News

Jul 22, 2023THNEncryption / Privacy Apple has warned that it would rather stop offering iMessage and FaceTime services in the U.K. than bowing down to government pressure in response to new proposals that seek to expand digital surveillance powers available to state intelligence agencies. The development, first reported by BBC News, makes the iPhone maker

Jul 21, 2023THNVulnerability / Cyber Threat The U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) issued an advisory on Thursday warning that the newly disclosed critical security flaw in Citrix NetScaler Application Delivery Controller (ADC) and Gateway devices is being abused to drop web shells on vulnerable systems. “In June 2023, threat actors exploited this vulnerability

Jul 20, 2023THNCloud Security / Cyber Espionage Microsoft on Wednesday announced that it’s expanding cloud logging capabilities to help organizations investigate cybersecurity incidents and gain more visibility after facing criticism in the wake of a recent espionage attack campaign aimed at its email infrastructure. The tech giant said it’s making the change in direct response

Jul 19, 2023THNCyber Espionage / Spyware The U.S. government on Tuesday added two foreign commercial spyware vendors, Cytrox and Intellexa, to an economic blocklist for weaponizing cyber exploits to gain unauthorized access to devices and “threatening the privacy and security of individuals and organizations worldwide.” This includes the companies’ corporate holdings in Hungary (Cytrox Holdings

Jul 18, 2023THNData Security / Cyber Attack A little over a week after JumpCloud reset API keys of customers impacted by a security incident, the company said the intrusion was the work of a sophisticated nation-state actor. The adversary “gained unauthorized access to our systems to target a small and specific set of our customers,”

Jul 17, 2023THNCyber Attack / Data Safety The Russia-linked threat actor known as Gamaredon has been observed conducting data exfiltration activities within an hour of the initial compromise. “As a vector of primary compromise, for the most part, emails and messages in messengers (Telegram, WhatsApp, Signal) are used, in most cases, using previously compromised accounts,”

Jul 15, 2023THNArtificial Intelligence / Cyber Crime With generative artificial intelligence (AI) becoming all the rage these days, it’s perhaps not surprising that the technology has been repurposed by malicious actors to their own advantage, enabling avenues for accelerated cybercrime. According to findings from SlashNext, a new generative AI cybercrime tool called WormGPT has been

Jul 14, 2023THNVulnerability/ Cyber Threat Multiple security vulnerabilities have been discovered in various services, including Honeywell Experion distributed control system (DCS) and QuickBlox, that, if successfully exploited, could result in severe compromise of affected systems. Dubbed Crit.IX, the nine flaws in the Honeywell Experion DCS platform allow for “unauthorized remote code execution, which means an

Jul 13, 2023THNCyber Attack Government entities, military organizations, and civilian users in Ukraine and Poland have been targeted as part of a series of campaigns designed to steal sensitive data and gain persistent remote access to the infected systems. The intrusion set, which stretches from April 2022 to July 2023, leverages phishing lures and decoy

Jul 12, 2023THNRansomware / Cyber Threat Ransomware has emerged as the only cryptocurrency-based crime to grow in 2023, with cybercriminals extorting nearly $175.8 million more than they did a year ago, according to findings from Chainalysis. “Ransomware attackers are on pace for their second-biggest year ever, having extorted at least $449.1 million through June,” the

Jul 12, 2023The Hacker NewsVulnerability / Software Security Microsoft on Tuesday released updates to address a total of 130 new security flaws spanning its software, including six zero-day flaws that it said have been actively exploited in the wild. Of the 130 vulnerabilities, nine are rated Critical and 121 are rated Important in severity. This

Jul 11, 2023THNZero-Day / Endpoint Security Apple has released Rapid Security Response updates for iOS, iPadOS, macOS, and Safari web browser to address a zero-day flaw that it said has been actively exploited in the wild. The WebKit bug, cataloged as CVE-2023-37450, could allow threat actors to achieve arbitrary code execution when processing specially crafted

Jul 03, 2023The Hacker NewsWebsite Security Tool Every website owner or webmaster grapples with the issue of spam on their website forms. The volume of spam can be so overwhelming that finding useful information within it becomes quite challenging. What exacerbates this issue is that spam can populate your public pages, appearing in comments and

Jul 08, 2023Swati KhandelwalMobile Security / Spyware Two file management apps on the Google Play Store have been discovered to be spyware, putting the privacy and security of up to 1.5 million Android users at risk. These apps engage in deceptive behaviour and secretly send sensitive user data to malicious servers in China. Pradeo, a

Jul 07, 2023Swati KhandelwalMobile Security / Malware Researchers have issued a warning about an emerging and advanced form of voice phishing (vishing) known as “Letscall.” This technique is currently targeting individuals in South Korea. The criminals behind “Letscall” employ a multi-step attack to deceive victims into downloading malicious apps from a counterfeit Google Play Store

Jul 06, 2023Ravie LakshmananEndpoint Security / Malware The Iranian nation-state actor known as TA453 has been linked to a new set of spear-phishing attacks that infect both Windows and macOS operating systems with malware. “TA453 eventually used a variety of cloud hosting providers to deliver a novel infection chain that deploys the newly identified PowerShell

Jul 05, 2023Ravie LakshmananCritical Infrastructure Security A sophisticated stealer-as-a-ransomware threat dubbed RedEnergy has been spotted in the wild targeting energy utilities, oil, gas, telecom, and machinery sectors in Brazil and the Philippines through their LinkedIn pages. The malware “possesses the ability to steal information from various browsers, enabling the exfiltration of sensitive data, while also

Jul 04, 2023Ravie LakshmananPrivacy / Online Security The Swedish data protection watchdog has warned companies against using Google Analytics due to risks posed by U.S. government surveillance, following similar moves by Austria, France, and Italy last year. The development comes in the aftermath of an audit initiated by the Swedish Authority for Privacy Protection (IMY)

Jul 03, 2023Ravie LakshmananMalware Attack / Cyberespionage A Chinese nation-state group has been observed targeting Foreign Affairs ministries and embassies in Europe using HTML smuggling techniques to deliver the PlugX remote access trojan on compromised systems. Cybersecurity firm Check Point said the activity, dubbed SmugX, has been ongoing since at least December 2022. “The campaign

Jul 01, 2023Ravie LakshmananEndpoint Security / Malware Researchers have pulled back the curtain on an updated version of an Apple macOS malware called Rustbucket that comes with improved capabilities to establish persistence and avoid detection by security software. “This variant of Rustbucket, a malware family that targets macOS systems, adds persistence capabilities not previously observed,”

Jul 01, 2023Ravie LakshmananWebsite Security / Cyber Threat As many as 200,000 WordPress websites are at risk of ongoing attacks exploiting a critical unpatched security vulnerability in the Ultimate Member plugin. The flaw, tracked as CVE-2023-3460 (CVSS score: 9.8), impacts all versions of the Ultimate Member plugin, including the latest version (2.6.6) that was released

Jun 30, 2023The Hacker NewsCyber Espionage/ Malware Charming Kitten, the nation-state actor affiliated with Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), has been attributed to a bespoke spear-phishing campaign that delivers an updated version of a fully-featured PowerShell backdoor called POWERSTAR. “There have been improved operational security measures placed in the malware to make it more

Jun 29, 2023Ravie Lakshmanan The Iranian state-sponsored group dubbed MuddyWater has been attributed to a previously unseen command-and-control (C2) framework called PhonyC2 that’s been put to use by the actor since 2021. Evidence shows that the custom made, actively developed framework has been leveraged in the February 2023 attack on Technion, an Israeli research institute,

Jun 28, 2023Ravie LakshmananFirmware Security / Tech Drones that don’t have any known security weaknesses could be the target of electromagnetic fault injection (EMFI) attacks, potentially enabling a threat actor to achieve arbitrary code execution and compromise their functionality and safety. The research comes from IOActive, which found that it is “feasible to compromise the

Jun 27, 2023Ravie LakshmananMalware / Cyber Threat A new process injection technique dubbed Mockingjay could be exploited by threat actors to bypass security solutions to execute malicious code on compromised systems. “The injection is executed without space allocation, setting permissions or even starting a thread,” Security Joes researchers Thiago Peixoto, Felipe Duarte, and Ido Naor

Jun 26, 2023Ravie LakshmananCryptography / Cybersecurity In what’s an ingenious side-channel attack, a group of academics has found that it’s possible to recover secret keys from a device by analyzing video footage of its power LED. “Cryptographic computations performed by the CPU change the power consumption of the device which affects the brightness of the

Jun 24, 2023Ravie LakshmananCyber Crime / Cryptocurrency A U.K. citizen who took part in the massive July 2020 hack of Twitter has been sentenced to five years in prison in the U.S. Joseph James O’Connor (aka PlugwalkJoe), 24, was awarded the sentence on Friday in the Southern District of New York, a little over a

Jun 24, 2023Ravie LakshmananThreat Intel / Zero Day The U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency has added a batch of six flaws to its Known Exploited Vulnerabilities (KEV) catalog, citing evidence of active exploitation. This comprises three vulnerabilities that Apple patched this week (CVE-2023-32434, CVE-2023-32435, and CVE-2023-32439), two flaws in VMware (CVE-2023-20867 and CVE-2023-20887), and

Jun 23, 2023Ravie LakshmananSocial Engineering / Phishing A threat actor known as Muddled Libra is targeting the business process outsourcing (BPO) industry with persistent attacks that leverage advanced social engineering ploys to gain initial access. “The attack style defining Muddled Libra appeared on the cybersecurity radar in late 2022 with the release of the 0ktapus

Jun 22, 2023Ravie LakshmananCyber Attack / Phishing A new phishing campaign codenamed MULTI#STORM has set its sights on India and the U.S. by leveraging JavaScript files to deliver remote access trojans on compromised systems. “The attack chain ends with the victim machine infected with multiple unique RAT (remote access trojan) malware instances, such as Warzone