Security News
A threat actor with a suspected China nexus has been linked to a set of espionage attacks in the Philippines that primarily relies on USB devices as an initial infection vector. The reliance on infected USB drives to propagate the malware is unusual if not new.
The cyber espionage group known as Bahamut has been attributed as behind a highly targeted campaign that infects users of Android devices with malicious apps designed to extract sensitive information. The activity, which has been active since January 2022, entails distributing rogue VPN apps through a fake SecureVPN website set up for this purpose, Slovak cybersecurity firm ESET said in a new report shared with The Hacker News.
A hacking group named 'DiceyF' has been observed deploying a malicious attack framework against online casinos based in Southeast Asia since at least November 2021. According to a new report by Kaspersky, the DiceyF APT group does not appear to be targeting financial gains from the casinos but instead conducting stealthy cyberespionage and intellectual property theft.
Telecommunications and IT service providers in the Middle East and Asia are being targeted by a previously undocumented Chinese-speaking threat group dubbed WIP19. "Almost all operations performed by the threat actor were completed in a 'hands-on keyboard' fashion, during an interactive session with compromised machines," SentinelOne researchers Joey Chen and Amitai Ben Shushan Ehrlich said in a report this week.
A new piece of research has detailed the increasingly sophisticated nature of the malware toolset employed by an advanced persistent threat group named Earth Aughisky. "Over the last decade, the group has continued to make adjustments in the tools and malware deployments on specific targets located in Taiwan and, more recently, Japan," Trend Micro disclosed in a technical profile last week.
A threat actor tracked under the moniker Webworm has been linked to bespoke Windows-based remote access trojans, some of which are said to be in pre-deployment or testing phases. "The group has developed customized versions of three older remote access trojans, including Trochilus RAT, Gh0st RAT, and 9002 RAT," the Symantec Threat Hunter team, part of Broadcom Software, said in a report shared with The Hacker News.
Lazarus, also known as Hidden Cobra or Zinc, is a known nation-state cyberespionage threat actor originating from North Korea, according to the U.S. government. Lazarus could use only VSingle, VSingle and MagicRAT, or a new malware dubbed YamaBot.
"A notable feature of these attacks is that the attackers leveraged a wide range of legitimate software packages in order to load their malware payloads using a technique known as DLL side-loading," the Symantec Threat Hunter team, part of Broadcom Software, said in a report shared with The Hacker News. The attacks entail the use of old and outdated versions of security solutions, graphics software, and web browsers that are bound to lack mitigations for DLL side-loading, using them as a conduit to load arbitrary shellcode designed to execute additional payloads.
A newly discovered cyber-espionage group has been hacking governments and high-profile companies in Asia since at least 2020 using a combination of custom and existing malicious tools. The threat group, tracked as Worok by ESET security researchers who first spotted it, has also attacked targets from Africa and the Middle East.
A months-long cyber espionage campaign undertaken by a Chinese nation-state group targeted several entities with reconnaissance malware so as to glean information about its victims and meet its strategic goals. "The targets of this recent campaign spanned Australia, Malaysia, and Europe, as well as entities that operate in the South China Sea," enterprise security firm Proofpoint said in a published in partnership with PwC. Targets encompass local and federal Australian Governmental agencies, Australian news media companies, and global heavy industry manufacturers which conduct maintenance of fleets of wind turbines in the South China Sea.