Security News
The FBI has issued a warning about fake job ads that recruit workers into forced labor operations in Southeast Asia - some of which enslave visitors and force them to participate in cryptocurrency scams. "Criminal actors assign debts to victims under the guise of travel fees and room and board, and use victims' mounting debt and fear of local law enforcement as additional means to control victims. Trafficked victims are sometimes sold and transferred between compounds, further adding to their debt," said the FBI. Advocacy groups and media report similar tactics, with victims targeted online and promised lucrative jobs abroad with travel fees and other benefits paid.
A cryptocurrency phishing and scam service called 'Inferno Drainer' has reportedly stolen over $5.9 million worth of crypto from 4,888 victims. The malicious websites created with Inferno Drainer target 229 popular brands, including Pepe, Bob, MetaMask, OpenSea, Collab.
A financially motivated threat actor of Indonesian origin has been observed leveraging Amazon Web Services Elastic Compute Cloud instances to carry out illicit crypto mining operations. Cloud security company's Permiso P0 Labs, which first detected the group in November 2021, has assigned it the moniker GUI-vil.
LayerZero Labs has launched a bug bounty on the Immunefi platform that offers a maximum reward of $15 million for critical smart contract and blockchain vulnerabilities, a figure that sets a new record in the crypto space. Bug bounty programs are initiatives launched by businesses and software developers to reward security researchers for identifying and reporting bugs in their platforms.
Poorly managed Microsoft SQL servers are the target of a new campaign that's designed to propagate a category of malware called CLR SqlShell that ultimately facilitates the deployment of cryptocurrency miners and ransomware. "Similar to web shell, which can be installed on web servers, SqlShell is a malware strain that supports various features after being installed on an MS SQL server, such as executing commands from threat actors and carrying out all sorts of malicious behavior," AhnLab Security Emergency response Center said in a report published last week.
A former employee of Ubiquiti has been sentenced to six years in jail after he pleaded guilty to posing as an anonymous hacker and a whistleblower in an attempt to extort almost $2 million worth of cryptocurrency while working at the company. Nickolas Sharp, 37, was arrested in December 2021 for using his insider access as a senior developer to steal confidential data and sending an anonymous email asking the network technology provider to pay 50 bitcoin in exchange for the siphoned information.
Hackers exploited a Level Finance smart contract vulnerability to drain 214,000 LVL tokens from the decentralized exchange and swapped them for 3,345 BNB, worth approximately $1,100,000. While Level Finance said the attack did not affect its liquidity pool and the DAO treasury, and the exploit was isolated from all other contracts, the LVL token lost roughly 50% of its value immediately after the attack was made known.
The FBI and Ukrainian police have seized nine cryptocurrency exchange websites that facilitated money laundering for scammers and cybercriminals, including ransomware actors. The seized sites allowed users to anonymously convert cryptocurrency into harder-to-trace coins to obscure the money trace and help cybercriminals launder their pilfers without being traced by law enforcement.
Threat actors are advertising a new information stealer for the Apple macOS operating system called Atomic macOS Stealer on Telegram for $1,000 per month, joining the likes of MacStealer. "The Atomic macOS Stealer can steal various types of information from the victim's machine, including Keychain passwords, complete system information, files from the desktop and documents folder, and even the macOS password," Cyble researchers said in a technical report.
A new macOS information-stealing malware named 'Atomic' is being sold to cybercriminals via private Telegram channels for a subscription of $1,000 per month. For this hefty price, buyers get a DMG file containing a 64-bit Go-based malware designed to target macOS systems and steal keychain passwords, files from the local filesystem, passwords, cookies, and credit cards stored in browsers.