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Android smartphone users in India are the target of a new malware campaign that employs social engineering lures to install fraudulent apps that are capable of harvesting sensitive data. "Using social media platforms like WhatsApp and Telegram, attackers are sending messages designed to lure users into installing a malicious app on their mobile device by impersonating legitimate organizations, such as banks, government services, and utilities," Microsoft threat intelligence researchers Abhishek Pustakala, Harshita Tripathi, and Shivang Desai  said  in a Monday analysis. The ultimate goal of the operation is to capture banking details, payment card information, account credentials, and other personal data. The attack chains involve sharing malicious APK files via social media messages sent on WhatsApp and Telegram by falsely presenting them as banking apps and inducing a sense of urgency by claiming that the targets' bank accounts will be blocked unless they update their permanent a

Phishing campaigns delivering malware families such as DarkGate and PikaBot are following the same tactics previously used in attacks leveraging the now-defunct QakBot trojan. "These include hijacked email threads as the initial infection, URLs with unique patterns that limit user access, and an infection chain nearly identical to what we have seen with QakBot delivery," Cofense  said  in a report shared with The Hacker News. "The malware families used also follow suit to what we would expect QakBot affiliates to use." QakBot, also called QBot and Pinkslipbot, was  shut down  as part of a coordinated law enforcement effort codenamed Operation Duck Hunt earlier this August. The use of DarkGate and PikaBot in these campaigns is not surprising as they can both act as conduits to deliver additional payloads to compromised hosts, making them both an attractive option for cybercriminals. PikaBot's parallels to QakBot were  previously highlighted  by Zscaler in its analysis of the malw

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

A hacking group that leveraged a recently disclosed security flaw in the WinRAR software as a zero-day has now been categorized as an entirely new advanced persistent threat (APT). Cybersecurity company NSFOCUS has described  DarkCasino  as an "economically motivated" actor that first came to light in 2021. "DarkCasino is an APT threat actor with strong technical and learning ability, who is good at integrating various popular APT attack technologies into its attack process," the company  said  in an analysis. "Attacks launched by the APT group DarkCasino are very frequent, demonstrating a strong desire to steal online property." DarkCasino was most recently linked to the zero-day exploitation of  CVE-2023-38831  (CVSS score: 7.8), a security flaw that can be weaponized to launch malicious payloads. In August 2023, Group-IB disclosed real-world attacks weaponizing the vulnerability and aimed at online trading forums at least since April 2023 to deli

The  three zero-day flaws  addressed by Apple on September 21, 2023, were leveraged as part of an iPhone exploit chain in an attempt to deliver a spyware strain called  Predator  targeting former Egyptian member of parliament Ahmed Eltantawy between May and September 2023. "The targeting took place after Eltantawy publicly  stated his plans  to run for President in the 2024 Egyptian elections," the Citizen Lab  said , attributing the attack with high confidence to the Egyptian government owing to it being a known customer of the commercial spying tool. According to a joint investigation conducted by the Canadian interdisciplinary laboratory and Google's Threat Analysis Group (TAG), the mercenary surveillance tool is said to have been delivered via links sent on SMS and WhatsApp. "In August and September 2023, Eltantawy's Vodafone Egypt mobile connection was persistently selected for targeting via network injection; when Eltantawy visited certain websites not

Google on Thursday disclosed it took steps to dismantle over 50,000 instances of activity orchestrated by a pro-Chinese influence operation known as DRAGONBRIDGE in 2022. "Most DRAGONBRIDGE activity is low quality content without a political message, populated across many channels and blogs," the company's Threat Analysis Group (TAG)  said  in a  report  shared with The Hacker News. "However, a small fraction of DRAGONBRIDGE accounts also post about current events with messaging that pushes pro-China talking points." DRAGONBRIDGE  was first exposed by Google-owned Mandiant in July 2022, calling out its unsuccessful efforts in targeting rare earth mining companies in Australia, Canada, and the U.S. with the goal of triggering environmental protests against the firms. Also known by the name Spamouflage Dragon, the spammy influence network is known to have a presence across multiple platforms, including YouTube, Blogger, Facebook, and Twitter, primarily dissem

Last year, there were discussions about Google Code—a platform that lets developers host their projects—being exploited to distribute malware. Research by zScaler has identified yet another instance where this platform has been misused. According to the Google Code site: "Project Hosting on Google Code provides a free collaborative development environment for open source projects. Each project includes its own member controls, Subversion/Mercurial repository, issue tracker, wiki pages, and downloads section. Our hosting service is designed to be simple, fast, reliable, and scalable, enabling you to concentrate on your open source development." The concerning project contained over 50 executable files in its download section. These files, mainly executable and zipped ".rar" files, have been uploaded over the past month, indicating that an attacker is actively using this free service to disseminate malware. VirusTotal results for the first file revealed that only 8