Security News

Fancy Bear, the Kremlin's cyber-spy crew, has been exploiting two previously patched bugs for large-scale phishing campaigns against high-value targets - like government, defense, and aerospace agencies in the US and Europe - since March, according to Microsoft. The US and UK governments have linked this state-sponsored gang to Russia's military intelligence agency, the GRU. Its latest phishing expeditions look to exploit CVE-2023-23397, a Microsoft Outlook elevation of privilege flaw, and CVE-2023-38831, a WinRAR remote code execution flaw that allows arbitrary code execution.

Amazon Web Services has launched an independent cloud for Europe designed for public sector customers and companies operating in highly regulated industries within the European Union. The AWS Sovereign Cloud will operate both "Physically and logically" separate from AWS's existing cloud regions and has been engineered specifically to meet the data residency and regulatory requirements of European customers.

The Winter Vivern cyber spy group is exploiting an XSS zero-day vulnerability in attacks on European governments. Researchers at ESET, who discovered the activity, didn't name the specific government entities it targeted but given Winter Vivern's nexus to Russia and Belarus, they are likely to be adversaries of those countries.

Their phishing messages impersonated the Outlook Team and tried to trick potential victims into opening malicious emails, automatically triggering a first-stage payload that exploited the Roundcube email server vulnerability. "The final JavaScript payload [.] is able to list folders and emails in the current Roundcube account, and to exfiltrate email messages to the C&C server."

An updated version of a sophisticated backdoor framework called MATA has been used in attacks aimed at over a dozen Eastern European companies in the oil and gas sector and defense industry as...

Various European customers of different banks are being targeted by an Android banking trojan called SpyNote as part of an aggressive campaign detected in June and July 2023. What makes the malware strain notable is its dual functions as spyware and perform bank fraud.

The Russian nation-state actor known as BlueBravo has been observed targeting diplomatic entities throughout Eastern Europe with the goal of delivering a new backdoor called GraphicalProton, exemplifying the continuous evolution of the threat. The phishing campaign is characterized by the use of legitimate internet services for command-and-control obfuscation, Recorded Future said in a new report published Thursday.

The U.S. government has banned European commercial spyware manufacturers Intellexa and Cytrox, citing risks to U.S. national security and foreign policy interests. Google's Threat Analysis Group linked the Cytrox in May 2022 with multiple zero-day vulnerabilities used to deploy Predator spyware on Android devices.

Microsoft on Tuesday revealed that it repelled a cyber attack staged by a Chinese nation-state actor targeting two dozen organizations, some of which include government agencies, in a cyber espionage campaign designed to acquire confidential data. "They focus on espionage, data theft, and credential access," Microsoft said.

Today, the European Commission adopted its adequacy decision for the EU-U.S. Data Privacy Framework. The EU-U.S. Data Privacy Framework introduces new binding safeguards to address all the concerns raised by the European Court of Justice, including limiting access to EU data by US intelligence services to what is necessary and proportionate, and establishing a Data Protection Review Court, to which EU individuals will have access.