Cyber Attack | Breaking Cybersecurity News | The Hacker News

Hackers associated with China's Ministry of State Security (MSS) have been linked to attacks in 17 different countries in Asia, Europe, and North America from 2021 to 2023. Cybersecurity firm Recorded Future attributed the intrusion set to a nation-state group it tracks under the name  RedHotel  (previously Threat Activity Group-22 or TAG-22), which overlaps with a cluster of activity broadly monitored as  Aquatic Panda ,  Bronze University , Charcoal Typhoon,  Earth Lusca , and  Red Scylla  (or Red Dev 10). Active since 2019, some of the prominent sectors targeted by the prolific actor encompass academia, aerospace, government, media, telecommunications, and research. A majority of the victims during the period were government organizations. "RedHotel has a dual mission of intelligence gathering and economic espionage," the cybersecurity company  said , calling out its persistence, operational intensity, and global reach. "It targets both government entities for

The U.K. Electoral Commission on Tuesday disclosed a "complex" cyber attack on its systems that went undetected for over a year, allowing the threat actors to access years worth of voter data belonging to 40 million people. "The incident was identified in October 2022 after suspicious activity was detected on our systems," the regulator  said . "It became clear that hostile actors had first accessed the systems in August 2021." The intrusion enabled unauthorized access to the Commission's servers hosting email, control systems, and copies of the electoral registers it maintains for research purposes. The identity of the intruders are presently unknown. The registers included the name and address of anyone in the U.K. who registered to vote between 2014 and 2022, as well as the names of those registered as overseas voters. However, they did not contain information of those who qualified to register anonymously and addresses of overseas electors regi

The threat actor known as  Space Pirates  has been linked to attacks against at least 16 organizations in Russia and Serbia over the past year by employing novel tactics and adding new cyber weapons to its arsenal. "The cybercriminals' main goals are still espionage and theft of confidential information, but the group has expanded its interests and the geography of its attacks," Positive Technologies  said  in a deep dive report published last week. Targets comprise government agencies, educational institutions, private security companies, aerospace manufacturers, agricultural producers, defense, energy, and healthcare firms in Russia and Serbia. Space Pirates was  first exposed  by the Russian cybersecurity company in May 2022, highlighting its attacks on the aerospace sector in the nation. The group, believed to be active since at least late 2019, has links to another adversary tracked by Symantec as  Webworm . Positive Technologies' analysis of the attack inf

A nation-state actor with links to China is suspected of being behind a series of attacks against industrial organizations in Eastern Europe that took place last year to siphon data stored on air-gapped systems. Cybersecurity company Kaspersky attributed the intrusions with medium to high confidence to a hacking crew called  APT31 , which is also tracked under the monikers Bronze Vinewood, Judgement Panda, and Violet Typhoon (formerly Zirconium), citing commonalities in the tactics observed. The attacks entailed the use of more than 15 distinct implants and their variants, broken down into three broad categories based on their ability to establish persistent remote access, gather sensitive information, and transmit the collected data to actor-controlled infrastructure. "One of the implant types appeared to be a sophisticated modular malware, aimed at profiling removable drives and contaminating them with a worm to exfiltrate data from isolated, or air-gapped, networks of indus

Threat actors associated with the hacking crew known as Patchwork have been spotted targeting universities and research organizations in China as part of a recently observed campaign. The activity, according to  KnownSec 404 Team , entailed the use of a backdoor codenamed  EyeShell . Patchwork , also known by the names Operation Hangover and Zinc Emerson, is suspected to be a threat group that operates on behalf of India. Active since at least December 2015, attack chains mounted by the outfit have a narrow focus and tend to single out Pakistan and China with custom implants such as BADNEWS via spear-phishing and watering hole attacks. The adversarial collective has been found to share tactical overlaps with other cyber-espionage groups with an Indian connection, including  SideWinder  and the  DoNot Team . Earlier this May, Meta  disclosed  that it took down 50 accounts on Facebook and Instagram operated by Patchwork, which took advantage of rogue messaging apps uploaded to the

An ongoing cyber attack campaign has set its sights on Korean-speaking individuals by employing U.S. Military-themed document lures to trick them into running malware on compromised systems. Cybersecurity firm Securonix is tracking the activity under the name STARK#MULE . The scale of the attacks is currently not known, and it's not clear if any of these attack attempts turned out to be successful. "Based on the source and likely targets, these types of attacks are on par with past attacks stemming from typical North Korean groups such as APT37 as South Korea has historically been a primary target of the group, especially its government officials," security researchers Den Iuzvyk, Tim Peck, and Oleg Kolesnikov said in a report shared with The Hacker News. APT37, also known by the names Nickel Foxcroft, Reaper, Ricochet Chollima, and ScarCruft, is a  North Korean nation-state actor  that's known to exclusively focus on targets in its southern counterpart, specific

As part of  Checkmarx's mission  to help organizations develop and deploy secure software, the Security Research team started looking at the security posture of major car manufacturers. Porsche has a well-established Vulnerability Reporting Policy (Disclosure Policy) [1] , it was considered in scope for our research, so we decided to start there, and see what we could find. What we found is an attack scenario that results from chaining security issues found on different Porsche's assets, a website and a GraphQL API, that could lead to data exfiltration. Data exfiltration is an attack technique that can impact businesses and organizations, regardless of size. When malicious users breach a company's or organization's systems and exfiltrate data, it can be a jarring and business-critical moment. Porsche has a diverse online presence - deploying several microsites, websites, and web applications. The Porsche Experience [2] is one website that allows registered users to

The Russian nation-state actor known as  BlueBravo  has been observed targeting diplomatic entities throughout Eastern Europe with the goal of delivering a new backdoor called GraphicalProton, exemplifying the continuous evolution of the threat. The phishing campaign is characterized by the use of legitimate internet services (LIS) for command-and-control (C2) obfuscation, Recorded Future said in a new report published Thursday. The activity was observed between March and May 2023. BlueBravo , also known by the names APT29, Cloaked Ursa, and Midnight Blizzard (formerly Nobelium), is attributed to Russia's Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR), and has in the past  used  Dropbox, Firebase, Google Drive, Notion, and Trello to evade detection and stealthily establish communications with infected hosts. To that end, GraphicalProton is the latest addition to a long list of malware targeting diplomatic organizations after  GraphicalNeutrino  (aka SNOWYAMBER),  HALFRIG, and QUARTERRIG .

The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) on Wednesday approved new rules that require publicly traded companies to publicize details of a cyber attack within four days of identifying that it has a "material" impact on their finances, marking a major shift in how computer breaches are disclosed. "Whether a company loses a factory in a fire — or millions of files in a cybersecurity incident — it may be material to investors," SEC chair Gary Gensler  said . "Currently, many public companies provide cybersecurity disclosure to investors. I think companies and investors alike, however, would benefit if this disclosure were made in a more consistent, comparable, and decision-useful way." To that end, the new obligations mandate that companies reveal the incident's nature, scope, and timing, as well as its impact. This disclosure, however, may be delayed by an additional period of up to 60 days should it be determined that giving out such specific

North Korean nation-state actors affiliated with the Reconnaissance General Bureau (RGB) have been attributed to the  JumpCloud hack  following an operational security (OPSEC) blunder that exposed their actual IP address. Google-owned threat intelligence firm Mandiant attributed the activity to a threat actor it tracks under the name UNC4899, which likely shares overlaps with clusters already being monitored as Jade Sleet and TraderTraitor, a group with a history of striking blockchain and cryptocurrency sectors. UNC4899 also overlaps with  APT43 , another hacking crew associated with the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK) that was unmasked earlier this March as conducting a series of campaigns to gather intelligence and siphon cryptocurrency from targeted companies. The adversarial collective's modus operandi is characterized by the use of Operational Relay Boxes ( ORBs ) using L2TP IPsec tunnels along with commercial VPN providers to disguise the attacker's

The recent attack against  Microsoft's email infrastructure  by a Chinese nation-state actor referred to as Storm-0558 is said to have a broader scope than previously thought. According to cloud security company Wiz, the inactive Microsoft account (MSA) consumer signing key used to forge Azure Active Directory (Azure AD or AAD) tokens to gain illicit access to Outlook Web Access (OWA) and Outlook.com could also have allowed the adversary to forge access tokens for various types of Azure AD applications. This  includes  every application that supports personal account authentication, such as OneDrive, SharePoint, and Teams; customers applications that support the "Login with Microsoft functionality," and multi-tenant applications in certain conditions. "Everything in the world of Microsoft leverages Azure Active Directory auth tokens for access," Ami Luttwak, chief technology officer and co-founder of Wiz, said in a statement. "An attacker with an AAD si

The defense sector in Ukraine and Eastern Europe has been targeted by a novel .NET-based backdoor called  DeliveryCheck  (aka CAPIBAR or GAMEDAY) that's capable of delivering next-stage payloads. The Microsoft threat intelligence team, in  collaboration  with the Computer Emergency Response Team of Ukraine (CERT-UA), attributed the attacks to a Russian nation-state actor known as  Turla , which is also tracked under the names Iron Hunter, Secret Blizzard (formerly Krypton), Uroburos, Venomous Bear, and Waterbug. It's linked to Russia's Federal Security Service (FSB). "DeliveryCheck is distributed via email as documents with malicious macros," the company  said  in a series of tweets. "It persists via a scheduled task that downloads and launches it in memory. It also contacts a C2 server to retrieve tasks, which can include the launch of arbitrary payloads embedded in XSLT stylesheets." Successful initial access is also accompanied in some cases by t

Microsoft on Tuesday  revealed  that it repelled a cyber attack staged by a Chinese nation-state actor targeting two dozen organizations, some of which include government agencies, in a cyber espionage campaign designed to acquire confidential data. The attacks, which commenced on May 15, 2023, entailed access to email accounts affecting approximately 25 entities and a small number of related individual consumer accounts. The tech giant attributed the campaign to Storm-0558, describing it as a nation-state activity group based out of China that primarily singles out government agencies in Western Europe. "They focus on espionage, data theft, and credential access," Microsoft  said . "They are also known to use custom malware that Microsoft tracks as Cigril and Bling, for credential access." The breach is said to have been detected a month later on June 16, 2023, after an unidentified customer reported the anomalous email activity to the company. Microsoft sai

A developing piece of ransomware called  Big Head  is being distributed as part of a malvertising campaign that takes the form of bogus Microsoft Windows updates and Word installers. Big Head was  first documented  by Fortinet FortiGuard Labs last month, when it discovered multiple variants of the ransomware that are designed to encrypt files on victims' machines in exchange for a cryptocurrency payment. "One Big Head ransomware variant displays a fake Windows Update, potentially indicating that the ransomware was also distributed as a fake Windows Update," Fortinet researchers said at the time. "One of the variants has a Microsoft Word icon and was likely distributed as counterfeit software." A majority of the Big Head samples have been submitted so far from the U.S., Spain, France, and Turkey. In a new analysis of the .NET-based ransomware, Trend Micro detailed its inner workings, calling out its ability to deploy three encrypted binaries: 1.exe to propag

Malicious actors exploited an unknown flaw in Revolut's payment systems to steal more than $20 million of the company's funds in early 2022. The development was  reported  by the Financial Times, citing multiple unnamed sources with knowledge of the incident. The breach has not been disclosed publicly. The fault stemmed from discrepancies between Revolut's U.S. and European systems, causing funds to be erroneously refunded using its own money when some transactions were declined. The problem was first detected in late 2021. But before it could be closed, the report said organized criminal groups leveraged the loophole by "encouraging individuals to try to make expensive purchases that would go on to be declined." The refunded amounts would then be withdrawn from ATMs. The exact technical details associated with the flaw are currently unclear. About $23 million was stolen in total, with some funds recovered by pursuing those who had withdrawn cash. The mass