Security News

A Russian cybercrime gang has lately sent credential-phishing emails to the military of Eastern European countries and a NATO Center of Excellence, according to a Google threat report this week. One of these crews is Coldriver, which the Google team refer to as "a Russian-based threat actor." According to Leonard, Google hasn't seen attackers successfully compromise any Gmail accounts in its phishing campaigns.

A nascent information stealer called Mars has been observed in campaigns that take advantage of cracked versions of the malware to steal information stored in web browsers and cryptocurrency wallets. "Mars Stealer is being distributed via social engineering techniques, malspam campaigns, malicious software cracks, and keygens," Morphisec malware researcher Arnold Osipov said in a report published Tuesday.

The Google Threat Analysis Group says more and more threat actors are now using Russia's war in Ukraine to target Eastern European and NATO countries, including Ukraine, in phishing and malware attacks. The report's highlight are credential phishing attacks coordinated by a Russian-based threat group tracked as COLDRIVER against a NATO Centre of Excellence and Eastern European militaries.

Google has updated its Stable channel for the desktop version of Chrome, to address a zero-day security vulnerability that's being actively exploited in the wild. The bug, tracked as CVE-2022-1096, is a type-confusion issue in the V8 JavaScript engine, which is an open-source engine used by Chrome and Chromium-based web browsers.

Threat actors from North Korea have been exploiting a vulnerability in Google Chrome to target certain users with remote code, particularly news outlets, software vendors and fintechs in the United States. On Feb. 10, Google's TAG team discovered two distinct threat actors using that vulnerability to target U.S.-based organizations spanning news media, IT, cryptocurrency and fintech industries.

Cybercriminals trying to foist the Mars Stealer malware onto users seemingly have a penchant for one particulat tactic: disguising it as legitimate, benign software to trick users into downloading it. In a recent campaign described by Morphisec malware researcher Arnold Osipov, the threat actor distributed the malware via cloned websites offering well-known software such as Apache Open Office.

Google has released Chrome 100 today, March 29th, 2022, to the Stable desktop channel, and it includes a new logo, security improvements, development features, and more. Today, Google promoted Chrome 100 to the Stable channel, Chrome 101 as the new Beta version, and Chrome 102 will be the Canary version.

A newly launched information-stealing malware variant called Mars Stealer is rising in popularity, and threat analysts are now spotting the first notable large-scale campaigns employing it. Mars Stealer emerged as a redesign of the Oski malware that shut down development in 2020, featuring extensive info-stealing capabilities targeting a broad spectrum of apps.

Google Chrome and Microsoft Edge have been updated to patch a security flaw an exploit for which is said to be in the wild. Chromium is at the heart of Google Chrome as well as Microsoft Edge.

Last time we reported on a Chrome zero-day flaw was back in February 2022. Anyway, back in February 2022, none of the bugs listed by Goole got a truly dangerous rating of "Critical", but one of them, dubbed CVE-2022-0609, was nevertheless accompanied by the admittedly rather vague words: "Google is aware of reports that an exploit for CVE-2022-0609 exists in the wild."