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An unnamed Southeast Asian government has been targeted by multiple China-nexus threat actors as part of espionage campaigns targeting the region over extended periods of time. "While this activity occurred around the same time and in some instances even simultaneously on the same victims' machines, each cluster is characterized by distinct tools, modus operandi, and infrastructure," Palo Alto Networks Unit 42 researchers Lior Rochberger, Tom Fakterman, and Robert Falcone  said  in an exhaustive three-part report. The attacks, which targeted different governmental entities such as critical infrastructure, public healthcare institutions, public financial administrators and ministries, have been attributed with moderate confidence to three disparate clusters tracked as  Stately Taurus  (aka Mustang Panda),  Alloy Taurus  (aka Granite Typhoon), and  Gelsemium . Mustang Panda Uses TONESHELL Variant and ShadowPad "The attackers conducted a cyberespionage operation th

Cybersecurity researchers have discovered a previously undocumented advanced backdoor dubbed  Deadglyph  employed by a threat actor known as Stealth Falcon as part of a cyber espionage campaign. "Deadglyph's architecture is unusual as it consists of cooperating components – one a native x64 binary, the other a .NET assembly," ESET  said  in a  new report  shared with The Hacker News. "This combination is unusual because malware typically uses only one programming language for its components. This difference might indicate separate development of those two components while also taking advantage of unique features of the distinct programming languages they utilize." It's also suspected that the use of different programming languages is a deliberate tactic to hinder analysis, making it a lot more challenging to navigate and debug. Unlike other traditional backdoors of its kind, the commands are received from an actor-controlled server in the form of additi

Continuous Threat Exposure Management (CTEM) is a strategic framework that helps organizations continuously assess and manage cyber risk. It breaks down the complex task of managing security threats into five distinct stages: Scoping, Discovery, Prioritization, Validation, and Mobilization. Each of these stages plays a crucial role in identifying, addressing, and mitigating vulnerabilities - before they can be exploited by attackers.  On paper, CTEM sounds great . But where the rubber meets the road – especially for CTEM neophytes - implementing CTEM can seem overwhelming. The process of putting CTEM principles into practice can look prohibitively complex at first. However, with the right tools and a clear understanding of each stage, CTEM can be an effective method for strengthening your organization's security posture.  That's why I've put together a step-by-step guide on which tools to use for which stage. Want to learn more? Read on… Stage 1: Scoping  When you're defin

The  three zero-day flaws  addressed by Apple on September 21, 2023, were leveraged as part of an iPhone exploit chain in an attempt to deliver a spyware strain called  Predator  targeting former Egyptian member of parliament Ahmed Eltantawy between May and September 2023. "The targeting took place after Eltantawy publicly  stated his plans  to run for President in the 2024 Egyptian elections," the Citizen Lab  said , attributing the attack with high confidence to the Egyptian government owing to it being a known customer of the commercial spying tool. According to a joint investigation conducted by the Canadian interdisciplinary laboratory and Google's Threat Analysis Group (TAG), the mercenary surveillance tool is said to have been delivered via links sent on SMS and WhatsApp. "In August and September 2023, Eltantawy's Vodafone Egypt mobile connection was persistently selected for targeting via network injection; when Eltantawy visited certain websites not

An active malware campaign targeting Latin America is dispensing a new variant of a banking trojan called  BBTok , particularly users in Brazil and Mexico. "The BBTok banker has a dedicated functionality that replicates the interfaces of more than 40 Mexican and Brazilian banks, and tricks the victims into entering its 2FA code to their bank accounts or into entering their payment card number," Check Point  said  in research published this week. The payloads are generated by a custom server-side PowerShell script and are unique for each victim based on the operating system and country, while being delivered via phishing emails that leverage a variety of file types. BBTok is a Windows-based banking malware that  first surfaced  in 2020. It's equipped with features that run the typical trojan gamut, allowing it to enumerate and kill processes, issue remote commands, manipulate keyboard, and serve fake login pages for banks operating in the two countries. The attack cha

Thorough, independent tests are a vital resource as cybersecurity leaders and their teams evaluate vendors' abilities to guard against increasingly sophisticated threats to their organization. And perhaps no assessment is more widely trusted than the annual  MITRE Engenuity ATT&CK Evaluations: Enterprise .  This testing is critical for evaluating vendors because it's virtually impossible to evaluate cybersecurity vendors based on their own performance claims. Along with vendor reference checks and proof of value evaluations (POV) — a live trial — in their environment, the MITRE results add additional objective input to holistically assess cybersecurity vendors. Let's dive into the 2023 results. In this blog, we'll unpack MITRE's methodology to test security vendors against real-world threats, offer our interpretation of the results and identify top takeaways emerging from Cynet's evaluation. How does MITRE Engenuity test vendors during the evaluation? The MITRE ATT&CK

Israeli organizations were targeted as part of two different campaigns orchestrated by the Iranian nation-state actor known as  OilRig  in 2021 and 2022. The campaigns, dubbed Outer Space and Juicy Mix, entailed the use of two previously undocumented first-stage backdoors called Solar and Mango, which were deployed to collect sensitive information from major browsers and the Windows Credential Manager. "Both backdoors were deployed by VBS droppers, presumably spread via spear-phishing emails," ESET security researcher Zuzana Hromcová  said  in a Thursday analysis. OilRig (aka APT34, Cobalt Gypsy, Hazel Sandstorm, and Helix Kitten) is the name assigned to an  intrusion set  affiliated with Iran's Ministry of Intelligence and Security (MOIS). Active since 2014, the threat actor has used a wide range of tools at its disposal to carry out information theft. Earlier this February, Trend Micro  discovered  OilRig's use of a simple backdoor to steal users' credenti

Atlassian and the Internet Systems Consortium (ISC) have disclosed several security flaws impacting their products that could be exploited to achieve denial-of-service (DoS) and remote code execution. The Australian software services provider  said  that the four high-severity flaws were fixed in new versions shipped last month. This includes - CVE-2022-25647  (CVSS score: 7.5) - A deserialization flaw in the Google Gson package impacting Patch Management in Jira Service Management Data Center and Server CVE-2023-22512  (CVSS score: 7.5) - A DoS flaw in Confluence Data Center and Server CVE-2023-22513  (CVSS score: 8.5) - A RCE flaw in Bitbucket Data Center and Server CVE-2023-28709  (CVSS score: 7.5) - A DoS flaw in Apache Tomcat server impacting Bamboo Data Center and Server The flaws have been addressed in the following versions - Jira Service Management Server and Data Center (versions 4.20.25, 5.4.9, 5.9.2, 5.10.1, 5.11.0, or later) Confluence Server and Data Center (v

Apple has released yet another round of security patches to address three actively exploited zero-day flaws impacting iOS, iPadOS, macOS, watchOS, and Safari, taking the total tally of zero-day bugs discovered in its software this year to 16. The list of security vulnerabilities is as follows - CVE-2023-41991  - A certificate validation issue in the Security framework that could allow a malicious app to bypass signature validation. CVE-2023-41992  - A security flaw in Kernel that could allow a local attacker to elevate their privileges. CVE-2023-41993  - A WebKit flaw that could result in arbitrary code execution when processing specially crafted web content. Apple did not provide additional specifics barring an acknowledgement that the "issue may have been actively exploited against versions of iOS before iOS 16.7." The updates are available for the following devices and operating systems - iOS 16.7 and iPadOS 16.7  - iPhone 8 and later, iPad Pro (all models), iP

A previously undocumented threat actor dubbed  Sandman  has been attributed to a set of cyber attacks targeting telecommunication providers in the Middle East, Western Europe, and the South Asian subcontinent. Notably, the intrusions leverage a just-in-time (JIT) compiler for the Lua programming language known as LuaJIT as a vehicle to deploy a novel implant called LuaDream . "The activities we observed are characterized by strategic lateral movement to specific targeted workstations and minimal engagement, suggesting a deliberate approach aimed at achieving the set objectives while minimizing the risk of detection," SentinelOne security researcher Aleksandar Milenkoski  said  in an analysis published in collaboration with QGroup. "The implementation of LuaDream indicates a well-executed, maintained, and actively developed project of a considerable scale." Neither the campaign nor its tactics have been correlated with any known threat actor or group, although a

The peer-to-peer (P2) worm known as  P2PInfect  has witnessed a surge in activity since late August 2023, witnessing a 600x jump between September 12 and 19, 2023. "This increase in P2PInfect traffic has coincided with a growing number of variants seen in the wild, suggesting that the malware's developers are operating at an extremely high development cadence," Cado Security researcher Matt Muir said in a report published Wednesday. A majority of the compromises have been reported in China, the U.S., Germany, the U.K., Singapore, Hong Kong, and Japan. P2PInfect first came to light in July 2023 for its ability to breach poorly secured Redis instances. The threat actors behind the campaign have since resorted to different approaches for initial access, including the abuse of the database's replication feature to deliver the malware. Cado Security said it has observed an increase in initial access events attributable to P2PInfect in which the Redis SLAVEOF command

Security teams are familiar with threats emanating from third-party applications that employees add to improve their productivity. These apps are inherently designed to deliver functionality to users by connecting to a "hub" app, such as Salesforce, Google Workspace, or Microsoft 365. Security concerns center on the permission scopes that are granted to the third party apps, and the potential for a threat actor to take over the core apps and abuse those permissions. There's no real concern that the app, on its own, will start deleting files or sharing data. As such, SaaS Security Posture Management (SSPM) solutions are able to identify integrated third party applications and present their permission scopes. The security team then makes a risk assessment, balancing the benefits the app offers with its permission scopes before deciding whether to keep or decouple the applications. However, threat actors have changed the playing field with the introduction of malicious apps. These appl