Security News
Groups tied to the Russian intelligence services will also continue to target geographic neighbors with disinformation campaigns, intelligence gathering, and possibly low-level disruptive attacks. Traditional espionage targets will continue to be a focus; for example, we saw evidence in August 2022 of Russian intelligence services using spear phishing emails to target staff at the Argonne and Brookhaven national laboratories in the US, which conduct cutting edge energy research.
An Iranian cyber espionage gang with ties to the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps has learned new methods and phishing techniques, and aimed them at a wider set of targets - including politicians, government officials, critical infrastructure and medical researchers - according to email security vendor Proofpoint. Over the past two years, the threat actor group that Proofpoint's researchers track as TA453 has branched out from its usual victims - academics, researchers, diplomats, dissidents, journalists and human rights workers - and adopted new means of attack.
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.
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 recently discovered hacking group known for targeting employees dealing with corporate transactions has been linked to a new backdoor called Danfuan. This hitherto undocumented malware is delivered via another dropper called Geppei, researchers from Symantec, by Broadcom Software, said in a report shared with The Hacker News.
An advanced persistent threat actor known as Budworm targeted a U.S.-based entity for the first time in more than six years, according to latest research. The attack was aimed at an unnamed U.S. state legislature, the Symantec Threat Hunter team, part of Broadcom Software, said in a report shared with The Hacker News.
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.
An ex-NSA employee has been charged with trying to sell classified data to the Russians. It's a weird story, and the FBI affidavit raises more questions than it answers.
Emerging covert malware families that target VMware environments could allow criminals to gain persistent administrative access to the hypervisor, transfer files, and execute arbitrary commands between virtual machines, according to VMware and Mandiant, which discovered the software nasty earlier this year. Prior to this discovery, both VMware and Mandiant say they hadn't seen persistent malware with these capabilities deployed on VMware hypervisors or guest systems in the wild.