HTML Smuggling | Breaking Cybersecurity News | The Hacker News

Cybersecurity researchers are alerting of phishing campaigns that abuse  Cloudflare Workers  to serve phishing sites that are used to harvest users' credentials associated with Microsoft, Gmail, Yahoo!, and cPanel Webmail. The attack method, called transparent phishing or adversary-in-the-middle ( AitM ) phishing, "uses Cloudflare Workers to act as a reverse proxy server for a legitimate login page, intercepting traffic between the victim and the login page to capture credentials, cookies, and tokens," Netskope researcher Jan Michael Alcantara  said  in a report. A majority of phishing campaigns hosted on Cloudflare Workers over the past 30 days have targeted victims in Asia, North America, and Southern Europe, spanning technology, financial services, and banking sectors. The cybersecurity firm said that an increase in traffic to Cloudflare Workers-hosted phishing pages was first registered in Q2 2023, noting it observed a spike in the total number of distinct domains

Cybersecurity researchers have discovered a new malware campaign that leverages bogus Google Sites pages and HTML smuggling to distribute a commercial malware called  AZORult  in order to facilitate information theft. "It uses an unorthodox HTML smuggling technique where the malicious payload is embedded in a separate JSON file hosted on an external website," Netskope Threat Labs researcher Jan Michael Alcantara  said  in a report published last week. The phishing campaign has not been attributed to a specific threat actor or group. The cybersecurity company described it as widespread in nature, carried out with an intent to collect sensitive data for selling them in underground forums. AZORult, also called PuffStealer and Ruzalto, is an  information stealer  first detected around 2016. It's typically distributed via phishing and malspam campaigns, trojanized installers for pirated software or media, and malvertising. Once installed, it's capable of gathering cr

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

Phishing campaigns involving the  Qakbot malware  are using Scalable Vector Graphics ( SVG ) images embedded in HTML email attachments. The new distribution method was spotted by Cisco Talos, which  said  it identified fraudulent email messages featuring HTML attachments with encoded SVG images that incorporate  HTML script tags . HTML smuggling is a  technique  that relies on using legitimate features of HTML and JavaScript to run encoded malicious code contained within the lure attachment and assemble the payload on a victim's machine as opposed to making an HTTP request to fetch the malware from a remote server. In other words, the idea is to evade email gateways by storing a binary in the form of a JavaScript code that's decoded and downloaded when opened via a web browser. The attack chain spotted by the cybersecurity company concerns a JavaScript that's smuggled inside of the SVG image and executed when the unsuspecting email recipient launches the HTML attachme

Threat actors are increasingly banking on the technique of  HTML smuggling  in phishing campaigns as a means to gain initial access and deploy an array of threats, including banking malware, remote administration trojans (RATs), and ransomware payloads. Microsoft 365 Defender Threat Intelligence Team, in a new report published Thursday, disclosed that it identified infiltrations distributing the  Mekotio  banking Trojan, backdoors such as  AsyncRAT  and  NjRAT , and the infamous  TrickBot  malware. The multi-staged attacks — dubbed  ISOMorph  — were also publicly documented by Menlo Security in July 2021. HTML smuggling is an approach that allows an attacker to "smuggle" first-stage droppers, often encoded malicious scripts embedded within specially-crafted HTML attachments or web pages, on a victim machine by taking advantage of basic features in HTML5 and JavaScript rather than exploiting a vulnerability or a design flaw in modern web browsers. By doing so, it enables