Security News
A sophisticated advanced persistent threat group believed to be operating out of China has been stealthily targeting Southeast Asian governments over the past three years, Bitdefender reports. Believed to be state-sponsored, the group was observed using numerous malware families, including the Chinoxy backdoor, PCShare RAT, and the FunnyDream backdoor.
Cybersecurity researchers today unveiled a complex and targeted espionage attack on potential government sector victims in South East Asia that they believe was carried out by a sophisticated Chinese APT group at least since 2018. "The attack has a complex and complete arsenal of droppers, backdoors and other tools involving Chinoxy backdoor, PcShare RAT and FunnyDream backdoor binaries, with forensic artefacts pointing towards a sophisticated Chinese actor," Bitdefender said in a new analysis shared with The Hacker News.
Mozilla and Google have already patched the critical Firefox and Chrome vulnerabilities exploited recently by white hat hackers at a competition in China. The flaw was fixed with the release of Firefox 82.0.3, Firefox ESR 78.4.1 and Thunderbird 78.4.2 just a couple of days after it was disclosed at the 2020 Tianfu Cup International PWN Contest, which took place over the past weekend in China.
Muhstik is a botnet that leverages known web application exploits to compromise IoT devices, such as routers, to mine cryptocurrency. Although Muhstik botnet has been around for at least 2018, in December 2019, Palo Alto Networks had identified a new variant of the botnet attacking and taking over Tomato routers.
The Czech Republic's intelligence agency said Tuesday Russian and Chinese spies posed an imminent threat to the EU member's security and other key interests last year. All Russian intelligence services were active on Czech territory in 2019.
Bug bounty hunters have earned a total of more than $1.2 million over the weekend at the 2020 Tianfu Cup International PWN Contest, a major hacking competition that takes place every year in China. The winner was a team representing Chinese cybersecurity firm Qihoo 360, which earned over $740,000.
In 1965, Gordon Moore published a short informal paper, Cramming more components onto integrated circuits. In it, he noted [PDF] that in three years, the optimal cost per component on a chip had dropped by a factor of 10, while the optimal number had increased by the same factor, from 10 to 100.
Squid geopolitics. As usual, you can also use this squid post to talk about the security stories in the news that I haven’t covered. Read my blog posting guidelines here.
A Chinese threat actor is leveraging DLL side-loading for the execution of malicious code in attacks targeting organizations in Myanmar, Sophos security researchers reveal. DLL side-loading is a technique that uses malicious DLLs that spoof legitimate ones, and which relies on legitimate Windows applications to load and execute the code.
The NSA released an advisory listing the top twenty-five known vulnerabilities currently being exploited by Chinese nation-state attackers. This advisory provides Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures known to be recently leveraged, or scanned-for, by Chinese state-sponsored cyber actors to enable successful hacking operations against a multitude of victim networks.