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A new QBot malware campaign is leveraging hijacked business correspondence to trick unsuspecting victims into installing the malware, new findings from Kaspersky reveal. The latest activity, which commenced on April 4, 2023, has primarily targeted users in Germany, Argentina, Italy, Algeria, Spain, the U.S., Russia, France, the U.K., and Morocco. QBot  (aka Qakbot or Pinkslipbot) is a  banking trojan  that's known to be active since at least 2007. Besides stealing passwords and cookies from web browsers, it doubles up as a backdoor to inject next-stage payloads such as Cobalt Strike or ransomware. Distributed via phishing campaigns, the malware has seen  constant   updates   during its lifetime  that pack in anti-VM, anti-debugging, and anti-sandbox techniques to evade detection. It has also emerged as the  most prevalent malware  for the month of March 2023, per Check Point. "Early on, it was distributed through infected websites and pirated software," Kaspersky re

A Chinese nation-state group targeted an unnamed Taiwanese media organization to deliver an open source red teaming tool known as Google Command and Control ( GC2 ) amid broader abuse of Google's infrastructure for malicious ends. The tech giant's Threat Analysis Group (TAG) attributed the campaign to a threat actor it tracks under the  geological  and  geographical-themed  moniker  HOODOO , which is also known by the names  APT41 , Barium, Bronze Atlas, Wicked Panda, and  Winnti . The starting point of the attack is a phishing email that contains links to a password-protected file hosted on Google Drive, which, in turn, incorporates the Go-based GC2 tool to read commands from Google Sheets and exfiltrate data using the cloud storage service. "After installation on the victim machine, the malware queries Google Sheets to obtain attacker commands," Google's cloud division  said  in its sixth Threat Horizons Report. "In addition to exfiltration via Drive,

The U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) has  added  two vulnerabilities to its Known Exploited Vulnerabilities (KEV) catalog, based on evidence of active exploitation. The two flaws are listed below - CVE-2023-20963  (CVSS score: 7.8) - Android Framework Privilege Escalation Vulnerability CVE-2023-29492  (CVSS score: TBD) - Novi Survey Insecure Deserialization Vulnerability "Android Framework contains an unspecified vulnerability that allows for privilege escalation after updating an app to a higher Target SDK with no additional execution privileges needed," CISA  said  in an advisory for CVE-2023-20963. Google, in its monthly Android Security Bulletin for March 2023,  acknowledged  "there are indications that CVE-2023-20963 may be under limited, targeted exploitation." The development comes as tech news site Ars Technica  disclosed  late last month that Android apps digitally signed by China's e-commerce company Pinduoduo weap

Cybersecurity researchers have detailed the tactics of a "rising" cybercriminal gang called "Read The Manual" (RTM) Locker that functions as a private ransomware-as-a-service (RaaS) provider and carries out opportunistic attacks to generate illicit profit. "The 'Read The Manual' Locker gang uses affiliates to ransom victims, all of whom are forced to abide by the gang's strict rules," cybersecurity firm Trellix said in a report shared with The Hacker News. "The business-like set up of the group, where affiliates are required to remain active or notify the gang of their leave, shows the organizational maturity of the group, as has also been observed in other groups, such as  Conti ." RTM , first documented by ESET in February 2017,  started off  in 2015 as a banking malware targeting businesses in Russia via drive-by downloads, spam, and phishing emails. Attack chains mounted by the group have since  evolved  to deploy a ransomwa

The North Korean threat actor known as the Lazarus Group has been observed shifting its focus and rapidly evolving its tools and tactics as part of a long-running campaign called  DeathNote . While the nation-state adversary is known for persistently singling out the cryptocurrency sector, recent attacks have also targeted automotive, academic, and defense sectors in Eastern Europe and other parts of the world, in what's perceived as a "significant" pivot.  "At this point, the actor switched all the decoy documents to job descriptions related to defense contractors and diplomatic services," Kaspersky researcher Seongsu Park  said  in an analysis published Wednesday. The deviation in targeting, along with the use of updated infection vectors, is said to have occurred in April 2020. It's worth noting that the DeathNote cluster is also tracked under the monikers  Operation Dream Job  or  NukeSped . Google-owned Mandiant has also tied a subset of the activit

It's the second Tuesday of the month, and Microsoft has released another set of security updates to fix  a total of 97 flaws  impacting its software, one of which has been actively exploited in ransomware attacks in the wild. Seven of the 97 bugs are rated Critical and 90 are rated Important in severity. Interestingly, 45 of the shortcomings are remote code execution flaws, followed by 20 elevation of privilege vulnerabilities. The updates also follow fixes for 26 vulnerabilities in its Edge browser that were released over the past month. The security flaw that's come under active exploitation is  CVE-2023-28252  (CVSS score: 7.8), a privilege escalation bug in the Windows Common Log File System (CLFS) Driver. "An attacker who successfully exploited this vulnerability could gain SYSTEM privileges," Microsoft said in an advisory, crediting researchers Boris Larin, Genwei Jiang, and Quan Jin for reporting the issue. CVE-2023-28252 is the fourth privilege escalation

The U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) on Friday added  five security flaws  to its Known Exploited Vulnerabilities ( KEV ) catalog, citing evidence of active exploitation in the wild. This includes three high-severity flaws in the Veritas Backup Exec Agent software (CVE-2021-27876, CVE-2021-27877, and CVE-2021-27878) that could lead to the execution of privileged commands on the underlying system. The flaws were  fixed  in a patch released by Veritas in March 2021. CVE-2021-27876  (CVSS score: 8.1) - Veritas Backup Exec Agent File Access Vulnerability CVE-2021-27877  (CVSS score: 8.2) - Veritas Backup Exec Agent Improper Authentication Vulnerability CVE-2021-27878  (CVSS score: 8.8) - Veritas Backup Exec Agent Command Execution Vulnerability Google-owned Mandiant, in a  report  published last week, revealed that an affiliate associated with the  BlackCat  (aka ALPHV and Noberus) ransomware operation is targeting publicly exposed Veritas Backup Exec in

Taiwanese PC company MSI (short for Micro-Star International) officially confirmed it was the victim of a cyber attack on its systems. The company said it "promptly" initiated incident response and recovery measures after detecting "network anomalies." It also said it alerted law enforcement agencies of the matter. That said, MSI did not disclose any specifics about when the attack took place and if it entailed the exfiltration of any proprietary information, including source code. "Currently, the affected systems have gradually resumed normal operations, with no significant impact on financial business," the company said in a  brief notice  shared on Friday. In a  regulatory filing  with the Taiwan Stock Exchange, it said that it's setting up enhanced controls of its network and infrastructure to ensure the security of data. MSI is further urging users to obtain firmware/BIOS updates only from its official website, and refrain from downloading

The Iranian nation-state group known as  MuddyWater  has been observed carrying out destructive attacks on hybrid environments under the guise of a ransomware operation. That's according to new findings from the Microsoft Threat Intelligence team, which discovered the threat actor targeting both on-premises and cloud infrastructures in partnership with another emerging activity cluster dubbed  DEV-1084 . "While the threat actors attempted to masquerade the activity as a standard ransomware campaign, the unrecoverable actions show destruction and disruption were the ultimate goals of the operation," the tech giant  revealed  Friday. MuddyWater  is the name assigned to an  Iran-based actor  that the U.S. government has publicly connected to the country's Ministry of Intelligence and Security (MOIS). It's been known to be active since at least 2017. It's also tracked by the cybersecurity community under various names, including Boggy Serpens, Cobalt Ulster,

Portuguese users are being targeted by a new malware codenamed  CryptoClippy  that's capable of stealing cryptocurrency as part of a malvertising campaign. The activity leverages SEO poisoning techniques to entice users searching for "WhatsApp web" to rogue domains hosting the malware, Palo Alto Networks Unit 42  said  in a new report published today.  CryptoClippy, a C-based executable, is a type of  cryware  known as  clipper   malware  that monitors a victim's clipboard for content matching cryptocurrency addresses and substituting them with a wallet address under the threat actor's control. "The clipper malware uses regular expressions (regexes) to identify what type of cryptocurrency the address pertains to," Unit 42 researchers said. "It then replaces the clipboard entry with a visually similar but adversary-controlled wallet address for the appropriate cryptocurrency. Later, when the victim pastes the address from the clipboard to condu

Every year hundreds of millions of malware attacks occur worldwide, and every year businesses deal with the impact of viruses, worms, keyloggers, and ransomware. Malware is a pernicious threat and the biggest driver for businesses to look for cybersecurity solutions.  Naturally, businesses want to find products that will stop malware in its tracks, and so they search for solutions to do that. But  malware protection  alone is not enough, instead what's needed is a more holistic approach. Businesses need to defend against malware entering the network, and then on top of that have systems and processes in place to restrict the damage that malware can do if it infects a user device.  This approach will not only help stop and mitigate the damage from malware, but defend against other types of threats too, such as credential theft as a result of phishing, insider threats, and supply-chain attacks.  Element 1: Malware Protection and Web Filtering The first and most sensible place to

The adversary behind the  supply chain attack targeting 3CX  deployed a second-stage implant specifically singling out a small number of cryptocurrency companies. Russian cybersecurity firm Kaspersky, which has been  internally tracking  the versatile backdoor under the name  Gopuram  since 2020, said it observed an increase in the number of infections in March 2023 coinciding with the 3CX breach. Gopuram's primary function is to connect to a command-and-control (C2) server and await further instructions that allow the attackers to interact with the victim's file system, create processes, and launch as many as eight in-memory modules. The backdoor's links to North Korea stem from the fact that it "co-existed on victim machines with  AppleJeus , a backdoor attributed to the Korean-speaking threat actor Lazarus," detailing an attack on an unnamed crypto firm located in Southeast Asia in 2020. The targeting of cryptocurrency companies is another telltale sign of

The advanced persistent threat (APT) actor known as Winter Vivern is now targeting officials in Europe and the U.S. as part of an ongoing cyber espionage campaign. "TA473 since at least February 2023 has continuously leveraged an unpatched Zimbra vulnerability in publicly facing webmail portals that allows them to gain access to the email mailboxes of government entities in Europe," Proofpoint  said  in a new report. The enterprise security firm is tracking the activity under its own moniker  TA473  (aka UAC-0114), describing it as an adversarial crew whose operations align with that of Russian and Belarussian geopolitical objectives. What it lacks in sophistication, it makes up for in persistence. In recent months, the group has been linked to attacks targeting  state authorities of Ukraine and Poland  as well as  government officials in India, Lithuania, Slovakia, and the Vatican . The NATO-related intrusion wave entails the exploitation of CVE-2022-27926 (CVSS score:

Details have emerged about a now-patched vulnerability in Azure Service Fabric Explorer ( SFX ) that could lead to unauthenticated remote code execution. Tracked as  CVE-2023-23383  (CVSS score: 8.2), the issue has been dubbed "Super FabriXss" by Orca Security, a nod to the  FabriXss flaw  (CVE-2022-35829, CVSS score: 6.2) that was fixed by Microsoft in October 2022. "The Super FabriXss vulnerability enables remote attackers to leverage an XSS vulnerability to achieve remote code execution on a container hosted on a Service Fabric node without the need for authentication," security researcher Lidor Ben Shitrit  said  in a report shared with The Hacker News. XSS refers to a kind of  client-side code injection  attack that makes it possible to upload malicious scripts into otherwise trusted websites. The scripts then get executed every time a victim visits the compromised website, thereby leading to unintended consequences. While both FabriXss and Super FabriXss

A new North Korean nation-state cyber operator has been attributed to a series of campaigns orchestrated to gather strategic intelligence that aligns with Pyongyang's geopolitical interests since 2018. Google-owned Mandiant, which is tracking the activity cluster under the moniker  APT43 , said the group's motives are both espionage- and financially-motivated, leveraging techniques like  credential harvesting  and social engineering to further its objectives. The monetary angle to its attack campaigns is an attempt on the part of the threat actor to generate funds to meet its "primary mission of collecting strategic intelligence." Victimology patterns suggest that targeting is focused on South Korea, the U.S., Japan, and Europe, spanning government, education, research, policy institutes, business services, and manufacturing sectors. The threat actor was also observed straying off course by striking health-related verticals and pharma companies from October 2020

Telecommunication providers in the Middle East are the subject of new cyber attacks that commenced in the first quarter of 2023. The intrusion set has been attributed to a Chinese cyber espionage actor associated with a long-running campaign dubbed  Operation Soft Cell  based on tooling overlaps. "The initial attack phase involves infiltrating Internet-facing Microsoft Exchange servers to deploy web shells used for command execution," researchers from SentinelOne and QGroup said in a  new technical report  shared with The Hacker News. "Once a foothold is established, the attackers conduct a variety of reconnaissance, credential theft, lateral movement, and data exfiltration activities." Operation Soft Cell, according to  Cybereason , refers to malicious activities undertaken by China-affiliated actors targeting telecommunications providers since at least 2012. The Soft Cell threat actor, also tracked by Microsoft as  Gallium , is known to target unpatched int