Security News

Attack chains mounted by the group commence with a spear-phishing email to deploy a wide range of tools for backdoor access, command-and-control, and data exfiltration. These messages come bearing with malicious lure archives distributed via Dropbox or Google Drive links that employ DLL side-loading, LNK shortcut files, and fake file extensions as arrival vectors to obtain a foothold and drop backdoors like TONEINS, TONESHELL, PUBLOAD, and MQsTTang.

The North Korean advanced persistent threat actor dubbed ScarCruft is using weaponized Microsoft Compiled HTML Help files to download additional malware. "The group is constantly evolving its tools, techniques, and procedures while experimenting with new file formats and methods to bypass security vendors," Zscaler researchers Sudeep Singh and Naveen Selvan said in a new analysis published Tuesday.

The threat actors behind the CatB ransomware operation have been observed using a technique called DLL search order hijacking to evade detection and launch the payload. CatB, also referred to as CatB99 and Baxtoy, emerged late last year and is said to be an "Evolution or direct rebrand" of another ransomware strain known as Pandora based on code-level similarities. It's worth noting that the use of Pandora has been attributed to Bronze Starlight, a China-based threat actor that's known to employ short-lived ransomware families as a ruse to likely conceal its true objectives.

More than a dozen security flaws have been disclosed in E11, a smart intercom product made by Chinese company Akuvox. "The vulnerabilities could allow attackers to execute code remotely in order to activate and control the device's camera and microphone, steal video and images, or gain a network foothold," Claroty security researcher Vera Mens said in a technical write-up.

A suspected North Korean hacking group is targeting security researchers and media organizations in the U.S. and Europe with fake job offers that lead to the deployment of three new, custom malware families. Mandiant says the particular group has previously targeted tech firms, media groups, and entities in the defense industry.

The RIG exploit kit touched an all-time high successful exploitation rate of nearly 30% in 2022, new findings reveal. Exploit kits are programs used to distribute malware to large numbers of victims by taking advantage of known security flaws in commonly-used software such as web browsers.

Rezilion uncovered the presence of hundreds of Docker container images containing vulnerabilities that are not detected by most standard vulnerability scanners and SCA tools. The research revealed numerous high-severity/critical vulnerabilities hidden in hundreds of popular container images, downloaded billions of times collectively.

Google last year paid its highest bug bounty ever through the Vulnerability Reward Program for a critical exploit chain report that the company valued at $605,000. In total, Google spent over $12 million for more than 2,900 vulnerabilities in its products discovered and reported by security researchers.

A new information stealer called Stealc that's being advertised on the dark web could emerge as a worthy competitor to other malware of its ilk. "The threat actor presents Stealc as a fully featured and ready-to-use stealer, whose development relied on Vidar, Raccoon, Mars, and RedLine stealers," SEKOIA said in a Monday report.

A spear-phishing campaign targeting Indian government entities aims to deploy an updated version of a backdoor called ReverseRAT. Cybersecurity firm ThreatMon attributed the activity to a threat actor tracked as SideCopy. SideCopy is a threat group of Pakistani origin that shares overlaps with another actor called Transparent Tribe.