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Potential connections between a subscription-based crimeware-as-a-service (CaaS) solution and a cracked copy of Cobalt Strike have been established in what the researchers suspect is being offered as a tool for its customers to stage post-exploitation activities. Prometheus , as the service is called, first came to light in August 2021 when cybersecurity company Group-IB disclosed details of malicious software distribution campaigns undertaken by cybercriminal groups to distribute Campo Loader, Hancitor, IcedID, QBot, Buer Loader, and SocGholish in Belgium and the U.S. Costing $250 a month, it's marketed on Russian underground forums as a traffic direction system (TDS) to enable phishing redirection on a mass scale to rogue landing pages that are designed to deploy malware payloads on the targeted systems. "Prometheus can be considered a full-bodied service/platform that allows threat groups to purvey their malware or phishing operations with ease," BlackBerry Resear

Just as animals use their senses to detect danger, cybersecurity depends on sensors to identify signals in the computing environment that may signal danger. The more highly tuned, diverse and coordinated the senses, the more likely one is to detect important signals that indicate danger. This, however, can be a double-edged sword. Too many signals with too little advanced signal processing just leads to a lot of noise. The right, diverse set of signals with highly evolved signal processing leads to survival. It therefore makes sense that broad threat visibility across the IT environment is fundamental for detecting cyberattacks. Cybersecurity company Cynet puts this in perspective in a new eBook,  The Guide for Threat Visibility for Lean IT Security Teams – link to this . The Ongoing Problem of Limited Threat Visibility The complexity of today's IT environments has made it exceedingly difficult to protect. The defensive perimeter has expanded with an expanded remote workforce, incr

Super Low RPO with Continuous Data Protection: Dial Back to Just Seconds Before an Attack Zerto , a Hewlett Packard Enterprise company, can help you detect and recover from ransomware in near real-time. This solution leverages continuous data protection (CDP) to ensure all workloads have the lowest recovery point objective (RPO) possible. The most valuable thing about CDP is that it does not use snapshots, agents, or any other periodic data protection methodology. Zerto has no impact on production workloads and can achieve RPOs in the region of 5-15 seconds across thousands of virtual machines simultaneously. For example, the environment in the image below has nearly 1,000 VMs being protected with an average RPO of just six seconds! Application-Centric Protection: Group Your VMs to Gain Application-Level Control   You can protect your VMs with the Zerto application-centric approach using Virtual Protection Groups (VPGs). This logical grouping of VMs ensures that your whole applica

The financially motivated  FIN8 actor , in all likelihood, has resurfaced with a never-before-seen ransomware strain called " White Rabbit " that was recently deployed against a local bank in the U.S. in December 2021. That's according to new findings published by Trend Micro, calling out the malware's overlaps with Egregor, which was taken down by Ukrainian law enforcement authorities in February 2021. "One of the most notable aspects of White Rabbit's attack is how its payload binary requires a specific command-line password to decrypt its internal configuration and proceed with its ransomware routine," the researchers  noted . "This method of hiding malicious activity is a trick that the ransomware family Egregor uses to hide malware techniques from analysis." Egregor, which commenced operations in September 2020 until its operations took a huge hit, is widely believed to be a  reincarnation of Maze , which shut down its criminal enterp

An IRC  (Internet Relay Chat) bot strain programmed in GoLang is being used to launch distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks targeting users in Korea. "The malware is being distributed under the guise of adult games," researchers from AhnLab's Security Emergency-response Center (ASEC)  said  in a new report published on Wednesday. "Additionally, the DDoS malware was installed via downloader and  UDP RAT  was used." The attack works by uploading the malware-laced games to webhards — which refers to a web hard drive or a remote file hosting service — in the form of compressed ZIP archives that, when opened, includes an executable ("Game_Open.exe") that's orchestrated to run a malware payload aside from launching the actual game. This payload, a GoLang-based downloader, establishes connections with a remote command-and-control (C&C) server to retrieve additional malware, including an IRC bot that can perform DDoS attacks. "It is

The coordinated cyberattacks targeting  Ukrainian government websites  and the deployment of a data-wiper malware called  WhisperGate  on select government systems are part of a broader wave of malicious activities aimed at  sabotaging critical infrastructure  in the country. The Secret Service of Ukraine on Monday confirmed that the two incidents are related, adding the breaches also exploited the recently disclosed  Log4j vulnerabilities  to gain access to some of the compromised systems. "The attack used vulnerabilities in the site's content management systems (October CMS) and Log4j, as well as compromised accounts of employees of the development company," the SSU  said , corroborating prior disclosure from the  Ukraine CERT team . The disclosure comes days after Microsoft warned of a malware operation aimed at government, non-profit, and information technology entities in Ukraine, attributing the attacks to a threat cluster codenamed "DEV-0586." "

Cybersecurity researchers have disclosed details of a now-patched bug in Box's multi-factor authentication (MFA) mechanism that could be abused to completely sidestep SMS-based login verification. "Using this technique, an attacker could use stolen credentials to compromise an organization's Box account and exfiltrate sensitive data without access to the victim's phone," Varonis researchers  said  in a report shared with The Hacker News. The cybersecurity company said it reported the issue to the cloud service provider on November 2, 2021, post which fixes were issued by Box. MFA is an authentication method that relies on a combination of factors such as a password (something only the user knows) and a temporary one-time password aka TOTP (something only the user has) to provide users a second layer of defense against credential stuffing and other account takeover attacks. This two-step authentication can either involve sending the code as an SMS or alternat

VPNLab.net, a  VPN provider  that was used by malicious actors to deploy ransomware and facilitate other cybercrimes, was taken offline following a coordinated law enforcement operation. Europol said it took action against the misuse of the VPN service by grounding 15 of its servers on January 17 and rendering it inoperable as part of a disruptive action that took place across Germany, the Netherlands, Canada, the Czech Republic, France, Hungary, Latvia, Ukraine, the U.S., and the U.K. A second outcome of the seizure is that at least 100 businesses that have been identified as at risk of impending cyber attacks are being notified. Europol didn't disclose the names of the companies. Established in 2008, the tool provided an advanced level of anonymity by offering double VPN connections to its clients — wherein the internet traffic is routed through two VPN servers located in different countries instead of one — for as cheap as $60 a year. "This made VPNLab.net a popular