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Microsoft on Monday said it’s taking steps to disable Visual Basic for Applications (VBA) macros by default across its products, including Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Access, and Visio, for documents downloaded from the web in an attempt to eliminate an entire class of attack vector. “Bad actors send macros in Office files to end users who […]
Systems hosting content pertaining to the National Games of China were successfully breached last year by an unnamed Chinese-language-speaking hacking group. Cybersecurity firm Avast, which dissected the intrusion, said that the attackers gained access to a web server 12 days prior to the start of the event on September 3 to drop multiple reverse web […]
A Chinese advanced persistent threat (APT) group has been targeting Taiwanese financial institutions as part of a “persistent campaign” that lasted for at least 18 months. The intrusions, whose primary intent was espionage, resulted in the deployment of a backdoor called xPack, granting the adversary extensive control over compromised machines, Broadcom-owned Symantec said in a […]
The U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) is urging federal agencies to secure their systems against an actively exploited security vulnerability in Windows that could be abused to gain elevated permissions on affected hosts. To that end, the agency has added CVE-2022-21882 (CVSS score: 7.0) to the Known Exploited Vulnerabilities Catalog, necessitating that Federal […]
A threat actor, likely Chinese in origin, is actively attempting to exploit a zero-day vulnerability in the Zimbra open-source email platform as part of spear-phishing campaigns that commenced in December 2021. The espionage operation — codenamed “EmailThief” — was detailed by cybersecurity company Volexity in a technical report published Thursday, noting that successful exploitation of […]
An ongoing search engine optimization (SEO) poisoning attack campaign has been observed abusing trust in legitimate software utilities to trick users into downloading BATLOADER malware on compromised machines. “The threat actor used ‘free productivity apps installation’ or ‘free software development tools installation’ themes as SEO keywords to lure victims to a compromised website and to […]
Microsoft on Wednesday shed light on a previously undocumented Mac trojan that it said has undergone several iterations since its first appearance in September 2020, effectively granting it an “increasing progression of sophisticated capabilities.” The company’s Microsoft 365 Defender Threat Intelligence Team dubbed the new malware family “UpdateAgent,” charting its evolution from a barebones information […]
Cybersecurity researchers have turned the spotlight on a new wave of offensive cyberattacks targeting Palestinian activists and entities starting around October 2021 using politically-themed phishing emails and decoy documents. The intrusions are part of what Cisco Talos calls a longstanding espionage and information theft campaign undertaken by the Arid Viper hacking group using a Delphi-based […]
The threat actor behind the supply chain compromise of SolarWinds has continued to expand its malware arsenal with new tools and techniques that were deployed in attacks as early as 2019, once indicative of the elusive nature of the campaigns and the adversary’s ability to maintain persistent access for years. According to cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike, […]
A politically motivated hacker group tied to a series of espionage and sabotage attacks on Israeli entities in 2021 incorporated a previously undocumented remote access trojan (RAT) that masquerades as the Windows Calculator app as part of a conscious effort to stay under the radar. Cybersecurity company Cybereason, which has been tracking the operations of […]
Cybersecurity researchers on Monday said they uncovered evidence of attempted attacks by a Russia-linked hacking operation targeting a Ukrainian entity in July 2021. Broadcom-owned Symantec, in a new report published Monday, attributed the attacks to an actor tracked as Gamaredon (aka Shuckworm or Armageddon), a cyber-espionage collective known to be active since at least 2013. […]
DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service) attacks are making headlines almost every day. 2021 saw a 434% upsurge in DDoS attacks, 5.5 times higher than 2020. Q3 2021 saw a 24% increase in the number of DDoS attacks in comparison to Q3 2020. Advanced DDoS attacks that are typically targeted, known as smart attacks, rose by […]
Samba has issued software updates to address multiple security vulnerabilities that, if successfully exploited, could allow remote attackers to execute arbitrary code with the highest privileges on affected installations. Chief among them is CVE-2021-44142, which impacts all versions of Samba before 4.13.17 and concerns an out-of-bounds heap read/write vulnerability in the VFS module “vfs_fruit” that […]
The notorious Lazarus Group actor has been observed mounting a new campaign that makes use of the Windows Update service to execute its malicious payload, expanding the arsenal of living-off-the-land (LotL) techniques leveraged by the APT group to further its objectives. The Lazarus Group, also known as APT38, Hidden Cobra, Whois Hacking Team, and Zinc, […]
A cyberespionage group with ties to North Korea has resurfaced with a stealthier variant of its remote access trojan called Konni to attack political institutions located in Russia and South Korea. “The authors are constantly making code improvements,” Malwarebytes researcher Roberto Santos said. “Their efforts are aimed at breaking the typical flow recorded by sandboxes […]
Taiwanese company QNAP has warned customers to secure network-attached storage (NAS) appliances and routers against a new ransomware variant called DeadBolt. “DeadBolt has been widely targeting all NAS exposed to the Internet without any protection and encrypting users’ data for Bitcoin ransom,” the company said. “QNAP urges all QNAP NAS users to […] immediately update […]
Researchers from the Bitdefender Mobile Threats team said they have intercepted more than 100,000 malicious SMS messages attempting to distribute Flubot malware since the beginning of December. “Findings indicate attackers are modifying their subject lines and using older yet proven scams to entice users to click,” the Romanian cybersecurity firm detailed in a report published […]
A new, sophisticated phishing attack has been observed delivering the AsyncRAT trojan as part of a malware campaign that’s believed to have commenced in September 2021. “Through a simple email phishing tactic with an HTML attachment, threat attackers are delivering AsyncRAT (a remote access trojan) designed to remotely monitor and control its infected computers through […]
Cybersecurity researchers on Tuesday took the wraps off a multi-stage espionage campaign targeting high-ranking government officials overseeing national security policy and individuals in the defense industry in Western Asia. The attack is unique as it leverages Microsoft OneDrive as a command-and-control (C2) server and is split into as many as six stages to stay as […]
A previously undocumented cyber-espionage malware aimed at Apple’s macOS operating system leveraged a Safari web browser exploit as part of a watering hole attack targeting politically active, pro-democracy individuals in Hong Kong. Slovak cybersecurity firm ESET attributed the intrusion to an actor with “strong technical capabilities,” calling out the campaign’s overlaps to that of a […]
The cybercrime operators behind the notorious TrickBot malware have once again upped the ante by fine-tuning its techniques by adding multiple layers of defense to slip past antimalware products. “As part of that escalation, malware injections have been fitted with added protection to keep researchers out and get through security controls,” IBM Trusteer said in […]