Mar 23, 2023Ravie LakshmananBrowser Security / Artificial Intelligence Google has stepped in to remove a bogus Chrome browser extension from the official Web Store that masqueraded as OpenAI’s ChatGPT service to harvest Facebook session cookies and hijack the accounts. The “ChatGPT For Google” extension, a trojanized version of a legitimate open source browser add-on, attracted
Month: March 2023
An administrator of the notorious BreachForums website has announced the forum was taken down following the arrest of its alleged founder days ago. Writing in a Telegram message within the “Breach Forums” channel on Tuesday, the BreachForums admin known as “baphomet” confirmed he would be closing the site. “I will be taking down the forum,
by Paul Ducklin Just yesterday, we wrote about a bug in Google Pixel phones, apparently now patched, with potentially dangerous consequences. The bug finders, understandably excited (and concerned) by what they’d found, decided to follow the BWAIN principle for maximum, turning it into a Bug With An Impressive Name: aCropalypse. In case you’re wondering, the
Mar 22, 2023Ravie LakshmananICS/SCADA Security The U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) has released eight Industrial Control Systems (ICS) advisories on Tuesday, warning of critical flaws affecting equipment from Delta Electronics and Rockwell Automation. This includes 13 security vulnerabilities in Delta Electronics’ InfraSuite Device Master, a real-time device monitoring software. All versions prior to
More than 2400 scam pages have been discovered targeting Arabic-speaking job seekers in 13 countries from January 2022 to January 2023. The findings were made public by Group-IB security researchers in an advisory published earlier today. In it, risk protection analysts Sharef Hlal and Olga Ulchenko said that firms based in Egypt (48%), Saudi Arabia
by Paul Ducklin Even if you’ve never used one, you probably know what a VCR is (or was). Short for video cassette recorder, it was how we recorded and watched back videos at home in the days when digital video stored on hard disks was the absurdly expensive privilege of huge companies, typically TV stations.
Twitter’s ditching of free text-message authentication doesn’t mean that you should forgo using 2FA. Instead, switch to another – and, indeed, better – 2FA option. Starting today, Twitter is disabling SMS-based two-factor authentication (2FA) for all but paying users following a decision that, not unlike other recent moves by the social media giant, has been
Mar 21, 2023Ravie LakshmananCyber War / Cyber Threat Amid the ongoing war between Russia and Ukraine, government, agriculture, and transportation organizations located in Donetsk, Lugansk, and Crimea have been attacked as part of an active campaign that drops a previously unseen, modular framework dubbed CommonMagic. “Although the initial vector of compromise is unclear, the details
Twenty different spam campaigns relying on the Mispadu banking Trojan were discovered targeting victims in Chile, Mexico, Peru and Portugal. The findings, which show 90,518 credentials stolen from a total of 17,595 unique websites, come from the Ocelot Team of Latin American cybersecurity firm Metabase Q. These included a number of government websites: 105 in
by Paul Ducklin There are plenty of military puns in operating system history. Unix famously has a whole raft of personnel known as Major Number, who organise the batallions of devices such as disk drives, keyboards and webcams in your system. Microsoft once struggled with the apparently incompetent General Failure, who was regularly spotted trying
Mar 20, 2023Ravie LakshmananCyber Threat / Malware A new piece of malware dubbed dotRunpeX is being used to distribute numerous known malware families such as Agent Tesla, Ave Maria, BitRAT, FormBook, LokiBot, NetWire, Raccoon Stealer, RedLine Stealer, Remcos, Rhadamanthys, and Vidar. “DotRunpeX is a new injector written in .NET using the Process Hollowing technique and
The Russia-aligned advanced persistent threat (APT) known as Winter Vivern has been observed conducting espionage campaigns targeting government organizations and a private telecommunication organization. Security researchers at SentinelOne shared details about the new campaign in an advisory published on Thursday. The APT activity was first identified by DomainTools in early 2021 and then further described
Mar 18, 2023Ravie LakshmananCyber Crime / Data Breach U.S. law enforcement authorities have arrested a New York man in connection with running the infamous BreachForums hacking forum under the online alias “Pompompurin.” The development, first reported by Bloomberg Law, comes after News 12 Westchester, earlier this week, said that federal investigators “spent hours inside and
The Project Zero team at Google published a new advisory on Thursday, confirming it reported 18 zero-day vulnerabilities in Exynos Modems made by Samsung between late 2022 and early 2023. Written by Project Zero head, Tim Willis, the blog post states that four of the vulnerabilities (CVE-2023-24033 and three others that have yet to be
by Paul Ducklin Google has just revealed a fourfecta of critical zero-day bugs affecting a wide range of Android phones, including some of its own Pixel models. These bugs are a bit different from your usual Android vulnerabilities, which typically affect the Android operating system (which is Linux-based) or the applications that come along with
Scammers are looking to cash in on the chaos that has set in following the startling meltdowns of Silicon Valley Bank and Signature Bank and the crisis at Credit Suisse When mayhem, panic and chaos set in – as has been the case following the meltdowns of Silicon Valley Bank (SVB) and Signature Bank and
Mar 18, 2023Ravie LakshmananNetwork Security / Cyber Espionage The zero-day exploitation of a now-patched medium-severity security flaw in the Fortinet FortiOS operating system has been linked to a suspected Chinese hacking group. Threat intelligence firm Mandiant, which made the attribution, said the activity cluster is part of a broader campaign designed to deploy backdoors onto
Dozens of websites set up to deliver trojanized versions of WhatsApp and Telegram apps have been spotted targeting Android and Windows users. As discovered by security researchers at ESET, most of these apps rely on clipper malware designed to steal or modify the contents of the Android clipboard. Read more on clipper malware here: Shein
by Paul Ducklin THE PRICE OF FAST FASHION Lucky Thirteen! The price of fast fashion. Firefox fixes. Feature creep fail curtailed in Patch Tuesday. No audio player below? Listen directly on Soundcloud. With Paul Ducklin and Chester Wisniewski. Intro and outro music by Edith Mudge. You can listen to us on Soundcloud, Apple Podcasts, Google
How cybercriminals can exploit Silicon Valley Bank’s downfall for their own ends – and at your expense Big news events and major crises usually trigger an avalanche of follow-on phishing attempts. The COVID-19 pandemic and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine are perhaps the most obvious examples, but the most recent one is the collapse of Silicon
Mar 17, 2023The Hacker NewsZero Trust / Access Control Think of the typical portrayal of a cyberattack. Bad guy pounding furiously on a keyboard, his eyes peeking out from under a dark hoodie. At long last, his efforts pay off and he hits the right combination of keys. “I’m in!” he shouts in triumph. Clearly,
The US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) has disclosed information regarding a .NET deserialization vulnerability (CVE-2019-18935) in the Progress Telerik user interface (UI) for ASP.NET AJAX. CISA described the findings in an advisory on Wednesday, saying multiple cyber-threat actors were able to exploit the flaw, which also affected the Microsoft Internet Information Services (IIS) web server
by Paul Ducklin Heard of cricket (the sport, not the insect)? It’s much like baseball, except that batters can hit the ball wherever they like, including backwards or sideways; bowlers can hit the batter with the ball on purpose (within certain safety limits, of course – it just wouldn’t be cricket otherwise) without kicking off
ESET researchers analyzed Android and Windows clippers that can tamper with instant messages and use OCR to steal cryptocurrency funds ESET researchers have discovered dozens of copycat Telegram and WhatsApp websites targeting mainly Android and Windows users with trojanized versions of these instant messaging apps. Most of the malicious apps we identified are clippers –
Threat activity clusters affiliated with the Chinese and Russian cybercriminal ecosystems have been observed using a new piece of malware that’s designed to load Cobalt Strike onto infected machines. Dubbed SILKLOADER by Finnish cybersecurity company WithSecure, the malware leverages DLL side-loading techniques to deliver commercial adversary simulation software. The development comes as improved detection capabilities
A new malware campaign targeting an East Asian company that develops data-loss prevention (DLP) software for government and military entities has been attributed to the advanced persistent threat (APT) group known as Tick. According to an advisory published by ESET on Tuesday, the threat actor breached the DLP company’s internal update servers to deliver malware
by Paul Ducklin Thanks to the precise four-week length of February this year, last month’s coincidence of Firefox and Microsoft updates has happened once again. Last month, Microsoft dealt with three zero-days, by which we mean security holes that cybercriminals found first, and figured out how to abuse in real-life attacks before any patches were
ESET Research uncovered a campaign by APT group Tick against a data-loss prevention company in East Asia and found a previously unreported tool used by the group ESET researchers discovered a campaign that we attribute with high confidence to the APT group Tick. The incident took place in the network of an East Asian company
Mar 15, 2023Ravie LakshmananCyber Espionage / Data Security A previously undocumented threat actor dubbed YoroTrooper has been targeting government, energy, and international organizations across Europe as part of a cyber espionage campaign that has been active since at least June 2022. “Information stolen from successful compromises include credentials from multiple applications, browser histories and cookies,
A previously unknown threat actor has been observed conducting espionage campaigns against CIS (Commonwealth of Independent States) entities. Dubbed YoroTrooper by the Cisco Talos team, the threat actors mainly targeted government and energy organizations across Azerbaijan, Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan. “We also observed YoroTrooper compromise accounts from at least two international organizations: a critical European Union