Norwegian police agency Økokrim has announced the seizure of 60 million NOK (about $5.84 million) worth of cryptocurrency stolen by the Lazarus Group in March 2022 following the Axie Infinity Ronin Bridge hack. “This case shows that we also have a great capacity to follow the money on the blockchain, even if the criminals use
Month: February 2023
ESET researchers have identified a campaign using trojanized installers to deliver the FatalRAT malware, distributed via malicious websites linked in ads that appear in Google search results ESET researchers identified a malware campaign that targets Chinese-speaking people in Southeast and East Asia by buying misleading advertisements to appear in Google search results that lead to
In 2022, Russia-backed cyber-attacks targeting Ukraine rose 250% compared to 2020 and those targeting NATO countries, 300%. This staggering surge is one of the findings from Google Threat Analysis Group (TAG) in a February 16 report, Fog of War: How the Ukraine Conflict Transformed the Cyber Threat Landscape, published in collaboration with Google Trust &
Feb 19, 2023Ravie LakshmananNetwork Security / Firewall Fortinet has released security updates to address 40 vulnerabilities in its software lineup, including FortiWeb, FortiOS, FortiNAC, and FortiProxy, among others. Two of the 40 flaws are rated Critical, 15 are rated High, 22 are rated Medium, and one is rated Low in severity. Top of the list
Threat actors used search engine ads to impersonate makers of popular software and direct internet users to malicious websites This week, the ESET research team has published a report describing a malware campaign that took aim at Chinese-speaking people in Southeast and East Asia. The campaign involved malicious advertisements that appeared in Google search and
Several Chinese state-sponsored threat groups have been observed targeting businesses and governments in the European Union. The claims come from a joint publication by the EU Agency for Cybersecurity (ENISA) and the Computer Emergency Response Team for the EU institutions, bodies and agencies (CERT-EU). Published on Wednesday, the document directly mentions particular advanced persistent threats (APTs): APT27,
Feb 18, 2023Ravie LakshmananAuthentication / Online Security Twitter has announced that it’s limiting the use of SMS-based two-factor authentication (2FA) to its Blue subscribers. “While historically a popular form of 2FA, unfortunately we have seen phone-number based 2FA be used – and abused – by bad actors,” the company said. “We will no longer allow
No longer relegated to a side-show, tech is embedded into virtually every new piece of gear entering the battlefield As military and tech gather to address the frosty world defense conditions and what the intersection of technology’s role is with attendees at AFCEA West, it’s clear that the global warfighting world has changed. No longer
A new malicious actor dubbed “WIP26” by SentinelOne has been observed targeting telecommunication providers in the Middle East. Describing the threat in a Thursday advisory, the security researchers said the team has been monitoring WIP26 with colleagues from QGroup GmbH. “WIP26 is characterized by the abuse of public Cloud infrastructure – Microsoft 365 Mail, Microsoft
Feb 17, 2023Ravie LakshmananMobile Security / Cyber Threat Suspected North Korean nation-state actors targeted a journalist in South Korea with a malware-laced Android app as part of a social engineering campaign. The findings come from South Korea-based non-profit Interlab, which coined the new malware RambleOn. The malicious functionalities include the “ability to read and leak
Don’t be their next victim – here’s a handy round-up of some the most common signs that should set your alarm bells ringing We all spend so much of our time online these days. It’s estimated that the average adult spends the best part of seven hours per day glued to their screens. When we’re
Two business email compromise (BEC) groups have been observed using executive impersonation to conduct attacks on companies worldwide. The findings come from security researchers at Abnormal Security, who have dubbed the threat actors “Midnight Hedgehog,” specializing in payment fraud, and “Mandarin Capybara,” focused on executing payroll diversion attacks. “Combined, they have launched BEC campaigns in
by Paul Ducklin CAN WE STOP WITH THE “SOPHISTICATED” ALREADY? The birth of ENIAC. A “sophisticated attack” (someone got phished). A cryptographic hack enabled by a security warning. Valentine’s Day Patch Tuesday. Apple closes spyware-sized 0-day hole. Click-and-drag on the soundwaves below to skip to any point. You can also listen directly on Soundcloud. With
Feb 16, 2023Ravie LakshmananAd Fraud / Malware Chinese-speaking individuals in Southeast and East Asia are the targets of a new rogue Google Ads campaign that delivers remote access trojans such as FatalRAT to compromised machines. The attacks involve purchasing ad slots to appear in Google search results that direct users searching for popular applications to
Spoiler alert: it turned me down. But that’s far from the only thing I learned while playing around with the bot that the world has fallen in love with so badly. When it was unleashed into an astonished world on November 30th 2022, ChatGPT became the fastest-growing web app ever, reaching a million users in the
The LockBit ransomware group has published a log of conversations between its operators and a Royal Mail negotiator showing the group demanded £65.7m ($79.85m) to safely return the company’s stolen data following a January cyber-attack. Hours after the incident, it was reported that the LockBit gang claimed responsibility for the attack, which disrupted Royal Mail
by Paul Ducklin Deciphering Microsoft’s official Update Guide web pages is not for the faint-hearted. Most of the information you need, if not everything you’d really like to know, is there, but there’s such a dizzing number of ways to view it, and so many generated-on-the-fly pages are needed to display it, that it can
Feb 15, 2023Ravie LakshmananThreat Intelligence / Malware The North Korea-linked threat actor tracked as APT37 has been linked to a piece of new malware dubbed M2RAT in attacks targeting its southern counterpart, suggesting continued evolution of the group’s features and tactics. APT37, also tracked under the monikers Reaper, RedEyes, Ricochet Chollima, and ScarCruft, is linked
Small and medium-sized businesses have good reason to be concerned about the loss of data and financial impacts While tech advancements have enabled small and medium businesses (SMBs) to grow their business and allowed them to evolve their operational models, cybersecurity risks and threats can cancel any progress that has been made so far. Underlying
Check Point has released its Global Threat Index report for January 2023, which shows AgentTesla returning to the third spot (from the ninth in December 2022) in the January 2023 Most Wanted Malware list. The Lokibot infostealer has also grown substantially, from not being in the top 10 list to second place. Further, the infostealer Vidar has
by Paul Ducklin Apple has just released updates for all supported Macs, and for any mobile devices running the very latest versions of their respective operating systems. In version number terms: iPhones and iPads on version 16 go to iOS 16.3.1 and iPadOS 16.3.1 respectively (see HT213635). Apple Watches on version 9 go to watchOS
Feb 14, 2023Ravie LakshmananAd Fraud / Online Security The threat actors behind the black hat redirect malware campaign have scaled up their campaign to use more than 70 bogus domains mimicking URL shorteners and infected over 10,800 websites. “The main objective is still ad fraud by artificially increasing traffic to pages which contain the AdSense
Several US government agencies and non-profits have warned individuals against romance scams connected with Valentine’s Day. The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) has issued two separate statements over the last week to warn citizens in Texas and New Mexico against these crime attempts. According to the Bureau’s Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3), romance scams have
by Paul Ducklin Last week, we wrote about a bunch of memory management bugs that were fixed in the latest security update of the popular OpenSSL encryption library. Along with those memory bugs, we also reported on a bug dubbed CVE-2022-4304: Timing Oracle in RSA Decryption. In this bug, firing the same encrypted message over
Feb 13, 2023Ravie LakshmananGame Hacking / Cyber Threat An unknown threat actor created malicious game modes for the Dota 2 multiplayer online battle arena (MOBA) video game that could have been exploited to establish backdoor access to players’ systems. The modes exploited a high-severity flaw in the V8 JavaScript engine tracked as CVE-2021-38003 (CVSS score:
A package called “aabquerys” has been spotted on the open-source JavaScript npm repository using typosquatting techniques to enable the download of malicious components. The findings come from security researchers at ReversingLabs, who have said aabquerys was able to download second- and third-stage malware payloads to infected systems. “The package name, aabquerys, is also similar to the name
Suspected Russian threat actors have been targeting Eastern European users in the crypto industry with fake job opportunities as bait to install information-stealing malware on compromised hosts. The attackers “use several highly obfuscated and under-development custom loaders in order to infect those involved in the cryptocurrency industry with Enigma stealer,” Trend Micro researchers Aliakbar Zahravi
What is behind the drop in ransomware and what should still be done for containing the ransomware scourge? Ransomware detections fell by 20% between 2021 and 2022, according to ESET’s latest Threat Report. What is behind the drop, why is ransomware still a huge problem, and what has yet to be done before the ransomware
Reddit suffered a cyber-attack after its internal systems were breached on February 05 due to a “sophisticated” and “highly-targeted” phishing attack that led to employee credential compromise. “The attacker sent out plausible-sounding prompts pointing employees to a website that cloned the behavior of our intranet gateway in an attempt to steal credentials and second-factor tokens,”
by Paul Ducklin Popular social media site Reddit – “orange Usenet with ads”, as we’ve somewhat ungraciously heard it described – is the latest well-known web property to suffer a data breach in which its own source code was stolen. In recent weeks, LastPass and GitHub have confessed to similar experiences, with cyercriminals apparently breaking