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

A new malware campaign leveraged two zero-day flaws in Cisco networking gear to deliver custom malware and facilitate covert data collection on target environments. Cisco Talos, which dubbed the activity  ArcaneDoor , attributed it as the handiwork of a previously undocumented sophisticated state-sponsored actor it tracks under the name UAT4356 (aka Storm-1849 by Microsoft). "UAT4356 deployed two backdoors as components of this campaign, 'Line Runner' and 'Line Dancer,' which were used collectively to conduct malicious actions on-target, which included configuration modification, reconnaissance, network traffic capture/exfiltration and potentially lateral movement," Talos  said . The intrusions, which were first detected and confirmed in early January 2024, entail the exploitation of  two vulnerabilities  - CVE-2024-20353  (CVSS score: 8.6) - Cisco Adaptive Security Appliance and Firepower Threat Defense Software Web Services Denial-of-Service Vulnerabi

The U.S. Treasury Department's Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) on Monday sanctioned two firms and four individuals for their involvement in malicious cyber activities on behalf of the Iranian Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps Cyber Electronic Command (IRGC-CEC) from at least 2016 to April 2021. This includes the front companies Mehrsam Andisheh Saz Nik (MASN) and Dadeh Afzar Arman (DAA), as well as the Iranian nationals Alireza Shafie Nasab, Reza Kazemifar Rahman, Hossein Mohammad Harooni, and Komeil Baradaran Salmani. "These actors targeted more than a dozen U.S. companies and government entities through cyber operations, including spear-phishing and malware attacks," the Treasury Department  said . Concurrent with the sanctions, the U.S. Department of Justice (DoJ)  unsealed  an indictment against the four individuals for orchestrating cyber attacks targeting the U.S. government and private entities. Furthermore, a  reward of up to $10 million  has been an

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,

Cybersecurity researchers have discovered an ongoing attack campaign that's leveraging phishing emails to deliver a malware called SSLoad . The campaign, codenamed  FROZEN#SHADOW  by Securonix, also involves the deployment of Cobalt Strike and the ConnectWise ScreenConnect remote desktop software. "SSLoad is designed to stealthily infiltrate systems, gather sensitive information and transmit its findings back to its operators," security researchers Den Iuzvyk, Tim Peck, and Oleg Kolesnikov said in a report shared with The Hacker News. "Once inside the system, SSLoad deploys multiple backdoors and payloads to maintain persistence and avoid detection." Attack chains involve the use of phishing messages to randomly target organizations in Asia, Europe, and the Americas, with emails containing links that lead to the retrieval of a JavaScript file that kicks off the infection flow. Earlier this month, Palo Alto Networks uncovered at least two different method

Security vulnerabilities uncovered in cloud-based pinyin keyboard apps could be exploited to reveal users' keystrokes to nefarious actors. The findings come from the Citizen Lab, which discovered weaknesses in eight of nine apps from vendors like Baidu, Honor, iFlytek, OPPO, Samsung, Tencent, Vivo, and Xiaomi. The only vendor whose keyboard app did not have any security shortcomings is that of Huawei's. The vulnerabilities could be exploited to "completely reveal the contents of users' keystrokes in transit," researchers Jeffrey Knockel, Mona Wang, and Zoë Reichert  said . The disclosure builds upon prior research from the interdisciplinary laboratory based at the University of Toronto, which identified  cryptographic flaws  in Tencent's Sogou Input Method last August. Collectively, it's estimated that close to one billion users are affected by this class of vulnerabilities, with Input Method Editors (IMEs) from Sogou, Baidu, and iFlytek accounting fo

Compliance requirements are meant to increase cybersecurity transparency and accountability. As cyber threats increase, so do the number of  compliance frameworks  and the specificity of the security controls, policies, and activities they include. For CISOs and their teams, that means compliance is a time-consuming, high-stakes process that demands strong organizational and communication skills on top of security expertise. We tapped into the CISO brain trust to get their take on the best ways to approach data security and privacy compliance requirements. In this blog, they share strategies to reduce the pain of dealing with the compliance process, including risk management and stakeholder alignment. Read on for recommendations for turning compliance from a "necessary evil" into a strategic tool that helps you evaluate cyber risk, gain budget and buy-in, and increase customer and shareholder confidence. Which CISOs care most about compliance? How CISOs view cybersecurity complia

A new malware campaign has been exploiting the updating mechanism of the eScan antivirus software to distribute backdoors and cryptocurrency miners like XMRig through a long-standing threat codenamed GuptiMiner targeting large corporate networks. Cybersecurity firm Avast said the activity is the work of a threat actor with possible connections to a North Korean hacking group dubbed  Kimsuky , which is also known as Black Banshee, Emerald Sleet, and TA427. "GuptiMiner is a highly sophisticated threat that uses an interesting infection chain along with a couple of techniques that include performing DNS requests to the attacker's DNS servers, performing sideloading, extracting payloads from innocent-looking images, signing its payloads with a custom trusted root anchor certification authority, among others," Avast  said . The intricate and elaborate infection chain, at its core, leverages a security shortcoming in the update mechanism of Indian antivirus vendor eScan to

A new ongoing malware campaign has been observed distributing three different stealers, such as  CryptBot ,  LummaC2 , and  Rhadamanthys  hosted on Content Delivery Network (CDN) cache domains since at least February 2024. Cisco Talos has attributed the activity with moderate confidence to a threat actor tracked as  CoralRaider , a suspected Vietnamese-origin group that came to light earlier this month. This assessment is based on "several overlaps in tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs) of CoralRaider's Rotbot campaign, including the initial attack vector of the Windows Shortcut file, intermediate PowerShell decryptor and payload download scripts, the FoDHelper technique used to bypass User Access Controls (UAC) of the victim machine," the company said. Targets of the campaign span various business verticals across geographies, including the U.S., Nigeria, Pakistan, Ecuador, Germany, Egypt, the U.K., Poland, the Philippines, Norway, Japan, Syria, and Turkey.

Researchers have identified a dependency confusion vulnerability impacting an archived Apache project called Cordova App Harness . Dependency confusion attacks  take place owing to the fact that package managers check the public repositories before private registries, thus allowing a threat actor to publish a malicious package with the same name to a public package repository. This causes the package manager to inadvertently download the fraudulent package from the public repository instead of the intended private repository. If successful, it can have serious consequences, such as infecting all downstream customers that install the package. A May 2023 analysis of npm and PyPI packages stored in cloud environments by enterprise security company Orca  revealed  that nearly 49% of organizations are vulnerable to a dependency confusion attack. While npm and other package managers have since introduced fixes to prioritize the private versions, application security firm Legit Security