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A malicious campaign has been found leveraging a technique called domain fronting to hide command-and-control traffic by leveraging a legitimate domain owned by the Myanmar government to route communications to an attacker-controlled server with the goal of evading detection. The threat, which was observed in September 2021, deployed Cobalt Strike payloads as a stepping stone for launching further attacks, with the adversary using a domain associated with the Myanmar Digital News network, a state-owned digital newspaper, as a front for their Beacons. "When the Beacon is launched, it will submit a DNS request for a legitimate high-reputation domain hosted behind Cloudflare infrastructure and modify the subsequent HTTPs requests header to instruct the CDN to direct the traffic to an attacker-controlled host," Cisco Talos researchers Chetan Raghuprasad, Vanja Svajcer, and Asheer Malhotra  said  in a technical analysis published Tuesday. Originally released in 2012 to addres

Israeli spyware vendor Candiru, which was  added  to an economic blocklist by the U.S. government this month, is said to have reportedly waged "watering hole" attacks against high-profile entities in the U.K. and the Middle East, new findings reveal. "The victimized websites belong to media outlets in the U.K., Yemen, and Saudi Arabia, as well as to Hezbollah; to government institutions in Iran (Ministry of Foreign Affairs), Syria (including the Ministry of Electricity), and Yemen (including the Ministries of Interior and Finance); to internet service providers in Yemen and Syria; and to aerospace/military technology companies in Italy and South Africa," ESET  said  in a new report. "The attackers also created a website mimicking a medical trade fair in Germany." The strategic web compromises are believed to have occurred in two waves, the first commencing as early as March 2020 before ending in August 2020, and the second string of attacks beginning in

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,

In the span of a few years, cryptocurrencies have gone from laughingstock and novelty to a serious financial instrument, and a major sector in high-tech. The price of Bitcoin and Ethereum has gone from single dollars to thousands, and they're increasingly in the mainstream.  This is undoubtedly a positive development, as it opens new avenues for finance, transactions, tech developments, and more. Unfortunately, no innovation is without its dark side, and the crypto industry is no exception. A new webinar from XDR provider Cynet ( you can see it here ) dives deeper into this dark corner to explore the intersection of cybersecurity and cryptocurrency.  The first question is how, exactly, cryptocurrency creates security vulnerabilities for organizations. There's no single answer, and in many cases, the results are more indirect. This bears closer inspection, and the webinar, led by Cynet  CyOps Analyst  Ronen Ahdut, studies the different ways cryptocurrencies are used by attackers.  I

Meta, the company formerly known as Facebook, announced Tuesday that it took action against four separate malicious cyber groups from Pakistan and Syria who were found targeting people in Afghanistan, as well as journalists, humanitarian organizations, and anti-regime military forces in the West Asian country. The Pakistani threat actor, dubbed  SideCopy , is said to have used the platform to single out people with ties to the Afghan government, military and law enforcement in Kabul. The campaign, which Meta dubbed as a "well-resourced and persistent operation," involved sending malicious links, often shortened using URL shortener services, to websites hosting malware between April and August of 2021, what with the operators posing as young women and tricking the recipients with romantic lures in a bid to make them click on phishing links or download trojanized chat applications. Meta's threat intelligence analysts said these apps were a front for two distinct malwa

Cybersecurity researchers have demonstrated yet another variation of the Rowhammer attack affecting all  DRAM  (dynamic random-access memory) chips that bypasses currently deployed mitigations, thereby effectively compromising the security of the devices. The new technique — dubbed " Blacksmith " ( CVE-2021-42114 , CVSS score: 9.0) — is designed to trigger bit flips on target refresh rate-enabled DRAM chips with the help of novel "non-uniform and frequency-based" memory access patterns, according to a study jointly published by academics from ETH Zurich, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, and Qualcomm Technologies. Originally disclosed in 2014,  Rowhammer  refers to a fundamental hardware vulnerability that could be abused to alter or corrupt memory contents by taking advantage of DRAM's tightly-packed, matrix-like memory cell architecture to repeatedly access certain rows (aka "aggressors") that induces an electrical disturbance large enough to cause t

No fewer than 1,220 Man-in-the-Middle (MitM) phishing websites have been discovered as targeting popular online services like Instagram, Google, PayPal, Apple, Twitter, and LinkedIn with the goal of hijacking users' credentials and carrying out further follow-on attacks. The findings come from a  new study  undertaken by a group of researchers from Stony Brook University and Palo Alto Networks, who have demonstrated a new fingerprinting technique that makes it possible to identify MitM phishing kits in the wild by leveraging their intrinsic network-level properties, effectively automating the discovery and analysis of phishing websites. Dubbed " PHOCA " — named after the Latin word for "seals" — the tool not only facilitates the discovery of previously unseen MitM phishing toolkits, but also can be used to detect and isolate malicious requests coming from such servers. Phishing toolkits aim to  automate and streamline  the work required by attackers to cond

The notorious Emotet malware is staging a comeback of sorts  nearly 10 months  after a coordinated law enforcement operation dismantled its command-and-control infrastructure in late January 2021. According to a  new report  from security researcher Luca Ebach, the infamous  TrickBot  malware is being used as an entry point to distribute what appears to be a new version of Emotet on systems previously infected by the former. The latest  variant  takes the form of a DLL file, with the first occurrence of the deployment being detected on November 14. Europol  dubbed   Emotet  as the "world's most dangerous malware" for its ability to act as a "door opener" for threat actors to obtain unauthorized access, becoming a precursor to many critical data theft and ransomware attacks. Interestingly, the loader operation enabled other malware families such as Trickbot, QakBot, and Ryuk to enter a machine. The resurfacing is also significant not least because it follow