Security News

Thai activists involved in the country's pro-democracy protests have had their smartphones infected with the infamous Pegasus government-sponsored spyware. The attacks entailed the use of two zero-click exploits - KISMET and FORCEDENTRY - to compromise the victims' phones and deploy Pegasus, spyware that's capable of intercepting calls and texts as well as amassing other information stored in a phone.

Game publishing giant Bandai Namco has confirmed that they suffered a cyberattack that may have resulted in the theft of customers' personal data. This past Monday, the BlackCat ransomware operation claimed to have breached Bandai Namco and stolen corporate data during the attack.

The $540 million hack of Axie Infinity's Ronin Bridge in late March 2022 was the consequence of one of its former employees getting tricked by a fraudulent job offer on LinkedIn, it has emerged. According to a report from The Block published last week citing two people familiar with the matter, a senior engineer at the company was duped into applying for a job at a non-existent company, causing the individual to download a fake offer document disguised as a PDF. "After what one source described as multiple rounds of interviews, a Sky Mavis engineer was offered a job with an extremely generous compensation package," the Block reported.

The popular protocol for radio controlled aircraft called ExpressLRS can be hacked in only a few steps, according to a bulletin published last week. The vulnerability in the protocol is tied to the fact some of the information sent over via over-the-air packets is link data that a third-party can use to hijack the connection between drone operator and drone.

The US Department of Defense has created a broad but short bug bounty program for vulnerabilities in public-facing systems and applications. The Hack US program kicked off on Independence Day and is scheduled to run though July 11, with reward totals reflected by the severity of the flaws.

The notorious North Korea-backed hacking collective Lazarus Group is suspected to be behind the recent $100 million altcoin theft from Harmony Horizon Bridge, citing similarities to the Ronin bridge attack in March 2022. The finding comes as Harmony confirmed that its Horizon Bridge, a platform that allows users to move cryptocurrency across different blockchains, had been breached last week.

Google's Threat Analysis Group on Thursday disclosed it had acted to block as many as 36 malicious domains operated by hack-for-hire groups from India, Russia, and the U.A.E. In a manner analogous to the surveillanceware ecosystem, hack-for-hire firms equip their clients with capabilities to enable targeted attacks aimed at corporates as well as activists, journalists, politicians, and other high-risk users. "The hack-for-hire landscape is fluid, both in how the attackers organize themselves and in the wide range of targets they pursue in a single campaign at the behest of disparate clients," Shane Huntley, director of Google TAG, said in a report.

Google's Threat Analysis Group has blocked dozens of malicious domains and websites used by hack-for-hire groups in attacks targeting high-risk targets worldwide. Hack-for-hire groups target individuals and organizations in data theft and corporate espionage campaigns, with past victims including politicians, journalists, human rights and political activists, and various other high-risk users from all over the world.

A new security vulnerability has been disclosed in RARlab's UnRAR utility that, if successfully exploited, could permit a remote attacker to execute arbitrary code on a system that relies on the binary. The flaw, assigned the identifier CVE-2022-30333, relates to a path traversal vulnerability in the Unix versions of UnRAR that can be triggered upon extracting a maliciously crafted RAR archive.

Semiconductor giant AMD says they are investigating a cyberattack after the RansomHouse gang claimed to have stolen 450 GB of data from the company last year. RansomHouse is a data extortion group that breaches corporate networks, steals data, and then demands a ransom payment to not publicly leak the data or sell it to other threat actors.