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The Computer Emergency Response Team of Ukraine (CERT-UA) has warned of new phishing attacks that aim to infect devices with malware. The activity has been attributed to a threat cluster it tracks as UAC-0020, which is also known as Vermin . The exact scale and scope of the attacks are presently unknown. The attack chains commence with phishing messages with photos of alleged prisoners of war (PoWs) from the Kursk region, urging recipients to click on a link pointing to a ZIP archive. The ZIP file contains a Microsoft Compiled HTML Help (CHM) file that embeds JavaScript code responsible for launching an obfuscated PowerShell script. "Opening the file installs components of known spyware SPECTR, as well as the new malware called FIRMACHAGENT," CERT-UA said. "The purpose of FIRMACHAGENT is to retrive the data stolen by SPECTR and send it to a remote management server." SPECTR is a known malware linked to Vermin as far back as 2019. The group is assessed to be

The Russian government and IT organizations are the target of a new campaign that delivers a number of backdoors and trojans as part of a spear-phishing campaign codenamed EastWind . The attack chains are characterized by the use of RAR archive attachments containing a Windows shortcut (LNK) file that, upon opening, activates the infection sequence, culminating in the deployment of malware such as GrewApacha, an updated version of the CloudSorcerer backdoor, and a previously undocumented implant dubbed PlugY. PlugY is "downloaded through the CloudSorcerer backdoor, has an extensive set of commands and supports three different protocols for communicating with the command-and-control server," Russian cybersecurity company Kaspersky said . The initial infection vector relies on a booby-trapped LNK file, which employs DLL side-loading techniques to launch a malicious DLL file that uses Dropbox as a communications mechanism to execute reconnaissance commands and download add

Want to know what's the latest and greatest in SecOps for 2024? Gartner's recently released Hype Cycle for Security Operations report takes important steps to organize and mature the domain of Continuous Threat Exposure Management, aka CTEM. Three categories within this domain are included in this year's report: Threat Exposure Management, Exposure Assessment Platforms (EAP), and Adversarial Exposure Validation (AEV). These category definitions are aimed at providing some structure to the evolving landscape of exposure management technologies. Pentera, listed as a sample vendor in the newly defined AEV category, is playing a pivotal role in increasing the adoption of CTEM, with a focus on security validation. Following is our take on the CTEM related product categories and what they mean for enterprise security leaders. The Industry is Maturing CTEM, coined by Gartner in 2022, presents a structural approach for continuously assessing, prioritizing, validating, and remediating expo

Companies in Russia and Moldova have been the target of a phishing campaign orchestrated by a little-known cyber espionage group known as XDSpy . The findings come from cybersecurity firm F.A.C.C.T., which said the infection chains lead to the deployment of a malware called DSDownloader. The activity was observed this month, it added. XDSpy is a threat actor of indeterminate origin that was first uncovered by the Belarusian Computer Emergency Response Team, CERT.BY, in February 2020. A subsequent analysis by ESET attributed the group to information-stealing attacks aimed at government agencies in Eastern Europe and the Balkans since 2011. Attack chains mounted by the adversary are known to leverage spear-phishing emails in order to infiltrate their targets with a main malware module known as XDDown that, in turn, drops additional plugins for gathering system information, enumerating C: drive, monitoring external drives, exfiltrating local files, and gathering passwords. Ove

A 22-year-old Russian national has been indicted in the U.S. for his alleged role in staging destructive cyber attacks against Ukraine and its allies in the days leading to Russia's full-blown military invasion of Ukraine in early 2022. Amin Timovich Stigal, the defendant in question, is assessed to be affiliated with the Main Directorate of the General Staff of the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation (GRU). He remains at large. If convicted, he faces a maximum penalty of five years in prison. Concurrent with the action, the U.S. Department of State's Rewards for Justice program is offering a reward of up to $10 million for information pertaining to his whereabouts or the malicious cyber attacks he is associated with. "The defendant conspired with Russian military intelligence on the eve of Russia's unjust and unprovoked invasion of Ukraine to launch cyberattacks targeting the Ukrainian government and later targeting its allies, including the United States,&quo

Microsoft has emphasized the need for securing internet-exposed operational technology (OT) devices following a spate of cyber attacks targeting such environments since late 2023. "These repeated attacks against OT devices emphasize the crucial need to improve the security posture of OT devices and prevent critical systems from becoming easy targets," the Microsoft Threat Intelligence team said . The company noted that a cyber attack on an OT system could allow malicious actors to tamper with critical parameters used in industrial processes, either programmatically via the programmable logic controller (PLC) or using the graphical controls of the human-machine interface (HMI), resulting in malfunctions and system outages. It further said that OT systems often lack adequate security mechanisms, making them ripe for exploitation by adversaries and carry out attacks that are "relatively easy to execute," a fact compounded by the additional risks introduced by direc

The U.S. Treasury Department's Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) on Monday sanctioned two firms and four individuals for their involvement in malicious cyber activities on behalf of the Iranian Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps Cyber Electronic Command (IRGC-CEC) from at least 2016 to April 2021. This includes the front companies Mehrsam Andisheh Saz Nik (MASN) and Dadeh Afzar Arman (DAA), as well as the Iranian nationals Alireza Shafie Nasab, Reza Kazemifar Rahman, Hossein Mohammad Harooni, and Komeil Baradaran Salmani. "These actors targeted more than a dozen U.S. companies and government entities through cyber operations, including spear-phishing and malware attacks," the Treasury Department  said . Concurrent with the sanctions, the U.S. Department of Justice (DoJ)  unsealed  an indictment against the four individuals for orchestrating cyber attacks targeting the U.S. government and private entities. Furthermore, a  reward of up to $10 million  has been an

The U.S. Department of Justice (DoJ) on Monday unsealed indictments against seven Chinese nationals for their involvement in a hacking group that targeted U.S. and foreign critics, journalists, businesses, and political officials for about 14 years. The defendants include Ni Gaobin (倪高彬), Weng Ming (翁明), Cheng Feng (程锋), Peng Yaowen (彭耀文), Sun Xiaohui (孙小辉), Xiong Wang (熊旺), and Zhao Guangzong (赵光宗).  The suspected cyber spies have been charged with conspiracy to commit computer intrusions and conspiracy to commit wire fraud in connection with a state-sponsored threat group tracked as  APT31 , which is also known as Altaire,  Bronze Vinewood , Judgement Panda, and Violet Typhoon (formerly Zirconium). The hacking collective has been  active since at least 2010 . Specifically, their responsibilities entail testing and exploiting the malware used to conduct the intrusions, managing the attack infrastructure, and conducting surveillance of specific U.S. entities, federal prosecutors no

A China-linked threat cluster leveraged security flaws in Connectwise ScreenConnect and F5 BIG-IP software to deliver custom malware capable of delivering additional backdoors on compromised Linux hosts as part of an "aggressive" campaign. Google-owned Mandiant is  tracking  the activity under its uncategorized moniker  UNC5174  (aka Uteus or Uetus), describing it as a "former member of Chinese hacktivist collectives that has since shown indications of acting as a contractor for China's Ministry of State Security (MSS) focused on executing access operations." The threat actor is believed to have orchestrated widespread attacks against Southeast Asian and U.S. research and education institutions, Hong Kong businesses, charities and non-governmental organizations (NGOs), and U.S. and U.K. government organizations between October and November 2023, and again in February 2024 using the ScreenConnect bug. Initial access to target environments is facilitated by t

The data wiping malware called  AcidPour  may have been deployed in attacks targeting four telecom providers in Ukraine, new findings from SentinelOne show. The cybersecurity firm also confirmed connections between the malware and AcidRain, tying it to threat activity clusters associated with Russian military intelligence. "AcidPour's expanded capabilities would enable it to better disable embedded devices including networking, IoT, large storage (RAIDs), and possibly ICS devices running Linux x86 distributions," security researchers Juan Andres Guerrero-Saade and Tom Hegel  said . AcidPour is a variant of  AcidRain , a wiper that was used to render Viasat KA-SAT modems operable at the onset of the Russo-Ukrainian war in early 2022 and cripple Ukraine's military communications. It also builds upon the latter's features, while targeting Linux systems running on x86 architecture. AcidRain, on the other hand, is compiled for MIPS architecture. Where AcidRain w

The U.S. Treasury Department's Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) on Wednesday announced sanctions against two 46-year-old Russian nationals and the respective companies they own for engaging in cyber influence operations. Ilya Andreevich Gambashidze (Gambashidze), the founder of the Moscow-based company Social Design Agency (SDA), and Nikolai Aleksandrovich Tupikin (Tupikin), the CEO and current owner of Russia-based Company Group Structura LLC (Structura), have been accused of providing services to the Russian government in connection to a "foreign malign influence campaign." The disinformation campaign is tracked by the broader cybersecurity community under the name  Doppelganger , which is known to target audiences in Europe and the U.S. using inauthentic news sites and social media accounts. "SDA and Structura have been identified as key actors of the campaign, responsible for providing [the Government of the Russian Federation] with a variety of servic

A new variant of a data wiping malware called AcidRain has been detected in the wild that's specifically designed for targeting Linux x86 devices. The malware, dubbed AcidPour, is compiled for Linux x86 devices, SentinelOne's Juan Andres Guerrero-Saade said in a series of posts on X. "The new variant [...] is an ELF binary compiled for x86 (not MIPS) and while it refers to similar devices/strings, it's a largely different codebase," Guerrero-Saade  noted . AcidRain  first came to light  in the early days of the Russo-Ukrainian war, with the malware deployed against KA-SAT modems from U.S. satellite company Viasat. An ELF binary compiled for MIPS architectures, it is capable of wiping the filesystem and different known storage device files by recursively iterating over common directories for most Linux distributions. The cyber attack was  subsequently attributed  to Russia by the Five Eyes nations, along with Ukraine and the European Union. AcidPour, as the

The Russia-linked threat actor known as  APT28  has been linked to multiple ongoing phishing campaigns that employ lure documents imitating government and non-governmental organizations (NGOs) in Europe, the South Caucasus, Central Asia, and North and South America. "The uncovered lures include a mixture of internal and publicly available documents, as well as possible actor-generated documents associated with finance, critical infrastructure, executive engagements, cyber security, maritime security, healthcare, business, and defense industrial production," IBM X-Force  said  in a report published last week. The tech company is tracking the activity under the moniker  ITG05 , which is also known as Blue Athena, BlueDelta, Fancy Bear, Fighting Ursa, Forest Blizzard (formerly Strontium), FROZENLAKE, Iron Twilight, Pawn Storm, Sednit, Sofacy, TA422, and UAC-028. The disclosure comes more than three months after the adversary was spotted using decoys related to the ongoing I

The environmental services industry witnessed an "unprecedented surge" in HTTP-based distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks, accounting for half of all its HTTP traffic. This marks a 61,839% increase in DDoS attack traffic year-over-year, web infrastructure and security company Cloudflare said in its DDoS threat report for 2023 Q4 published last week. "This surge in cyber attacks coincided with  COP 28 , which ran from November 30th to December 12th, 2023," security researchers Omer Yoachimik and Jorge Pacheco  said , describing it as a "disturbing trend in the cyber threat landscape." The uptick in HTTP attacks targeting environmental services websites is part of a larger trend observed annually over the past few years, specifically during COP 26 and COP 27, as well as other United Nations environment-related resolutions or announcements. "This recurring pattern underscores the growing intersection between environmental issues and cyber security, a nexus that is increasingl

Cybersecurity researchers have warned about a Windows version of a wiper malware that was previously observed targeting Linux systems in cyber attacks aimed at Israel. Dubbed  BiBi-Windows Wiper  by BlackBerry, the wiper is the Windows counterpart of  BiBi-Linux Wiper , which has been put to use by a pro-Hamas hacktivist group in the wake of the Israel-Hamas war last month. "The Windows variant [...] confirms that the threat actors who created the wiper are continuing to build out the malware, and indicates an expansion of the attack to target end user machines and application servers," the Canadian company  said  Friday. Slovak cybersecurity firm ESET is  tracking  the actor behind the wiper under the name BiBiGun, noting that the Windows variant (bibi.exe) is designed to overwrite data in the C:\Users directory recursively with junk data and append ".BiBi" to the filename. The BiBi-Windows Wiper artifact is said to have been compiled on October 21, 2023, two

The notorious Russian hackers known as  Sandworm  targeted an electrical substation in Ukraine last year, causing a brief power outage in October 2022. The findings come from Google's Mandiant, which described the hack as a "multi-event cyber attack" leveraging a novel technique for impacting industrial control systems (ICS). "The actor first used OT-level living-off-the-land ( LotL ) techniques to likely trip the victim's substation circuit breakers, causing an unplanned power outage that coincided with mass missile strikes on critical infrastructure across Ukraine," the company  said . "Sandworm later conducted a second disruptive event by deploying a new variant of  CaddyWiper  in the victim's IT environment." The threat intelligence firm did not reveal the location of the targeted energy facility, the duration of the blackout, and the number of people who were impacted by the incident. The development marks Sandworm's  continuous

A 29-year-old former CIA computer programmer who was charged with possession of child pornography last year has now been charged with masterminding the largest leak of classified information in the agency's history. Joshua Adam Schulte , who once created malware for both the CIA and NSA to break into adversaries computers, was indicted Monday by the Department of Justice on 13 charges of allegedly stealing and transmitting thousands of classified CIA documents , software projects , and hacking utilities . Schulte has also been suspected of leaking the stolen archive of documents to anti-secrecy organization WikiLeaks, who then began publishing the classified information in March 2017 in a series of leaks under the name " Vault 7 ." It is yet unconfirmed whether Schulte leaked documents to WikiLeaks and if yes, then when, but he had already been a suspect since January 2017 of stealing classified national defense information from the CIA in 2016. According to