The Hacker News | #1 Trusted Cybersecurity News Site — Index Page

Cybersecurity researchers are warning that threat actors are actively exploiting a "disputed" and unpatched vulnerability in an open-source artificial intelligence (AI) platform called Anyscale Ray to hijack computing power for illicit cryptocurrency mining. "This vulnerability allows attackers to take over the companies' computing power and leak sensitive data," Oligo Security researchers Avi Lumelsky, Guy Kaplan, and Gal Elbaz  said  in a Tuesday disclosure. "This flaw has been under active exploitation for the last seven months, affecting sectors like education, cryptocurrency, biopharma, and more." The campaign, ongoing since September 2023, has been codenamed  ShadowRay  by the Israeli application security firm. It also marks the first time AI workloads have been targeted in the wild through shortcomings underpinning the AI infrastructure. Ray is an  open-source, fully-managed compute framework  that allows organizations to build, train, and

A new phishing campaign has been observed leveraging a novel loader malware to deliver an information stealer and keylogger called  Agent Tesla . Trustwave SpiderLabs said it identified a phishing email bearing this attack chain on March 8, 2024. The message masquerades as a bank payment notification, urging the user to open an archive file attachment. The archive ("Bank Handlowy w Warszawie - dowód wpłaty_pdf.tar.gz") conceals a malicious loader that activates the procedure to deploy Agent Tesla on the compromised host. "This loader then used obfuscation to evade detection and leveraged polymorphic behavior with complex decryption methods," security researcher Bernard Bautista  said  in a Tuesday analysis. "The loader also exhibited the capability to bypass antivirus defenses and retrieved its payload using specific URLs and user agents leveraging proxies to further obfuscate traffic." The tactic of embedding malware within seemingly benign files is

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

Two China-linked advanced persistent threat (APT) groups have been observed targeting entities and member countries affiliated with the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) as part of a cyber espionage campaign over the past three months. This includes the threat actor known as  Mustang Panda , which has been recently linked to  cyber attacks against Myanmar  as well as other Asian countries with a variant of the PlugX (aka Korplug) backdoor dubbed  DOPLUGS . Mustang Panda, also called Camaro Dragon, Earth Preta, and Stately Taurus, is believed to have targeted entities in Myanmar, the Philippines, Japan and Singapore, targeting them with phishing emails designed to deliver two malware packages. "Threat actors created malware for these packages on March 4-5, 2024, coinciding with the ASEAN-Australia Special Summit (March 4-6, 2024)," Palo Alto Networks Unit 42  said  in a report shared with The Hacker News. One of the malware package is a ZIP file that contains

Threat hunters have identified a suspicious package in the  NuGet package manager  that's likely designed to target developers working with tools made by a Chinese firm that specializes in industrial- and digital equipment manufacturing. The package in question is  SqzrFramework480 , which ReversingLabs said was first published on January 24, 2024. It has been  downloaded  2,999 times as of writing. The software supply chain security firm said it did not find any other package that exhibited similar behavior. It, however, theorized the campaign could likely be used for orchestrating industrial espionage on systems equipped with cameras, machine vision, and robotic arms. The indication that SqzrFramework480 is seemingly tied to a Chinese firm named Bozhon Precision Industry Technology Co., Ltd. comes from the use of a version of the company's logo for the package's icon. It was uploaded by a Nuget user account called " zhaoyushun1999 ." Present within the l

The U.S. Department of Justice (DoJ) on Monday unsealed indictments against seven Chinese nationals for their involvement in a hacking group that targeted U.S. and foreign critics, journalists, businesses, and political officials for about 14 years. The defendants include Ni Gaobin (倪高彬), Weng Ming (翁明), Cheng Feng (程锋), Peng Yaowen (彭耀文), Sun Xiaohui (孙小辉), Xiong Wang (熊旺), and Zhao Guangzong (赵光宗).  The suspected cyber spies have been charged with conspiracy to commit computer intrusions and conspiracy to commit wire fraud in connection with a state-sponsored threat group tracked as  APT31 , which is also known as Altaire,  Bronze Vinewood , Judgement Panda, and Violet Typhoon (formerly Zirconium). The hacking collective has been  active since at least 2010 . Specifically, their responsibilities entail testing and exploiting the malware used to conduct the intrusions, managing the attack infrastructure, and conducting surveillance of specific U.S. entities, federal prosecutors no

Minecraft, with over 500 million registered users and 166 million monthly players, faces significant risks from distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks, threatening server functionality, player experience, and the game's reputation. Despite the prevalence of DDoS attacks on the game, the majority of incidents go unreported, leaving a gap in awareness and protection. This article explains what happens to a Minecraft server during a DDoS attack and how to protect against such attacks. For an in-depth version of the article,  check out this white paper . When Creepers Breach: What Happens When an Attack Is Successful When a Minecraft server is hit with a DDoS attack, players may have problems with logging in to servers, loading worlds, navigating biomes, using tools, and chatting. They can also experience general lags, disconnections, timeouts, or server crashes. These in-game disruptions can ruin the gaming experience for players while causing financial and reputational losses to

The U.S. Department of the Treasury's Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) sanctioned three cryptocurrency exchanges for offering services used to evade economic restrictions imposed on Russia following its invasion of Ukraine in early 2022. This includes Bitpapa IC FZC LLC, Crypto Explorer DMCC (AWEX), and Obshchestvo S Ogranichennoy Otvetstvennostyu Tsentr Obrabotki Elektronnykh Platezhey (TOEP). In all, the designations cover thirteen entities and two individuals operating in the Russian financial services and technology sectors. "Many of the individuals and entities designated today facilitated transactions or offered other services that helped OFAC-designated entities evade sanctions," the Treasury  said , adding the action seeks to "target companies servicing Russia's core financial infrastructure and curtail Russia's use of the international financial system to further its war against Ukraine." Bitpapa, which offers virtual currency excha

The U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) on Monday  placed  three security flaws to its Known Exploited Vulnerabilities ( KEV ) catalog, citing evidence of active exploitation. The vulnerabilities added are as follows - CVE-2023-48788  (CVSS score: 9.3) - Fortinet FortiClient EMS SQL Injection Vulnerability CVE-2021-44529  (CVSS score: 9.8) - Ivanti Endpoint Manager Cloud Service Appliance (EPM CSA) Code Injection Vulnerability CVE-2019-7256  (CVSS score: 10.0) - Nice Linear eMerge E3-Series OS Command Injection Vulnerability The shortcoming impacting Fortinet FortiClient EMS  came to light  earlier this month, with the company describing it as a flaw that could allow an unauthenticated attacker to execute unauthorized code or commands via specifically crafted requests. Fortinet has since revised its advisory to confirm that it has been exploited in the wild, although no other details regarding the nature of the attacks are currently available. CVE-20

Unidentified adversaries orchestrated a sophisticated attack campaign that has impacted several individual developers as well as the GitHub organization account associated with Top.gg, a Discord bot discovery site. "The threat actors used multiple TTPs in this attack, including account takeover via stolen browser cookies, contributing malicious code with verified commits, setting up a custom Python mirror, and publishing malicious packages to the PyPI registry," Checkmarx  said  in a technical report shared with The Hacker News. The software supply chain attack is said to have led to the theft of sensitive information, including passwords, credentials, and other valuable data. Some aspects of the campaign were  previously   disclosed  at the start of the month by an Egypt-based developer named Mohammed Dief. It chiefly entailed setting up a clever typosquat of the official PyPI domain known as "files. python hosted[.]org," giving it the name "files. pypi ho