Security News
A now-patched critical security flaw affecting Atlassian Confluence Server that came to light a few months ago is being actively exploited for illicit cryptocurrency mining on unpatched installations. In one of the infection chains observed by the cybersecurity company, the flaw was leveraged to download and run a shell script on the victim's machine, which, in turn, fetched a second shell script.
AT&T cybersecurity researchers have discovered a sneaky piece of malware targeting Linux endpoints and IoT devices in the hopes of gaining persistent access and turning victims into crypto-mining drones. Popular adventure clothing brand The North Face and shoe company Vans, subsidiaries of the same parent company, have admitted to a credential stuffing attack that netted its attacker 194,905 user's worth of PII. Most every piece of PII stored on the two websites were compromised, with the exception of credit card numbers, which the brands' parent company VF Outdoors said it doesn't store on its sites.
As many as three disparate but related campaigns between March and Jun 2022 have been found to deliver a variety of malware, including ModernLoader, RedLine Stealer, and cryptocurrency miners onto compromised systems. "The actors use PowerShell,.NET assemblies, and HTA and VBS files to spread across a targeted network, eventually dropping other pieces of malware, such as the SystemBC trojan and DCRat, to enable various stages of their operations," Cisco Talos researcher Vanja Svajcer said in a report shared with The Hacker News.
The campaign entails serving malware through free software hosted on popular sites such as Softpedia and Uptodown. In an interesting tactic, the malware puts off its execution for weeks and separates its malicious activity from the downloaded fake software to avoid detection.
Threat actors have begun to use the Tox peer-to-peer instant messaging service as a command-and-control method, marking a shift from its earlier role as a contact method for ransomware negotiations. The findings from Uptycs, which analyzed an Executable and Linkable Format artifact that functions as a bot and can run scripts on the compromised host using the Tox protocol.
More than 200 malicious packages have been discovered infiltrating the PyPI and npm open source registries this week. These packages are largely typosquats of widely used libraries and each one of them downloads a Bash script on Linux systems that run cryptominers.
A now-removed rogue package pushed to the official third-party software repository for Python has been found to deploy cryptominers on Linux systems. The module, named "Secretslib" and downloaded 93 times prior to its deletion, was released to the Python Package Index on August 6, 2022 and is described as "Secrets matching and verification made easy."
As many as 207 websites have been infected with malicious code designed to launch a cryptocurrency miner by leveraging WebAssembly on the browser. Js code makes use of WebAssembly to run low-level binary code directly on the browser.
A recently patched critical security flaw in Atlassian Confluence Server and Data Center products is being actively weaponized in real-world attacks to drop cryptocurrency miners and ransomware payloads. In at least two of the Windows-related incidents observed by cybersecurity vendor Sophos, adversaries exploited the vulnerability to deliver Cerber ransomware and a crypto miner called z0miner on victim networks.
Cybersecurity researchers have discovered a new Android banking malware named MaliBot, which poses as a cryptocurrency mining app or the Chrome web browser to target users in Italy and Spain. MaliBot focuses on stealing financial information such as e-banking service credentials, crypto wallet passwords, and personal details, while it's also capable of snatching two-factor authentication codes from notifications.