Security News
The advanced persistent threat known as Turla is targeting government organizations using custom malware, including an updated trio of implants that give the group persistence through overlapping backdoor access. Russia-tied Turla is a cyber-espionage group that's been around for more than a decade.
Strider Technologies, a company that provides solutions for combating cyber-espionage, on Tuesday announced that it raised $10 million in Series A funding. Aiming to help organizations mitigate innovation theft and supply-chain vulnerabilities, Strider offers a platform suitable not only for corporations, but also for government agencies and research institutions looking to identify, assess, and remediate state-sponsored economic espionage.
The campaign's starting point is an email with an embedded malicious attachment - either in the form of a ZIP file containing an LNK file or a Microsoft Word document - that triggers an infection chain via a series of steps to download the final-stage payload. Aside from identifying three different infection chains, what's notable is the fact that one of them exploited template injection and Microsoft Equation Editor flaw, a 20-year old memory corruption issue in Microsoft Office, which, when exploited successfully, let attackers execute remote code on a vulnerable machine even without user interaction. What's more, the LNK files have a double extension and come with document icons, thereby tricking an unsuspecting victim into opening the file.
Capping off a busy week of charges and sanctions against Iranian hackers, a new research offers insight into what's a six-year-long ongoing surveillance campaign targeting Iranian expats and dissidents with an intention to pilfer sensitive information. The threat actor, suspected to be of Iranian origin, is said to have orchestrated the campaign with at least two different moving parts - one for Windows and the other for Android - using a wide arsenal of intrusion tools in the form of info stealers and backdoors designed to steal personal documents, passwords, Telegram messages, and two-factor authentication codes from SMS messages.
It's one thing for APT groups to conduct cyber espionage to meet their own financial objectives. "The cybercriminal group infiltrated the company using a tainted and specially crafted plugin for Autodesk 3ds Max," Bitdefender researchers said in a report released today.
It's one thing for APT groups to conduct cyber espionage to meet their own financial objectives. "The cybercriminal group infiltrated the company using a tainted and specially crafted plugin for Autodesk 3ds Max," Bitdefender researchers said in a report released today.
According to a Thursday advisory by the National Security Agency and the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the malware especially represents a threat to national security systems such as the Department of Defense and Defense Industrial Base customers that use Linux systems. "Drovorub is a Linux malware toolset consisting of an implant coupled with a kernel module rootkit, a file transfer and port forwarding tool, and a Command and Control server," according to a 45-page deep-dive analysis of the malware published Thursday [PDF] by the FBI and NSA. "When deployed on a victim machine, the Drovorub implant provides the capability for direct communications with actor controlled C2 infrastructure; file download and upload capabilities; execution of arbitrary commands as 'root'; and port forwarding of network traffic to other hosts on the network."
The China-based APT known as CactusPete has returned with a new campaign aimed at military and financial targets in Eastern Europe, which is a new geography for the group's victimology, according to researchers. CactusPete is a Chinese-speaking APT group that has been publicly known since at least 2013, according to the blog post.
Group-IB security researchers have identified an advanced persistent threat group that has launched at least 26 targeted attacks since 2018. Presumably Russian-speaking, the group targeted victims in Canada, Germany, Norway, Russia, Ukraine, and the United Kingdom.
Recent attacks associated with the threat actor known as StrongPity appear to focus on the Kurdish community in Turkey and Syria, Bitdefender security researchers say. Despite the publishing of several reports detailing its activities, the threat actor remains active and continues to target victims in various regions, including Colombia, India, Canada and Vietnam, Cisco Talos reveals.