, and the U.S. at least since 2013. According to researchers from Kaspersky, the offensive, which was observed between June 2020 and January 2021, leverages a method called DLL side-loading to execute shellcode that decrypts a final payload dubbed " FoundCore ." DLL side-loading  has been a tried-and-tested technique used by various threat actors as an obfuscation tactic to bypass antivirus defenses. By loading malicious DLLs into legitimate executables, the idea is to mask their malicious activity under a trusted system or software proc

A new spear-phishing campaign is targeting professionals on LinkedIn with weaponized job offers in an attempt to infect targets with a sophisticated backdoor trojan called "more_eggs." To increase the odds of success, the phishing lures take advantage of malicious ZIP archive files that have the same name as that of the victims' job titles taken from their LinkedIn profiles. "For example, if the LinkedIn member's job is listed as Senior Account Executive—International Freight the malicious zip file would be titled Senior Account Executive—International Freight position (note the 'position' added to the end)," cybersecurity firm eSentire's Threat Response Unit (TRU)  said  in an analysis. "Upon opening the fake job offer, the victim unwittingly initiates the stealthy installation of the fileless backdoor, more_eggs." Campaigns delivering more_eggs using the  same modus operandi  have been spotted at least since 2018, with the backdo

It comes as no surprise that today's cyber threats are orders of magnitude more complex than those of the past. And the ever-evolving tactics that attackers use demand the adoption of better, more holistic and consolidated ways to meet this non-stop challenge. Security teams constantly look for ways to reduce risk while improving security posture, but many approaches offer piecemeal solutions – zeroing in on one particular element of the evolving threat landscape challenge – missing the forest for the trees.  In the last few years, Exposure Management has become known as a comprehensive way of reigning in the chaos, giving organizations a true fighting chance to reduce risk and improve posture. In this article I'll cover what Exposure Management is, how it stacks up against some alternative approaches and why building an Exposure Management program should be on  your 2024 to-do list. What is Exposure Management?  Exposure Management is the systematic identification, evaluation,

The data is in. According to IBM Security's  2020 Cost of a Data Breach Report , there is a 50% increase in cloud usage for enterprises across all industries. The number of threats targeting cloud services, predominantly collaboration services like Office 365, has  increased 630% . Moreover, 75% of respondents report that discovery and recovery time from data breaches has significantly increased due to remote work during the pandemic. Although organizations can save over $1 million if they discover a breach in the first 30 days, the average reported response time was a whopping 280 days.  In the remote-work world, SaaS apps have become an enticing vector-of-choice for bad actors. Just think of the typical employee, working off-site, untrained in security measures, and how their access or privileges increase the risk of sensitive data being stolen, exposed, or compromised. However, it doesn't have to be that way — a company's SaaS security posture can be strengthened, an

In what's likely to be a goldmine for bad actors, personal information associated with approximately 533 million Facebook users worldwide has been leaked on a popular cybercrime forum for free—which was harvested by hackers in 2019 using a Facebook vulnerability. The  leaked data  includes full names, Facebook IDs, mobile numbers, locations, email addresses, gender, occupation, city, country, marital status broken, account creation date, and other profile details broken down by country, with over 32 million records belonging to users in the U.S., 11 million users the U.K., and six million users in India, among others. Also included in the leak are  phone numbers  from Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, and co-founders Chris Hughes, and Dustin Moskovitz, who are the fourth, fifth, and sixth members to have registered on Facebook. Interestingly, it appears that the same phone number is also registered to his name on the privacy-focussed messaging app Signal. "Mark Zuckerberg als

Many enterprises rely on more than one security tool to protect their technology assets, devices, and networks. This is particularly true for organizations that use hybrid systems or a combination of cloud and local applications. Likewise, companies whose networks include a multitude of smartphones and IoT devices are likely to deploy multiple security solutions suitable for different scenarios. Employing several security solutions tends to be inevitable for many, especially those that have outgrown their previous network setups. Companies that expand to new branches and even overseas operations have to make use of additional security measures and tools. This use of multiple tools or software often leads to critical issues, though. The management of the many cybersecurity solutions can become too complicated and difficult to handle, especially for organizations with little experience in addressing cyber threats, let alone actual attacks. This can result in confusion and the inabilit

Apps on Android have been able to infer the presence of specific apps, or even collect the full list of installed apps on the device. What's more, an app can also set to be notified when a new app is installed. Apart from all the usual concerns about misuse of such a data grab, the information can be abused by a potentially harmful app to fingerprint other installed apps, check for the  presence of antivirus ,  affiliate fraud , and even for targeted ads.  In 2014, Twitter  began  tracking the list of apps installed on users' devices as part of its "app graph" initiative with an aim to deliver tailored content. Digital wallet company MobiKwik was also caught  collecting information  about installed apps in the wake of a data breach that came to light earlier this week. Indeed, a study undertaken by a group of Swiss researchers in 2019  found  that "free apps are more likely to query for such information and that third-party libraries (libs) are the main requ

The U.S. Department of Justice (DoJ) on Wednesday said that an Israeli national pleaded guilty for his role as an "administrator" of a portal called DeepDotWeb ( DDW ), a "news" website that "served as a gateway to numerous dark web marketplaces." According to the unsealed court documents, Tal Prihar , 37, an Israeli citizen residing in Brazil, operated DDW alongside Michael Phan , 34, of Israel, starting October 2013, in return for which they received kickbacks from the operators of the marketplaces in the form of virtual currency amounting to 8,155 bitcoins (worth $8.4 million at the time of the transactions). In an attempt to conceal the illicit payments, Prihar is said to have transferred the money to other bitcoin accounts and to bank accounts under his control in the name of shell companies. "Tal Prihar served as a broker for illegal Darknet marketplaces — helping such marketplaces find customers for fentanyl, firearms, and other dangerous

A 22-year-old man from the U.S. state of Kansas has been indicted on charges that he unauthorizedly accessed a public water facility's computer system, jeopardizing the residents' safety and health in the local community. Wyatt A. Travnichek, 22, of Ellsworth County, Kansas, has been charged with one count of tampering with a public water system and one count of reckless damage to a protected computer during unauthorized access, according to the Department of Justice (DoJ). "By illegally tampering with a public drinking water system, the defendant threatened the safety and health of an entire community,"  said  Lance Ehrig, Special Agent in Charge of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Criminal Investigation Division in Kansas. "EPA and its law enforcement partners are committed to upholding the laws designed to protect our drinking water systems from harm or threat of harm. Today's indictment sends a clear message that individuals who intentionall

Data breaches remain a constant threat, and no industry or organization is immune from the risks. From  Fortune 500  companies to startups, password-related breaches continue to spread seemingly unchecked. As a result of the volume of data breaches and cybersecurity incidents, hackers now have access to a vast swathe of credentials that they can use to power various password-related attacks. One example of this is credential stuffing attacks, which accounted for  1.5 billion  incidents in the last quarter of 2020—a staggering 90% increase from Q1 2020. The rapid pivot to digital in response to the pandemic has been a key contributor to the explosive growth in cybersecurity attacks. With organizations shifting more services online and investing in new applications that facilitate virtual interactions with employees and customers, this has changed the security landscape and presented an array of new avenues for hackers to exploit. However, in a rush to move everything online from mee

A novel technique adopted by attackers finds ways to use Microsoft's Background Intelligent Transfer Service (BITS) so as to deploy malicious payloads on Windows machines stealthily. In 2020, hospitals, retirement communities, and medical centers bore the brunt of an  ever-shifting phishing campaign  that distributed custom backdoors such as KEGTAP, which ultimately paved the way for RYUK ransomware attacks. But new  research  by FireEye's Mandiant cyber forensics arm has now revealed a previously unknown persistence mechanism that shows the adversaries made use of BITS to launch the backdoor. Introduced in Windows XP,  BITS  is a component of Microsoft Windows, which makes use of idle network bandwidth to facilitate the asynchronous transfer of files between machines. This is achieved by creating a job — a container that includes the files to download or upload. BITS is commonly used to deliver operating system updates to clients as well as by Windows Defender antivirus

A North Korean government-backed campaign targeting cybersecurity researchers with malware has re-emerged with new tactics in their arsenal as part of a fresh social engineering attack. In an update shared on Wednesday, Google's Threat Analysis Group said the attackers behind the operation set up a fake security company called SecuriElite and a slew of social media accounts across Twitter and LinkedIn in an attempt to trick unsuspecting researchers into visiting the company's booby-trapped website "where a browser exploit was waiting to be triggered." "The new website claims the company is an offensive security company located in Turkey that offers pentests, software security assessments and exploits," TAG's Adam Weidemann  said . The website is said to have gone live on March 17. A total of eight Twitter profiles and seven LinkedIn profiles, who claimed to be vulnerability researchers and human resources personnel at different security firms (inclu

You're fully aware of the need to stop threats at the front door and then hunt any that got through that first gate, so your company installed an EPP/ EDR solution. But like most companies, you've already come across its shortcoming – and these are amplified since you have a small security team. More than likely, you noticed that it has its share of detection blind spots and limitations for which you need to tack on more detection technologies.  Remediation requires manual effort, and in terms of operation, it's become too much of an investment on your already resource-constrained staff. Deployment took you ages, so you're somewhat wary of introducing new technology and going through that process again.  What should you do – fight for more resources, flight from the EDR/ EPP combo to other technological solutions, or freeze by accepting this painful situation and updating the board that your risk levels remain high?  When fight and freeze are typically the directio

Cybersecurity researchers on Tuesday disclosed details of a sophisticated campaign that deploys malicious backdoors for the purpose of exfiltrating information from a number of industry sectors located in Japan. Dubbed "A41APT" by Kaspersky researchers, the findings delve into a new slew of attacks undertaken by  APT10  (aka Stone Panda or Cicada) using previously undocumented malware to deliver as many as three payloads such as SodaMaster, P8RAT, and FYAnti. The long-running intelligence-gathering operation first came into the scene in March 2019, with activities spotted as recently as November 2020, when  reports  emerged of Japan-linked companies being targeted by the threat actor in over 17 regions worldwide. The fresh attacks uncovered by Kaspersky are said to have occurred in January 2021. The infection chain leverages a multi-stage attack process, with the initial intrusion happening via abuse of SSL-VPN by exploiting unpatched vulnerabilities or stolen credential

Popular Indian mobile payments service MobiKwik on Monday came under fire after 8.2 terabytes (TB) of data belonging to millions of its users began circulating on the dark web in the aftermath of a major data breach that came to light earlier this month. The leaked data includes sensitive personal information such as: customer names, hashed passwords, email addresses, residential addresses, GPS locations, list of installed apps, partially-masked credit card numbers, connected bank accounts and associated account numbers, and know your customer (KYC) documents of 3.5 million users. Even worse, the leak also shows that MobiKwik does not  delete the card information  from its servers even after a user has removed them, in what's likely a breach of government regulations. New guidelines issued by India's apex banking institution, the Reserve Bank of India,  prohibit  online merchants, e-commerce websites, and payment aggregators from storing card details of a customer online.

As many as five vulnerabilities have been uncovered in Ovarro's TBox remote terminal units (RTUs) that, if left unpatched, could open the door for escalating attacks against critical infrastructures, like remote code execution and denial-of-service. "Successful exploitation of these vulnerabilities could result in remote code execution, which may cause a denial-of-service condition," the U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA)  said  in an advisory published on March 23. TBox is an "all-in-one" solution for automation and control systems for supervisory control and data acquisition ( SCADA ) applications, with its telemetry software used for remote control and monitoring of assets in a number of critical infrastructure sectors, such as water, power, oil and gas, transportation, and process industries. TBox devices can be programmed using a software suite called TWinSoft, which allows for the creation of interactive web pages, where users

Cybersecurity researchers on Monday disclosed two new vulnerabilities in Linux-based operating systems that, if successfully exploited, could let attackers circumvent mitigations for speculative attacks such as  Spectre  and obtain sensitive information from kernel memory. Discovered by  Piotr Krysiuk  of Symantec's Threat Hunter team, the flaws — tracked as CVE-2020-27170 and CVE-2020-27171 (CVSS scores: 5.5) — impact all Linux kernels prior to 5.11.8. Patches for the security issues were released on March 20, with Ubuntu, Debian, and Red Hat deploying fixes for the vulnerabilities in their respective Linux distributions. While  CVE-2020-27170  can be abused to reveal content from any location within the kernel memory,  CVE-2020-27171 can be used to retrieve data from a 4GB range of kernel memory. First documented in January 2018,  Spectre and Meltdown  take advantage of flaws in modern processors to  leak data  that are currently processed on the computer, thereby allowing

Email spoofing is a growing problem for an organization's security. Spoofing occurs when a hacker sends an email that appears to have been sent from a trusted source/domain. Email spoofing is not a new concept. Defined as "the forgery of an email address header to make the message appear as if it was sent from a person or location other than the actual sender," it has plagued brands for decades.  When an email is sent, the From address doesn't show which server the email was actually sent from - instead, it shows the domain that was entered when the address was created so as not to arouse suspicion among recipients. With the amount of data flowing through email servers these days, it should come as no surprise that spoofing is a problem for businesses. At the end of 2020, we found that phishing incidents were up a staggering 220% year-over-year at the height of the global pandemic scare. Since not all spoofing attacks are large-scale, the actual number could be muc