Security News

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.

A new spear phishing campaign is taking place in Russia targeting dissenters with opposing views to those promoted by the state and national media about the war against Ukraine. The campaign targets government employees and public servants with emails warning of the software tools and online platforms that are forbidden in the country.

"As of October 2021, US election officials in at least nine states received invoice-themed phishing emails containing links to websites intended to steal login credentials." On 5 October 2021, unidentified cyber actors targeted US election officials in at least nine states, and representatives of the National Association of Secretaries of State, with phishing emails.

More advanced phishing kits contain a control center to tune the functionalities of the phishing pages, such as by specifying how they will receive data, or performing filtering. Phishing kits make it easier for cybercriminals without technical knowledge to launch phishing campaigns.

The ever-evolving banking trojan IcedID is back again with a phishing campaign that uses previously compromised Microsoft Exchange servers to send emails that appear to come from legitimate accounts. The actors behind IcedID - as well as other spearphishers - have previously used phishing emails that "Reuse previously stolen emails to make the lure more convincing," researchers wrote.

A China-based threat group is likely running a month-long campaign using a variant of the Korplug malware and targeting European diplomats, internet service providers and research institutions via phishing lures that refer to Russia's invasion of Ukraine and COVID-19 travel restrictions. The ongoing campaign was first seen in August 2021 and is being tied to Mustang Panda - a Chinese APT unit also known as TA416, RedDelta and PKPLUG - due to similar code and common tactics, techniques and procedures used by the group in the past, according to researchers with the cybersecurity firm ESET. Mustang Panda is known for targeting governmental entities and non-governmental organizations, with most of its victims being in East and Southeast Asia.

A rendering technique affecting the world's leading messaging and email platforms, including Instagram, iMessage, WhatsApp, Signal, and Facebook Messenger, allowed threat actors to create legitimate-looking phishing messages for the past three years. The vulnerabilities are rendering bugs resulting in the apps' interface incorrectly displaying URLs with injected RTLO Unicode control characters, making the user vulnerable to URI spoofing attacks.

Modern phishing kits sold on cybercrime forums as off-the-shelve packages feature multiple, sophisticated detection avoidance and traffic filtering systems to ensure that internet security solutions won't mark them as a threat. Most of these websites are built using phishing kits that feature brand logos, realistic login pages, and in cases of advanced offerings, dynamic webpages assembled from a set of basic elements.

The novel phishing technique, described last week by a penetration tester and security researcher who goes by the handle mr. The concocted popups simulate a browser window within the browser, spoofing a legitimate domain and making it possible to stage convincing phishing attacks.

A novel phishing technique called browser-in-the-browser attack can be exploited to simulate a browser window within the browser in order to spoof a legitimate domain, thereby making it possible to stage convincing phishing attacks. "Combine the window design with an iframe pointing to the malicious server hosting the phishing page, and it's basically indistinguishable," mrd0x said in a technical write-up published last week.