supply chain attack | Breaking Cybersecurity News | The Hacker News

The maintainers of Free Download Manager (FDM) have acknowledged a security incident dating back to 2020 that led to its website being used to distribute malicious Linux software. "It appears that a specific web page on our site was compromised by a Ukrainian hacker group, exploiting it to distribute malicious software," it  said  in an alert last week. "Only a small subset of users, specifically those who attempted to download FDM for Linux between 2020 and 2022, were potentially exposed." Less than 0.1% of its visitors are estimated to have encountered the issue, adding it may have been why the problem went undetected until now. The disclosure comes as Kaspersky  revealed  that the project's website was infiltrated at some point in 2020 to redirect select Linux users who attempted to download the software to a malicious site hosting a Debian package. The package was further configured to deploy a DNS-based backdoor and ultimately serve a Bash stealer mal

In yet another sign that developers continue to be targets of software supply chain attacks, a number of malicious packages have been discovered on the Rust programming language's crate registry. The libraries, uploaded between August 14 and 16, 2023, were published by a user named "amaperf," Phylum  said  in a report published last week. The names of the packages, now taken down, are as follows: postgress, if-cfg, xrvrv, serd, oncecell, lazystatic, and envlogger. It's not clear what the end goal of the campaign was, but the suspicious modules were found to harbor functionalities to capture the operating system information (i.e., Windows, Linux, macOS, or Unknown) and transmit the data to a hard-coded Telegram channel via the messaging platform's API. This suggests that the campaign may have been in its early stages and that the threat actor may have been casting a wide net to compromise as many developer machines as possible to deliver rogue updates with imp

A previously undocumented threat cluster has been linked to a software supply chain attack targeting organizations primarily located in Hong Kong and other regions in Asia. The Symantec Threat Hunter Team, part of Broadcom, is tracking the activity under its insect-themed moniker Carderbee. The attacks, per the cybersecurity firm, leverage a trojanized version of a legitimate software called EsafeNet Cobra DocGuard Client to deliver a known backdoor known as  PlugX  (aka Korplug) on victim networks. "In the course of this attack, the attackers used malware signed with a legitimate Microsoft certificate," the company  said  in a report shared with The Hacker News. The use of Cobra DocGuard Client to pull off a supply chain attack was previously highlighted by ESET in its quarterly APT Activity Report this year, detailing a September 2022 intrusion in which an unnamed gambling company in Hong Kong was compromised via a malicious update pushed by the software. The compan

Active flaws in the PowerShell Gallery could be weaponized by threat actors to pull off supply chain attacks against the registry's users. "These flaws make typosquatting attacks inevitable in this registry, while also making it extremely difficult for users to identify the true owner of a package," Aqua security researchers Mor Weinberger, Yakir Kadkoda, and Ilay Goldman said in a report shared with The Hacker News. Maintained by Microsoft,  PowerShell Gallery  is a  central repository  for sharing and acquiring PowerShell code, including PowerShell modules, scripts, and Desired State Configuration (DSC) resources. The registry boasts of 11,829 unique packages and 244,615 packages in total. The issues identified by the cloud security firm have to do with the service's lax policy surrounding package names, lacking protections against typosquatting attacks, as a result enabling attackers to upload malicious PowerShell modules that appear genuine to unsuspecting us

An analysis of the indicators of compromise ( IoCs ) associated with the JumpCloud hack has uncovered evidence pointing to the involvement of North Korean state-sponsored groups, in a style that's reminiscent of the  supply chain attack targeting 3CX . The findings come from SentinelOne, which  mapped out  the infrastructure pertaining to the intrusion to uncover underlying patterns. It's worth noting that JumpCloud, last week,  attributed  the attack to an unnamed "sophisticated nation-state sponsored threat actor." "The North Korean threat actors demonstrate a high level of creativity and strategic awareness in their targeting strategies," SentinelOne security researcher Tom Hegel told The Hacker News. "The research findings reveal a successful and multifaceted approach employed by these actors to infiltrate developer environments." "They actively seek access to tools and networks that can serve as gateways to more extensive opportunitie

In what's a new kind of software supply chain attack aimed at open source projects, it has emerged that threat actors could seize control of expired Amazon S3 buckets to serve rogue binaries without altering the modules themselves. "Malicious binaries steal the user IDs, passwords, local machine environment variables, and local host name, and then exfiltrates the stolen data to the hijacked bucket," Checkmarx researcher Guy Nachshon said. The attack was first observed in the case of an npm package called  bignum , which, until version 0.13.0, relied on an Amazon S3 bucket to download pre-built binary versions of an addon named node-pre-gyp during installation. "These binaries were published on a now-expired S3 bucket which has since been claimed by a malicious third party which is now serving binaries containing malware that exfiltrates data from the user's computer," according to a  GitHub advisory  published on May 24, 2023. An unknown threat actor

The maintainers of Python Package Index (PyPI), the official third-party software repository for the Python programming language, have temporarily disabled the ability for users to sign up and upload new packages until further notice. "The volume of malicious users and malicious projects being created on the index in the past week has outpaced our ability to respond to it in a timely fashion, especially with multiple PyPI administrators on leave," the admins  said  in a notice published on May 20, 2023. No additional details about the nature of the malware and the threat actors involved in publishing those rogue packages to PyPI were disclosed. The decision to freeze new user and project registrations comes as software registries such as PyPI have proven time and time again to be a popular target for attackers looking to poison the software supply chain and compromise developer environments. Earlier this week, Israeli cybersecurity startup Phylum  uncovered  an active m

Two malicious packages discovered in the npm package repository have been found to conceal an open source information stealer malware called  TurkoRat . The packages – named nodejs-encrypt-agent and nodejs-cookie-proxy-agent – were collectively downloaded approximately 1,200 times and were available for more than two months before they were identified and taken down. ReversingLabs, which broke down the details of the campaign, described TurkoRat as an information stealer capable of harvesting sensitive information such as login credentials, website cookies, and data from cryptocurrency wallets.  While nodejs-encrypt-agent came fitted with the malware inside, nodejs-cookie-proxy-agent was found to disguise the trojan as a dependency under the name axios-proxy. nodejs-encrypt-agent was also engineered to masquerade as another legitimate npm module known as  agent-base , which has been downloaded over 25 million times to date. The list of the rogue packages and their associated vers

A cybercrime enterprise known as  Lemon Group  is leveraging millions of pre-infected Android smartphones worldwide to carry out their malicious operations, posing significant supply chain risks. "The infection turns these devices into mobile proxies, tools for stealing and selling SMS messages, social media and online messaging accounts and monetization via advertisements and click fraud," cybersecurity firm Trend Micro  said . The activity encompasses no fewer than 8.9 million compromised Android devices, particularly budget phones, with the highest concentration of the infections discovered in the U.S., Mexico, Indonesia, Thailand, Russia, South Africa, India, Angola, the Philippines, and Argentina. The findings were  presented  by researchers Fyodor Yarochkin, Zhengyu Dong, Vladimir Kropotov, and Paul Pajares at the Black Hat Asia conference held in Singapore last week. Describing it as a  continuously evolving problem , the cybersecurity firm said the threat actors

A few weeks ago, the 32nd edition of RSA, one of the world's largest cybersecurity conferences, wrapped up in San Francisco. Among the highlights, Kevin Mandia, CEO of Mandiant at Google Cloud, presented a retrospective on  the state of cybersecurity . During his keynote, Mandia stated: "There are clear steps organizations can take beyond common safeguards and security tools to strengthen their defenses and increase their chances of detecting, thwarting or minimizing attack [...] Honeypots , or fake accounts deliberately left untouched by authorized users,  are effective at helping organizations detect intrusions or malicious activities that security products can't stop ". "Build honeypots" was one of his seven pieces of advice to help organizations avoid some of the attacks that might require engagement with Mandiant or other incident response firms. As a reminder, honeypots are  decoy systems  that are set up to lure attackers and divert their attentio

The threat actors behind the ransomware attack on Taiwanese PC maker MSI last month have leaked the company's private code signing keys on their dark website. "Confirmed, Intel OEM private key leaked, causing an impact on the entire ecosystem," Alex Matrosov, founder and CEO of firmware security firm Binarly,  said  in a tweet over the weekend. "It appears that Intel Boot Guard may not be effective on certain devices based on the 11th Tiger Lake, 12th Adler Lake, and 13th Raptor Lake." Present in the leaked data are firmware image signing keys associated with 57 PCs and private signing keys for Intel Boot Guard used on 116 MSI products. The Boot Guard keys from MSI are believed to impact several device vendors, including Intel, Lenovo and Supermicro. Intel Boot Guard is a  hardware-based security technology  that's designed to protect computers against executing tampered UEFI firmware. The development comes a month after MSI  fell victim  to a double

PHP software package repository Packagist revealed that an "attacker" gained access to four inactive accounts on the platform to hijack over a dozen packages with over 500 million installs to date. "The attacker forked each of the packages and replaced the package description in  composer.json  with their own message but did not otherwise make any malicious changes," Packagist's Nils Adermann  said . "The package URLs were then changed to point to the forked repositories." The four user accounts are said to have had access to a total of 14 packages, including multiple Doctrine packages. The incident took place on May 1, 2023. The complete list of impacted packages is as follows - acmephp/acmephp acmephp/core acmephp/ssl doctrine/doctrine-cache-bundle doctrine/doctrine-module doctrine/doctrine-mongo-odm-module doctrine/doctrine-orm-module doctrine/instantiator growthbook/growthbook jdorn/file-system-cache jdorn/sql-formatter khanamiryan/

The supply chain attack targeting 3CX was the result of a prior supply chain compromise associated with a different company, demonstrating a new level of sophistication with North Korean threat actors. Google-owned Mandiant, which is  tracking  the attack event under the moniker  UNC4736 ,  said  the incident marks the first time it has seen a "software supply chain attack lead to another software supply chain attack." The Matryoshka doll-style cascading attack against 3CX first came to light on March 29, 2023, when it  emerged  that Windows and macOS versions of its communication software were trojanized to deliver a C/C++-based data miner named ICONIC Stealer by means of a downloader, SUDDENICON, that used icon files hosted on GitHub to extract the server containing the stealer. "The malicious application next attempts to steal sensitive information from the victim user's web browser," the U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA)  said

Enterprise communications service provider 3CX confirmed that the  supply chain attack  targeting its desktop application for Windows and macOS was the handiwork of a threat actor with North Korean nexus. The findings are the result of an interim assessment conducted by Google-owned Mandiant, whose services were enlisted after the intrusion came to light late last month. The threat intelligence and incident response unit is tracking the activity under its uncategorized moniker  UNC4736 . It's worth noting that CrowdStrike has tied the attack to a Lazarus sub-group dubbed Labyrinth Chollima , citing tactical overlaps. The cybersecurity firm told The Hacker News the latest findings appear to be consistent with their previous attribution. The  attack chain , based on analyses from multiple security vendors, entailed the use of DLL side-loading techniques to load an information stealer known as ICONIC Stealer, followed by a second-stage called  Gopuram  in selective attacks aimed

Cybersecurity researchers have detailed the inner workings of the cryptocurrency stealer malware that was distributed via 13 malicious NuGet packages as part of a supply chain attack targeting .NET developers. The sophisticated typosquatting campaign, which was uncovered by JFrog late last month, impersonated legitimate packages to execute PowerShell code designed to retrieve a follow-on binary from a hard-coded server. The  two-stage attack  culminates in the deployment of a .NET-based persistent backdoor, called Impala Stealer, which is capable of gaining unauthorized access to users' cryptocurrency accounts. "The payload used a very rare obfuscation technique, called '.NET AoT compilation,' which is a lot more stealthy than using 'off the shelf' obfuscators while still making the binary hard to reverse engineer," JFrog told The Hacker News in a statement. .NET  AoT compilation  is an  optimization technique  that allows apps to be ahead-of-time c

The adversary behind the  supply chain attack targeting 3CX  deployed a second-stage implant specifically singling out a small number of cryptocurrency companies. Russian cybersecurity firm Kaspersky, which has been  internally tracking  the versatile backdoor under the name  Gopuram  since 2020, said it observed an increase in the number of infections in March 2023 coinciding with the 3CX breach. Gopuram's primary function is to connect to a command-and-control (C2) server and await further instructions that allow the attackers to interact with the victim's file system, create processes, and launch as many as eight in-memory modules. The backdoor's links to North Korea stem from the fact that it "co-existed on victim machines with  AppleJeus , a backdoor attributed to the Korean-speaking threat actor Lazarus," detailing an attack on an unnamed crypto firm located in Southeast Asia in 2020. The targeting of cryptocurrency companies is another telltale sign of

Enterprise communications software maker 3CX on Thursday confirmed that multiple versions of its desktop app for Windows and macOS are affected by a  supply chain attack . The version numbers include  18.12.407 and 18.12.416  for Windows and  18.11.1213, 18.12.402, 18.12.407, and 18.12.416  for macOS. The issue has been assigned the CVE identifier CVE-2023-29059 . The company said it's engaging the services of Google-owned Mandiant to review the incident. In the interim, it's urging its customers of self-hosted and on-premise versions of the software to update to version 18.12.422. "3CX Hosted and StartUP users do not need to update their servers as we will be updating them over the night automatically," 3CX CEO Nick Galea  said  in a blog post. "Servers will be restarted and the new Electron App MSI/DMG will be installed on the server." Evidence available so far points to either a compromise of 3CX's software build pipeline to distribute Windows an