Security News
The United States on Friday announced it has imposed export controls on 77 Chinese companies including the country's biggest chipmaker, SMIC, restricting its access to US technology over its alleged ties to China's military. The announcement in the final weeks of President Donald Trump's term comes after relations between Washington and Beijing soured under his administration, which saw the US start a trade war with China and expand its list of sanctioned entities to a few hundred Chinese companies and subsidiaries.
While it's a thrilling development, the inevitable rise of quantum computing means security teams are one step closer to facing a threat more formidable than anything before. The team joins Google, which claimed it achieved quantum supremacy in Oct. 2019 using a "Supercold, superconducting metal," according to WIRED. IBM has also entered the quantum computing fray, while leveling criticism against Google's claims of supremacy.
A Chinese threat actor tracked as Mustang Panda was observed using an updated arsenal of tools in recent attacks, Proofpoint's security researchers revealed on Monday. Also referred to as TA416 and RedDelta, the threat group is known for the targeting of entities connected to the diplomatic relations between the Vatican and the Chinese Communist Party, along with entities in Myanmar, and the new campaign appears to be a continuation of that activity.
VMware on Thursday announced releasing patches for a couple of serious ESXi vulnerabilities that were demonstrated at a recent hacking contest in China. The 360 ESG Vulnerability Research Institute from Chinese cybersecurity company Qihoo 360 earned more than $740,000 of the total, including $180,000 for a VMware ESXi guest to host escape exploit.
VMware has revealed and repaired the flaws in its hypervisor discovered at China's Tianfu Cup white hat hacking competition. The bug needs patching in ESXi from version 6.5, VMware's Fusion and Workstation desktop hypervisors from versions 11 and 15 respectively, plus VMware Cloud Foundation from version 3.
China-linked threat actor APT10 was observed launching a large-scale campaign against Japanese organizations and their subsidiaries. The attacks mainly focused on South and East Asia, with one victim being a Chinese subsidiary of a Japanese organization, an atypical target for a state-sponsored Chinese group.
A Chinese state-sponsored hacking group has been observed while attempting to exploit the Windows Zerologon vulnerability in attacks against Japanese companies and subsidiaries from multiple industry sectors in 17 regions around the globe. APT10 attackers were also observed using Zerologon exploits to steal domain credentials and take full control over the entire domain following successful exploitation of vulnerable devices.
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.