Month: August 2022

A new hacking campaign is exploiting the notorious deep field image taken from the James Webb telescope alongside obfuscated Go programming language payloads to infect systems. The malware was spotted by the Securonix Threat research team, who is tracking the campaign as GO#WEBBFUSCATOR. “Initial infection begins with a phishing email containing a Microsoft Office attachment,”

by Paul Ducklin Google’s latest Chrome browser, version 105, is out, though the full version number is annoyingly different depending on whether you are on Windows, Mac or Linux. On Unix-like systems (Mac and Linux), you want 105.0.5195.52, but on Windows, you’re looking for 105.0.5195.54. According to Google, this new version includes 24 security fixes,

Three connected campaigns delivered a variety of threats, including the ModernLoader bot, RedLine information-stealer and cryptocurrency-mining malware to victims between March and June 2022. The association between the three apparently unrelated campaigns was made by security researchers at Cisco Talos, who said the aforementioned threat actors compromised vulnerable web applications to deliver threats via fake Amazon

by Paul Ducklin Here’s an interesting paper from the recent 2022 USENIX conference: Mining Node.js Vulnerabilities via Object Dependence Graph and Query. We’re going to cheat a little bit here by not digging into and explaining the core research presented by the authors of the paper (some mathematics, and knowledge of operational semantics notation is

Nearly half of breaches during the first six months of 2022 involved stolen credentials, Switzerland-based cybersecurity company Acronis reported in its Mid-Year Cyberthreat Report, published on August 24, 2022. It will come as no surprise to learn that the cybercriminals’ prime goal in using these credentials is to launch ransomware attacks, which “continue to be

by Paul Ducklin As you no doubt already know, because the story has been all over the news and social media recently, the widely-known and widely-used password manager LastPass last week reported a security breach. The breach itself actually happened two weeks before that, the company said, and involved attackers getting into the system where

Security researchers have revealed a new phishing campaign targeting Okta identity credentials and connected two-factor authentication (2FA) codes.  The analysis comes from the Group-IB, who said it was particularly interesting because despite using low-skill methods, the campaign was able to compromise a large number of well-known companies. In fact, attackers sent employees of the targeted companies text

The threat actor known as TeamTNT has been targeting cloud instances and containerized environments on systems around the world for at least two years. The findings come from CloudSEK security researchers, who posted an advisory on Thursday detailing a timeline of TeamTNT attacks from February 2020 until July 2021. According to the report, the group’s Github

Iran-based threat actor MuddyWater (tracked by Microsoft as MERCURY) has been leveraging the exploitation of Log4j 2 vulnerabilities in SysAid applications to target organizations in Israel. The news comes from a new advisory from Microsoft’s security researchers, who said on Thursday they could assess with high confidence that MERCURY’s observed activity was affiliated with Iran’s Ministry

by Paul Ducklin Recent updates to Apple Safari and Google Chrome made big headlines because they fixed mysterious zero-day exploits that were already being used in the wild. But this week also saw the latest four-weekly Firefox update, which dropped as usual on Tuesday, four weeks after the last scheduled full-version-number-increment release. We haven’t written

Cybersecurity researchers from Microsoft Threat Intelligence Center (MSTIC)  have discovered a new, post-compromise capability allowing a threat actor to maintain persistent access to compromised environments. Dubbed ‘MagicWeb’ by the tech giant, the capability has been attributed to Nobelium, a group commonly associated with the SolarWinds and USAID attacks. “Nobelium remains highly active, executing multiple campaigns in parallel

by Paul Ducklin LISTEN NOW With Doug Aamoth and Paul Ducklin. Intro and outro music by Edith Mudge. Click-and-drag on the soundwaves below to skip to any point. You can also listen directly on Soundcloud. You can listen to us on Soundcloud, Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher and anywhere that good podcasts are found.