Security News

Black Hat State-sponsored cyber spies and criminals are increasingly using legitimate cloud services to attack their victims, according to Symantec's threat hunters who have spotted three such operations over recent months, plus new data theft and other malware tools in development by these goons. This piece of malware used Microsoft's Graph API to communicate with the attacker's command and control server, hosted on Microsoft OneDrive.

A new malware campaign leveraged two zero-day flaws in Cisco networking gear to deliver custom malware and facilitate covert data collection on target environments. Cisco Talos, which dubbed...

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Suspected Chinese state-sponsored hackers leveraging Ivanti Connect Secure VPN flaws to breach a variety of organizations have demonstrated "a nuanced understanding of the appliance", according to Mandiant incident responders and threat hunters. "While the limited attempts observed to maintain persistence have not been successful to date due to a lack of logic in the malware's code to account for an encryption key mismatch, it further demonstrates the lengths UNC5325 will go to maintain access to priority targets and highlights the importance of ensuring network appliances have the latest updates and patches," Mandiant's specialists noted.

Nathan Wenzler, chief security strategist at cyber security firm Tenable, said state-sponsored threat actors typically infiltrate by stealth and spread. Wenzler said Australian organisations should treat them as seriously as other actors or face serious risk during a geopolitical conflict. The Australian Cyber Security Centre found total reports of cybercrime were up by 23% to 94,000 in the year to June 2023, attributing part of that increase to state-sponsored attacks against critical infrastructure.

OpenAI has removed accounts used by state-sponsored threat groups from Iran, North Korea, China, and Russia, that were abusing its artificial intelligence chatbot, ChatGPT. The AI research organization took action against specific accounts associated with the hacking groups that were misusing its large language model services for malicious purposes after receiving key information from Microsoft's Threat Intelligence team. Forest Blizzard [Russia]: Utilized ChatGPT to conduct research into satellite and radar technologies pertinent to military operations and to optimize its cyber operations with scripting enhancements.

Microsoft and OpenAI have identified attempts by various state-affiliated threat actors to use large language models to enhance their cyber operations. Just as defenders do, threat actors are leveraging AI to boost their efficiency and continue to explore all the possibilities these technologies can offer.

Microsoft disclosed on Jan. 19 that a nation-state backed attack occurred beginning in November 2023 in which the Russian state-sponsored threat actor group Midnight Blizzard accessed some Microsoft corporate emails and documents through compromised email accounts. The attackers gained access in November 2023 using a legacy test tenant account.

Updated The offensive cyber unit linked to Russia's Foreign Intelligence Service is exploiting the critical vulnerability affecting the JetBrains TeamCity CI/CD server at scale, and has been since September, authorities warn. The exploit in TeamCity could give attackers enough access to manipulate a software's source code, sign certificates, and compile and deploy processes, the advisory says.

The Iranian state-sponsored threat actor known as OilRig deployed three different downloader malware throughout 2022 to maintain persistent access to victim organizations located in Israel. The...