Security News
Elite hackers associated with Russia's military intelligence service have been linked to large-volume phishing campaigns aimed at hundreds of users in Ukraine to extract intelligence and influence public discourse related to the war. The latest intrusion set, starting in early February 2023, involved the use of reflected cross-site scripting attacks in various Ukrainian government websites to redirect users to phishing domains and capture their credentials.
The cyber espionage actor tracked as Blind Eagle has been linked to a new multi-stage attack chain that leads to the deployment of the NjRAT remote access trojan on compromised systems. "The group is known for using a variety of sophisticated attack techniques, including custom malware, social engineering tactics, and spear-phishing attacks," ThreatMon said in a Tuesday report.
Google on Tuesday rolled out emergency fixes to address another actively exploited high-severity zero-day flaw in its Chrome web browser. The flaw, tracked as CVE-2023-2136, is described as a case of integer overflow in Skia, an open source 2D graphics library.
March 2023 was the most prolific month recorded by cybersecurity analysts in recent years, measuring 459 attacks, an increase of 91% from the previous month and 62% compared to March 2022. According to NCC Group, which compiled a report based on statistics derived from its observations, the reason last month broke all ransomware attack records was CVE-2023-0669.
Experts say the attacks demonstrate the risk that fairly unsophisticated attacks pose even to well-defended enterprises and that other countries should take notice and prepare. Starting before the annual OpIsrael hacktivist assault on Israeli enterprises from April 6 to 9, Israel experienced recent attacks by Russian entities like Killnet and Anonymous Sudan, a cybersecurity bugbear for Israel this year.
Active Directory is at the center of many attacks as it is still the predominant source of identity and access management in the enterprise. Hackers commonly target Active Directory with various attack techniques spanning many attack vectors.
The Chinese state-sponsored hacking group APT41 was found abusing the GC2 red teaming tool in data theft attacks against a Taiwanese media and an Italian job search company. In Google's April 2023 Threat Horizons Report, released last Friday, security researchers in its Threat Analysis Group revealed that APT41 was abusing the GC2 red teaming tool in attacks.
A new strain of malware developed by threat actors likely affiliated with the FIN7 cybercrime group has been put to use by the members of the now-defunct Conti ransomware gang, indicating collaboration between the two crews. The latest intrusion wave, spotted by IBM Security X-Force two months ago, involves the use of Dave Loader, a crypter previously attributed to the Conti group, to deploy the Domino backdoor.
QBot malware is now distributed in phishing campaigns utilizing PDFs and Windows Script Files to infect Windows devices. Qbot is a former banking trojan that evolved into malware that provides initial access to corporate networks for other threat actors.
Across all BEC attacks seen over the past year, 57% relied on language as the main attack vector to get them in front of unsuspecting employees, according to Armorblox. Language remains the main attack vector in BEC attacks.