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A governmental entity in Guyana has been targeted as part of a cyber espionage campaign dubbed  Operation Jacana . The  activity , which was detected by ESET in February 2023, entailed a spear-phishing attack that led to the deployment of a hitherto undocumented implant written in C++ called DinodasRAT. The Slovak cybersecurity firm said it could link the intrusion to a known threat actor or group, but attributed with medium confidence to a China-nexus adversary owing to the use of  PlugX  (aka Korplug), a remote access trojan common to Chinese hacking crews. "This campaign was targeted, as the threat actors crafted their emails specifically to entice their chosen victim organization," ESET  said  in a report shared with The Hacker News. "After successfully compromising an initial but limited set of machines with DinodasRAT, the operators proceeded to move inside and breach the target's internal network, where they again deployed this backdoor." The infec

A new deceptive package hidden within the npm package registry has been uncovered deploying an open-source rootkit called r77 , marking the first time a rogue package has delivered rootkit functionality. The package in question is  node-hide-console-windows , which mimics the legitimate npm package  node-hide-console-window  in what's an instance of a typosquatting campaign. It was  downloaded 704 times  over the past two months before it was taken down. ReversingLabs, which  first detected  the activity in August 2023, said the package "downloaded a Discord bot that facilitated the planting of an open-source rootkit, r77," adding it "suggests that open-source projects may increasingly be seen as an avenue by which to distribute malware." The malicious code, per the software supply chain security firm, is contained within the package's index.js file that, upon execution, fetches an executable that's automatically run. The executable in question is

Nearly three dozen counterfeit packages have been discovered in the npm package repository that are designed to exfiltrate sensitive data from developer systems, according to findings from Fortinet FortiGuard Labs. One set of packages – named @expue/webpack, @expue/core, @expue/vue3-renderer, @fixedwidthtable/fixedwidthtable, and @virtualsearchtable/virtualsearchtable – harbored an obfuscated JavaScript file that's capable of gathering valuable secrets. This includes Kubernetes configurations, SSH keys, and system metadata such as username, IP address, and hostname. The cybersecurity firm said it also discovered another collection of four modules, i.e., binarium-crm, career-service-client-0.1.6, hh-dep-monitoring, and orbitplate, which results in the unauthorized extraction of source code and configuration files. "The targeted files and directories may contain highly valuable intellectual property and sensitive information, such as various application and service credent

Cybersecurity experts have discovered yet another malware-as-a-service ( MaaS ) threat called  BunnyLoader  that's being advertised for sale on the cybercrime underground. "BunnyLoader provides various functionalities such as downloading and executing a second-stage payload, stealing browser credentials and system information, and much more," Zscaler ThreatLabz researchers Niraj Shivtarkar and Satyam Singh  said  in an analysis published last week. Among its other capabilities include running remote commands on the infected machine, a keylogger to capture keystrokes, and a clipper functionality to monitor the victim's clipboard and replace content matching cryptocurrency wallet addresses with actor-controlled addresses. A C/C++-based loader offered for $250 for a lifetime license, the malware is said to have been under continuous development since its debut on September 4, 2023, with new features and enhancements that incorporate anti-sandbox and antivirus evasion

An emerging Android banking trojan called Zanubis is now masquerading as a Peruvian government app to trick unsuspecting users into installing the malware. "Zanubis's main infection path is through impersonating legitimate Peruvian Android applications and then tricking the user into enabling the Accessibility permissions in order to take full control of the device," Kaspersky  said  in an analysis published last week. Zanubis,  originally documented  in August 2022, is the latest addition to a  long list of Android banker malware  targeting the Latin American (LATAM) region. Targets include more than 40 banks and financial entities in Peru. It's mainly known for abusing accessibility permissions on the infected device to display fake overlay screens atop the targeted apps in an attempt to steal credentials. it's also capable of harvesting contact data, list of installed apps, and system metadata. Kaspersky said it observed recent samples of Zanubis in the w

The U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) is warning of a new trend of dual ransomware attacks targeting the same victims, at least since July 2023. "During these attacks, cyber threat actors deployed two different ransomware variants against victim companies from the following variants: AvosLocker, Diamond, Hive, Karakurt, LockBit, Quantum, and Royal," the FBI  said  in an alert. "Variants were deployed in various combinations." Not much is known about the scale of such attacks, although it's believed that they happen in close proximity to one another, ranging from anywhere between 48 hours to within 10 days. Another notable change observed in ransomware attacks is the increased use of custom data theft, wiper tools, and malware to exert pressure on victims to pay up. "This use of dual ransomware variants resulted in a combination of data encryption, exfiltration, and financial losses from ransom payments," the agency said. "Second ran

Sophisticated cyber actors backed by Iran known as  OilRig  have been linked to a spear-phishing campaign that infects victims with a new strain of malware called Menorah. "The malware was designed for cyberespionage, capable of identifying the machine, reading and uploading files from the machine, and downloading another file or malware," Trend Micro researchers Mohamed Fahmy and Mahmoud Zohdy  said  in a Friday report. The victimology of the attacks is not immediately known, although the use of decoys indicates at least one of the targets is an organization located in Saudi Arabia. Also tracked under the names APT34, Cobalt Gypsy, Hazel Sandstorm, and Helix Kitten,  OilRig  is an Iranian advanced persistent threat (APT) group that specializes in covert intelligence gathering operations to infiltrate and maintain access within targeted networks. The revelation builds on  recent findings  from NSFOCUS, which uncovered an OilRig phishing attack resulting in the deploymen

Threat actors are selling a new crypter and loader called  ASMCrypt , which has been described as an "evolved version" of another loader malware known as DoubleFinger. "The idea behind this type of malware is to load the final payload without the loading process or the payload itself being detected by AV/EDR, etc.," Kaspersky  said  in an analysis published this week. DoubleFinger was  first documented  by the Russian cybersecurity company, detailing infection chains leveraging the malware to propagate a cryptocurrency stealer dubbed GreetingGhoul to victims in Europe, the U.S., and Latin America. ASMCrypt, once purchased and launched by the customers, is designed to establish contact with a backend service over the TOR network using hard-coded credentials, thereby enabling the buyers to build payloads of their choice for use in their campaigns. "The application creates an encrypted blob hidden inside a .PNG file," Kaspersky said. "This image mus

The North Korea-linked  Lazarus Group  has been linked to a cyber espionage attack targeting an unnamed aerospace company in Spain in which employees of the firm were approached by the threat actor posing as a recruiter for Meta. "Employees of the targeted company were contacted by a fake recruiter via LinkedIn and tricked into opening a malicious executable file presenting itself as a coding challenge or quiz," ESET security researcher Peter Kálnai  said  in a technical report shared with The Hacker News. The attack is part of a long-standing spear-phishing campaign called  Operation Dream Job  that's orchestrated by the hacking crew in an attempt to lure employees working at prospective targets that are of strategic interest, enticing them with lucrative job opportunities to activate the infection chain. Earlier this March, the Slovak cybersecurity company detailed an attack wave aimed at Linux users that involved the use of bogus HSBC job offers to launch a backdo

Malicious ads served inside Microsoft Bing's artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot are being used to distribute malware when searching for popular tools. The findings come from Malwarebytes, which revealed that unsuspecting users can be tricked into visiting booby-trapped sites and installing malware directly from Bing Chat conversations. Introduced by Microsoft in February 2023, Bing Chat is an  interactive search experience  that's powered by OpenAI's large language model called  GPT-4 . A month later, the tech giant  began   exploring  placing ads in the conversations. But the move has also opened the doors for threat actors who resort to malvertising tactics and propagate malware. "Ads can be inserted into a Bing Chat conversation in various ways," Jérôme Segura, director of threat intelligence at Malwarebytes,  said . "One of those is when a user hovers over a link and an ad is displayed first before the organic result." In an example highligh

A new deceptive campaign has been observed hijacking GitHub accounts and committing malicious code disguised as Dependabot contributions with an aim to steal passwords from developers. "The malicious code exfiltrates the GitHub project's defined secrets to a malicious C2 server and modify any existing javascript files in the attacked project with a web-form password-stealer malware code effecting any end-user submitting its password in a web form," Checkmarx  said  in a technical report. The malware is also designed to capture GitHub secrets and variables to a remote server by means of a GitHub Action. The software supply chain security firm said it observed the atypical commits to hundreds of public and private GitHub repositories between July 8 and 11, 2023. It has emerged that the victims had their GitHub personal access tokens stolen and used by the threat actors to make falsified code commits to users' repositories by posing as Dependabot. Dependabot  is d

Government and telecom entities have been subjected to a new wave of attacks by a China-linked threat actor tracked as  Budworm  using an updated malware toolset. The intrusions, targeting a Middle Eastern telecommunications organization and an Asian government, took place in August 2023, with the adversary deploying an improved version of its SysUpdate toolkit, the Symantec Threat Hunter Team, part of Broadcom,  said  in a report shared with The Hacker News. Budworm , also referred to by the names APT27, Bronze Union, Emissary Panda, Iron Tiger, Lucky Mouse, and Red Phoenix, is known to be active since at least 2013, targeting a wide range of industry verticals in pursuit of its intelligence gathering goals.  The nation-state group leverages various tools such as China Chopper web shell, Gh0st RAT, HyperBro, PlugX, SysUpdate, and ZXShell to exfiltrate high-value information and maintain access to sensitive systems over a long period of time. A previous report from SecureWorks in

A new malware strain called ZenRAT has emerged in the wild that's distributed via bogus installation packages of the Bitwarden password manager. "The malware is specifically targeting Windows users and will redirect people using other hosts to a benign web page," enterprise security firm Proofpoint  said  in a technical report. "The malware is a modular remote access trojan (RAT) with information stealing capabilities." ZenRAT is hosted on fake websites pretending to be associated with Bitwarden, although it's uncertain as to how traffic is being directed to the domains. Such malware has been propagated via phishing, malvertising, or SEO poisoning attacks in the past. The payload (Bitwarden-Installer-version-2023-7-1.exe), downloaded from crazygameis[.]com, is a trojanized version of the standard Bitwarden installation package that contains a malicious .NET executable (ApplicationRuntimeMonitor.exe). A noteworthy aspect of the campaign is that users wh

Cybersecurity experts have shed light on a new cybercrime group known as  ShadowSyndicate  (formerly Infra Storm) that may have leveraged as many as seven different ransomware families over the past year. "ShadowSyndicate is a threat actor that works with various ransomware groups and affiliates of ransomware programs," Group-IB and Bridewell  said  in a joint technical report. The actor, active since July 16, 2022, has linked to ransomware activity related to Quantum, Nokoyawa, BlackCat, Royal, Cl0p, Cactus, and Play strains, while also deploying off-the-shelf post-exploitation tools like  Cobalt Strike  and  Sliver  as well as loaders such as  IcedID  and  Matanbuchus . The findings are based on a distinct SSH fingerprint (1ca4cbac895fc3bd12417b77fc6ed31d) discovered on 85 servers, 52 of which have been used as command-and-control (C2) for Cobalt Strike. Among those servers are eight different Cobalt Strike license keys (or watermarks). A majority of the servers (23) a

An updated version of an  Android banking trojan  called  Xenomorph  has set its sights on more than 35 financial institutions in the U.S. The campaign, according to Dutch security firm ThreatFabric, leverages phishing web pages that are designed to entice victims into installing malicious Android apps that target a broader list of apps than its predecessors. Some of the other targeted prominent countries targeted comprise Spain, Canada, Italy, and Belgium. "This new list adds dozens of new overlays for institutions from the United States, Portugal, and multiple crypto wallets, following a trend that has been consistent amongst all banking malware families in the last year," the company  said  in an analysis published Monday. Xenomorph is a variant of another banker malware called Alien which  first emerged  in 2022. Later that year, the financial malware was propagated via a new dropper dubbed  BugDrop , which bypassed security features in Android 13. A subsequent iter

Tibetan, Uyghur, and Taiwanese individuals and organizations are the targets of a persistent campaign orchestrated by a threat actor codenamed  EvilBamboo  to gather sensitive information. "The attacker has created fake Tibetan websites, along with social media profiles, likely used to deploy browser-based exploits against targeted users," Volexity security researchers Callum Roxan, Paul Rascagneres, and Thomas Lancaster said in a report published last week. "Partly through impersonating existing popular communities, the attacker has built communities on online platforms, such as Telegram, to aid in distribution of their malware." EvilBamboo, formerly tracked by the cybersecurity firm under the name Evil Eye, has been linked to multiple attack waves  since at least 2019 , with the threat actor leveraging watering hole attacks to deliver spyware targeting Android and iOS devices. It's also known as Earth Empusa and POISON CARP. The intrusions directed agai

An unnamed Southeast Asian government has been targeted by multiple China-nexus threat actors as part of espionage campaigns targeting the region over extended periods of time. "While this activity occurred around the same time and in some instances even simultaneously on the same victims' machines, each cluster is characterized by distinct tools, modus operandi, and infrastructure," Palo Alto Networks Unit 42 researchers Lior Rochberger, Tom Fakterman, and Robert Falcone  said  in an exhaustive three-part report. The attacks, which targeted different governmental entities such as critical infrastructure, public healthcare institutions, public financial administrators and ministries, have been attributed with moderate confidence to three disparate clusters tracked as  Stately Taurus  (aka Mustang Panda),  Alloy Taurus  (aka Granite Typhoon), and  Gelsemium . Mustang Panda Uses TONESHELL Variant and ShadowPad "The attackers conducted a cyberespionage operation th