Gaza Cybergang | Breaking Cybersecurity News | The Hacker News

A Gaza-based threat actor has been linked to a series of cyber attacks aimed at Israeli private-sector energy, defense, and telecommunications organizations. Microsoft, which revealed details of the activity in its fourth annual  Digital Defense Report , is tracking the campaign under the name  Storm-1133 . "We assess this group works to further the interests of Hamas, a Sunni militant group that is the de facto governing authority in the Gaza Strip, as activity attributed to it has largely affected organizations perceived as hostile to Hamas," the company said. Targets of the campaign included organizations in the Israeli energy and defense sectors and entities loyal to Fatah, a Palestinian nationalist and social democratic political party headquartered in the West Bank region. Attack chains entail a mix of social engineering and fake profiles on LinkedIn that masquerade as Israeli human resources managers, project coordinators, and software developers to contact and s

Security researchers from Check Point Threat Intelligence Team have discovered the comeback of an APT (advanced persistent threat) surveillance group targeting institutions across the Middle East, specifically the Palestinian Authority. The attack, dubbed "Big Bang," begins with a phishing email sent to targeted victims that includes an attachment of a self-extracting archive containing two files—a Word document and a malicious executable. Posing to be from the Palestinian Political and National Guidance Commission, the Word document serves as a decoy to distract victims while the malware is installed in the background. The malicious executable, which runs in the background, act as the first stage info-stealer malware designed for intelligence gathering to identify potential victims (on the basis of what is unclear as of now), and then it accordingly downloads the second stage malware designed for espionage. "While the analysis...discloses the capabilities of