Security 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.
A China-aligned advanced persistent threat actor known as TA413 weaponized recently disclosed flaws in Sophos Firewall and Microsoft Office to deploy a never-before-seen backdoor called LOWZERO as part of an espionage campaign aimed at Tibetan entities. Targets primarily consisted of organizations associated with the Tibetan community, including enterprises associated with the Tibetan government-in-exile.
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.
"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 state-sponsored advanced persistent threat actor newly christened APT42 has been attributed to over 30 confirmed espionage attacks against individuals and organizations of strategic interest to the Iranian government at least since 2015. APT42 has exhibited a propensity to strike various industries such as non-profits, education, governments, healthcare, legal, manufacturing, media, and pharmaceuticals spanning at least 14 countries, including in Australia, Europe, the Middle East, and the U.S. Intrusions aimed at the pharmaceutical sector are also notable for the fact that they commenced at the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic in March 2020, indicating the threat actor's ability to swiftly modify its campaigns in order to meet its operational priorities.
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.
A suspected Iranian threat activity cluster has been linked to attacks aimed at Israeli shipping, government, energy, and healthcare organizations as part of an espionage-focused campaign that commenced in late 2020. Cybersecurity firm Mandiant is tracking the group under its uncategorized moniker UNC3890, which is believed to conduct operations that align with Iranian interests.