The Hacker News
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A dual Russian and Israeli national has been charged in the United States for allegedly being the developer of the now-defunct LockBit ransomware-as-a-service (RaaS) operation since its inception in or around 2019 through at least February 2024.
Rostislav Panev, 51, was arrested in Israel earlier this August and is currently awaiting extradition, the U.S. Department of Justice (DoJ) said in a
Posted: December 21, 2024, 9:22 am
The Lazarus Group, an infamous threat actor linked to the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK), has been observed leveraging a "complex infection chain" targeting at least two employees belonging to an unnamed nuclear-related organization within the span of one month in January 2024.
The attacks, which culminated in the deployment of a new modular backdoor referred to as CookiePlus, are
Posted: December 20, 2024, 10:44 am
The developers of Rspack have revealed that two of their npm packages, @rspack/core and @rspack/cli, were compromised in a software supply chain attack that allowed a malicious actor to publish malicious versions to the official package registry with cryptocurrency mining malware.
Following the discovery, versions 1.1.7 of both libraries have been unpublished from the npm registry. The latest
Posted: December 20, 2024, 8:39 am
Sophos has released hotfixes to address three security flaws in Sophos Firewall products that could be exploited to achieve remote code execution and allow privileged system access under certain conditions.
Of the three, two are rated Critical in severity. There is currently no evidence that the shortcomings have been exploited in the wild. The list of vulnerabilities is as follows -
Posted: December 20, 2024, 8:13 am
A now-patched critical security flaw impacting Fortinet FortiClient EMS is being exploited by malicious actors as part of a cyber campaign that installed remote desktop software such as AnyDesk and ScreenConnect.
The vulnerability in question is CVE-2023-48788 (CVSS score: 9.3), an SQL injection bug that allows attackers to execute unauthorized code or commands by sending specially crafted
Posted: December 20, 2024, 6:25 am
The U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) on Thursday added a critical security flaw impacting BeyondTrust Privileged Remote Access (PRA) and Remote Support (RS) products to the Known Exploited Vulnerabilities (KEV) catalog, citing evidence of active exploitation in the wild.
The vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2024-12356 (CVSS score: 9.8), is a command injection flaw that
Posted: December 20, 2024, 4:30 am
Threat actors have been observed uploading malicious typosquats of legitimate npm packages such as typescript-eslint and @types/node that have racked up thousands of downloads on the package registry.
The counterfeit versions, named @typescript_eslinter/eslint and types-node, are engineered to download a trojan and retrieve second-stage payloads, respectively.
"While typosquatting attacks are
Posted: December 19, 2024, 1:56 pm
Juniper Networks is warning that Session Smart Router (SSR) products with default passwords are being targeted as part of a malicious campaign that deploys the Mirai botnet malware.
The company said it's issuing the advisory after "several customers" reported anomalous behavior on their Session Smart Network (SSN) platforms on December 11, 2024.
"These systems have been infected with the Mirai
Posted: December 19, 2024, 1:37 pm
Fortinet has issued an advisory for a now-patched critical security flaw impacting Wireless LAN Manager (FortiWLM) that could lead to disclosure of sensitive information.
The vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2023-34990, carries a CVSS score of 9.6 out of a maximum of 10.0. It was originally fixed by Fortinet back in September 2023, but without a CVE designation.
"A relative path traversal [CWE-23]
Posted: December 19, 2024, 10:31 am
The U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) has issued Binding Operational Directive (BOD) 25-01, ordering federal civilian agencies to secure their cloud environments and abide by Secure Cloud Business Applications (SCuBA) secure configuration baselines.
"Recent cybersecurity incidents highlight the significant risks posed by misconfigurations and weak security controls,
Posted: December 19, 2024, 10:00 am
The Dutch Data Protection Authority (DPA) on Wednesday fined video on-demand streaming service Netflix €4.75 million ($4.93 million) for not giving consumers enough information about how it used their data between 2018 and 2020.
An investigation launched by the DPA in 2019 found that the tech giant did not inform customers clearly enough in its privacy statement about what it does with the data
Posted: December 19, 2024, 9:26 am
The Computer Emergency Response Team of Ukraine (CERT-UA) has disclosed that a threat actor it tracks as UAC-0125 is leveraging Cloudflare Workers service to trick military personnel in the country into downloading malware disguised as Army+, a mobile app that was introduced by the Ministry of Defence back in August 2024 in an effort to make the armed forces go paperless.
Users who visit the
Posted: December 19, 2024, 8:40 am
Cybersecurity researchers have disclosed a new phishing campaign that has targeted European companies with an aim to harvest account credentials and take control of the victims' Microsoft Azure cloud infrastructure.
The campaign has been codenamed HubPhish by Palo Alto Networks Unit 42 owing to the abuse of HubSpot tools in the attack chain. Targets include at least 20,000 automotive, chemical,
Posted: December 18, 2024, 2:10 pm
Threat actors are attempting to exploit a recently disclosed security flaw impacting Apache Struts that could pave the way for remote code execution.
The issue, tracked as CVE-2024-53677, carries a CVSS score of 9.5 out of 10.0, indicating critical severity. The vulnerability shares similarities with another critical bug the project maintainers addressed in December 2023 (CVE-2023-50164, CVSS
Posted: December 18, 2024, 1:36 pm
Having been at ActiveState for nearly eight years, I’ve seen many iterations of our product. However, one thing has stayed true over the years: Our commitment to the open source community and companies using open source in their code.
ActiveState has been helping enterprises manage open source for over a decade. In the early days, open source was in its infancy. We focused mainly on the
Posted: December 18, 2024, 11:55 am
The Russia-linked APT29 threat actor has been observed repurposing a legitimate red teaming attack methodology as part of cyber attacks leveraging malicious Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP) configuration files.
The activity, which has targeted governments and armed forces, think tanks, academic researchers, and Ukrainian entities, entails adopting a "rogue RDP" technique that was previously
Posted: December 18, 2024, 11:15 am
Across small-to-medium enterprises (SMEs) and managed service providers (MSPs), the top priority for cybersecurity leaders is to keep IT environments up and running. To guard against cyber threats and prevent data breaches, it’s vital to understand the current cybersecurity vendor landscape and continually assess the effectiveness of available solutions. Luckily, the 2024 MITRE ATT&CK
Posted: December 18, 2024, 10:30 am
BeyondTrust has disclosed details of a critical security flaw in Privileged Remote Access (PRA) and Remote Support (RS) products that could potentially lead to the execution of arbitrary commands.
Privileged Remote Access controls, manages, and audits privileged accounts and credentials, offering zero trust access to on-premises and cloud resources by internal, external, and third-party users.
Posted: December 18, 2024, 9:15 am
INTERPOL is calling for a linguistic shift that aims to put to an end to the term "pig butchering," instead advocating for the use of "romance baiting" to refer to online scams where victims are duped into investing in bogus cryptocurrency schemes under the pretext of a romantic relationship.
"The term 'pig butchering' dehumanizes and shames victims of such frauds, deterring people from coming
Posted: December 18, 2024, 9:10 am
Meta Platforms, the parent company of Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, and Threads, has been fined €251 million (around $263 million) for a 2018 data breach that impacted millions of users in the bloc, in what's the latest financial hit the company has taken for flouting stringent privacy laws.
The Irish Data Protection Commission (DPC) said the data breach impacted approximately 29 million
Posted: December 18, 2024, 5:43 am
A new social engineering campaign has leveraged Microsoft Teams as a way to facilitate the deployment of a known malware called DarkGate.
"An attacker used social engineering via a Microsoft Teams call to impersonate a user's client and gain remote access to their system," Trend Micro researchers Catherine Loveria, Jovit Samaniego, and Gabriel Nicoleta said.
"The attacker failed to install a
Posted: December 17, 2024, 4:35 pm
A new phishing campaign has been observed employing tax-themed lures to deliver a stealthy backdoor payload as part of attacks targeting Pakistan.
Cybersecurity company Securonix, which is tracking the activity under the name FLUX#CONSOLE, said it likely starts with a phishing email link or attachment, although it said it couldn't obtain the original email used to launch the attack.
"One of the
Posted: December 17, 2024, 2:11 pm
Even the best companies with the most advanced tools can still get hacked. It’s a frustrating reality: you’ve invested in the right solutions, trained your team, and strengthened your defenses. But breaches still happen.
So, what’s going wrong? The truth is, that attackers are constantly finding new ways to slip through cracks that often go unnoticed—even in well-prepared organizations. The good
Posted: December 17, 2024, 12:05 pm
A suspected South Asian cyber espionage threat group known as Bitter targeted a Turkish defense sector organization in November 2024 to deliver two C++-malware families tracked as WmRAT and MiyaRAT.
"The attack chain used alternate data streams in a RAR archive to deliver a shortcut (LNK) file that created a scheduled task on the target machine to pull down further payloads," Proofpoint
Posted: December 17, 2024, 11:07 am
Addressing cyber threats before they have a chance to strike or inflict serious damage is by far the best security approach any company can embrace. Achieving this takes a lot of research and proactive threat hunting. The problem here is that it is easy to get stuck in endless arrays of data and end up with no relevant intel.
To avoid this, use these five battle-tested techniques that are
Posted: December 17, 2024, 10:52 am
Bogus software update lures are being used by threat actors to deliver a new stealer malware called CoinLurker.
"Written in Go, CoinLurker employs cutting-edge obfuscation and anti-analysis techniques, making it a highly effective tool in modern cyber attacks," Morphisec researcher Nadav Lorber said in a technical report published Monday.
The attacks make use of fake update alerts that employ
Posted: December 17, 2024, 9:03 am
A little-known cyber espionage actor known as The Mask has been linked to a new set of attacks targeting an unnamed organization in Latin America twice in 2019 and 2022.
"The Mask APT is a legendary threat actor that has been performing highly sophisticated attacks since at least 2007," Kaspersky researchers Georgy Kucherin and Marc Rivero said in an analysis published last week. "Their targets
Posted: December 17, 2024, 6:55 am
The U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) on Monday added two security flaws to its Known Exploited Vulnerabilities (KEV) catalog, citing evidence of active exploitation in the wild.
The list of flaws is below -
CVE-2024-20767 (CVSS score: 7.4) - Adobe ColdFusion contains an improper access control vulnerability that could allow an attacker to access or modify restricted
Posted: December 17, 2024, 5:47 am
Cybersecurity researchers have shed light on a previously undocumented aspect associated with ClickFix-style attacks that hinge on taking advantage of a single ad network service as part of a malvertising-driven information stealer campaign dubbed DeceptionAds.
"Entirely reliant on a single ad network for propagation, this campaign showcases the core mechanisms of malvertising — delivering over
Posted: December 16, 2024, 2:22 pm
A Serbian journalist had his phone first unlocked by a Cellebrite tool and subsequently compromised by a previously undocumented spyware codenamed NoviSpy, according to a new report published by Amnesty International.
"NoviSpy allows for capturing sensitive personal data from a target's phone after infection and provides the ability to turn on the phone's microphone or camera remotely," the
Posted: December 16, 2024, 12:45 pm
This past week has been packed with unsettling developments in the world of cybersecurity. From silent but serious attacks on popular business tools to unexpected flaws lurking in everyday devices, there’s a lot that might have flown under your radar. Attackers are adapting old tricks, uncovering new ones, and targeting systems both large and small.
Meanwhile, law enforcement has scored wins
Posted: December 16, 2024, 12:11 pm
With the evolution of modern software development, CI/CD pipeline governance has emerged as a critical factor in maintaining both agility and compliance. As we enter the age of artificial intelligence (AI), the importance of robust pipeline governance has only intensified. With that said, we’ll explore the concept of CI/CD pipeline governance and why it's vital, especially as AI becomes
Posted: December 16, 2024, 11:00 am
Cybersecurity researchers are calling attention to a new kind of investment scam that leverages a combination of social media malvertising, company-branded posts, and artificial intelligence (AI) powered video testimonials featuring famous personalities, ultimately leading to financial and data loss.
"The main goal of the fraudsters is to lead victims to phishing websites and forms that harvest
Posted: December 16, 2024, 10:17 am
Cybersecurity researchers have discovered a new PHP-based backdoor called Glutton that has been put to use in cyber attacks targeting China, the United States, Cambodia, Pakistan, and South Africa.
QiAnXin XLab, which discovered the malicious activity in late April 2024, attributed the previously unknown malware with moderate confidence to the prolific Chinese nation-state group tracked Winnti (
Posted: December 16, 2024, 9:09 am
The Security Service of Ukraine (SBU or SSU) has exposed a novel espionage campaign suspected to be orchestrated by Russia's Federal Security Service (FSB) that involves recruiting Ukrainian minors for criminal activities under the guise of "quest games."
Law enforcement officials said that it detained two FSB agent groups following a special operation in Kharkiv. These groups, per the agency,
Posted: December 16, 2024, 6:44 am
Germany's Federal Office of Information Security (BSI) has announced that it has disrupted a malware operation called BADBOX that came preloaded on at least 30,000 internet-connected devices sold across the country.
In a statement published earlier this week, authorities said they severed the communications between the devices and their command-and-control (C2) servers by sinkholing the domains
Posted: December 14, 2024, 11:33 am
Thai government officials have emerged as the target of a new campaign that leverages a technique called DLL side-loading to deliver a previously undocumented backdoor dubbed Yokai.
"The target of the threat actors were Thailand officials based on the nature of the lures," Nikhil Hegde, senior engineer for Netskope's Security Efficacy team, told The Hacker News. "The Yokai backdoor itself is not
Posted: December 14, 2024, 10:16 am
A now-removed GitHub repository that advertised a WordPress tool to publish posts to the online content management system (CMS) is estimated to have enabled the exfiltration of over 390,000 credentials.
The malicious activity is part of a broader attack campaign undertaken by a threat actor, dubbed MUT-1244 (where MUT refers to "mysterious unattributed threat") by Datadog Security Labs, that
Posted: December 13, 2024, 8:00 pm
A security flaw has been disclosed in OpenWrt's Attended Sysupgrade (ASU) feature that, if successfully exploited, could have been abused to distribute malicious firmware packages.
The vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2024-54143, carries a CVSS score of 9.3 out of a maximum of 10, indicating critical severity. Flatt Security researcher RyotaK has been credited with discovering and reporting the
Posted: December 13, 2024, 4:48 pm
The U.S. Department of Justice (DoJ) has indicted 14 nationals belonging to the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK or North Korea) for their alleged involvement in a long-running conspiracy to violate sanctions and commit wire fraud, money laundering, and identity theft by illegally seeking employment in U.S. companies and non-profit organizations.
"The conspirators, who worked for
Posted: December 13, 2024, 3:51 pm
Iran-affiliated threat actors have been linked to a new custom malware that's geared toward IoT and operational technology (OT) environments in Israel and the United States.
The malware has been codenamed IOCONTROL by OT cybersecurity company Claroty, highlighting its ability to attack IoT and supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) devices such as IP cameras, routers, programmable
Posted: December 13, 2024, 11:44 am
Run by the team at orchestration, AI, and automation platform Tines, the Tines library contains pre-built workflows shared by real security practitioners from across the community, all of which are free to import and deploy via the Community Edition of the platform.
Their bi-annual “You Did What with Tines?!” competition highlights some of the most interesting workflows submitted by their
Posted: December 13, 2024, 11:30 am
Cybersecurity researchers have uncovered a new Linux rootkit called PUMAKIT that comes with capabilities to escalate privileges, hide files and directories, and conceal itself from system tools, while simultaneously evading detection.
"PUMAKIT is a sophisticated loadable kernel module (LKM) rootkit that employs advanced stealth mechanisms to hide its presence and maintain communication with
Posted: December 13, 2024, 9:11 am
The U.S. Department of Justice (DoJ) on Thursday announced the shutdown of an illicit marketplace called Rydox ("rydox[.]ru" and "rydox[.]cc") for selling stolen personal information, access devices, and other tools for conducting cybercrime and fraud.
In tandem, three Kosovo nationals and administrators of the service, Ardit Kutleshi, Jetmir Kutleshi, and Shpend Sokoli, have been arrested.
Posted: December 13, 2024, 6:06 am
Cybersecurity researchers are warning that thousands of servers hosting the Prometheus monitoring and alerting toolkit are at risk of information leakage and exposure to denial-of-service (DoS) as well as remote code execution (RCE) attacks.
"Prometheus servers or exporters, often lacking proper authentication, allowed attackers to easily gather sensitive information, such as credentials and API
Posted: December 12, 2024, 2:24 pm
The Russia-linked state-sponsored threat actor tracked as Gamaredon has been attributed to two new Android spyware tools called BoneSpy and PlainGnome, marking the first time the adversary has been discovered using mobile-only malware families in its attack campaigns.
"BoneSpy and PlainGnome target former Soviet states and focus on Russian-speaking victims," Lookout said in an analysis. "Both
Posted: December 12, 2024, 1:35 pm
Details have emerged about a now-patched security vulnerability in Apple's iOS and macOS that, if successfully exploited, could sidestep the Transparency, Consent, and Control (TCC) framework and result in unauthorized access to sensitive information.
The flaw, tracked as CVE-2024-44131 (CVSS score: 5.3), resides in the FileProvider component, per Apple, and has been addressed with improved
Posted: December 12, 2024, 12:35 pm
SaaS services are one of the biggest drivers of OpEx (operating expenses) for modern businesses. With Gartner projecting $247.2 billion in global SaaS spending this year, it’s no wonder SaaS budgets are a big deal in the world of finance and IT. Efficient SaaS utilization can significantly affect both the bottom line and employee productivity.
In this article, we’ll break down this topic
Posted: December 12, 2024, 11:30 am
Malicious actors are exploiting a critical vulnerability in the Hunk Companion plugin for WordPress to install other vulnerable plugins that could open the door to a variety of attacks.
The flaw, tracked as CVE-2024-11972 (CVSS score: 9.8), affects all versions of the plugin prior to 1.9.0. The plugin has over 10,000 active installations.
"This flaw poses a significant security risk, as it
Posted: December 12, 2024, 9:18 am
A global law enforcement operation has failed 27 stresser services that were used to conduct distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks and took them offline as part of a multi-year international exercise called PowerOFF.
The effort, coordinated by Europol and involving 15 countries, dismantled several booter and stresser websites, including zdstresser.net, orbitalstress.net, and
Posted: December 12, 2024, 6:15 am