Security News
Rockwell Automation has fixed two vulnerabilities in the communication modules of its ControlLogix industrial programmable logic controllers, ahead of expected in-the-wild exploitation. "An unreleased exploit capability leveraging these vulnerabilities is associated with an unnamed APT group," industrial cybersecurity company Dragos has stated on Wednesday.
By analyzing a year's worth of APT campaign data they collected from the 200,000+ SMBs that have their security solution deployed, they pinpointed three main trends of attacks targeting SMBs in the space of a year. SMBs often lack adequate cybersecurity measures, making them vulnerable to all kinds of cyber threats.
The threat actor known as Dark Pink has been linked to five new attacks aimed at various entities in Belgium, Brunei, Indonesia, Thailand, and Vietnam between February 2022 and April 2023. Dark Pink, also called Saaiwc Group, is an advanced persistent threat actor believed to be of Asia-Pacific origin, with attacks targeting entities primarily located in East Asia and, to a lesser extent, in Europe.
A previously undetected advanced persistent threat actor dubbed Red Stinger has been linked to attacks targeting Eastern Europe since 2020. Red Stinger overlaps with a threat cluster Kaspersky revealed under the name Bad Magic last month as having targeted government, agriculture, and transportation organizations located in Donetsk, Lugansk, and Crimea last year.
An advanced persistent threat actor known as Dragon Breath has been observed adding new layers of complexity to its attacks by adopting a novel DLL side-loading mechanism. "The attack is based on a classic side-loading attack, consisting of a clean application, a malicious loader, and an encrypted payload, with various modifications made to these components over time," Sophos researcher Gabor Szappanos said.
The advanced persistent threat 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.
An unknown Chinese state-sponsored hacking group has been linked to a novel piece of malware aimed at Linux servers. "The rootkit has a limited set of features, mainly installing a hook designed for hiding itself."
The advanced persistent threat known as Winter Vivern has been linked to campaigns targeting government officials in India, Lithuania, Slovakia, and the Vatican since 2021. The activity targeted Polish government agencies, the Ukraine Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the Italy Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and individuals within the Indian government, SentinelOne said in a report shared with The Hacker News.
Sentinel Labs has previously seen spreadsheet files with malicious macros that launch PowerShell being dropped on cloned sites used by the APT. Deploying fake virus scanners. One example of Winter Vivern's resourcefulness in the Sentinel Labs report is the use of Windows batch files to impersonate antivirus scanners while, in reality, downloading malicious payloads.
A cyberespionage actor known as Tick has been attributed with high confidence to a compromise of an East Asian data-loss prevention company that caters to government and military entities. "The attackers compromised the DLP company's internal update servers to deliver malware inside the software developer's network, and trojanized installers of legitimate tools used by the company, which eventually resulted in the execution of malware on the computers of the company's customers," ESET researcher Facundo Muñoz said.