PowerExchange Backdoor and Web Shells Breach at UAE Government Agency

Threat Level Attack Report For a detailed threat advisory, download the pdf file here Summary A high-severity attack targeted a UAE government agency, utilizing a custom PowerShell backdoor named PowerExchange and web shells on Microsoft Exchange servers. To receive real-time threat advisories,...

What is a web shell?

Editors note: The Need to Know is a new series from Talos, which focuses on cybersecurity terms, threats, tools and tactics that are discussed in our broader threat research. Think of this as a living encyclopedia of security terms and trends. Cisco Talos Incident Response recently released our...

New PowerExchange Backdoor Used in Iranian Cyber Attack on UAE Government

An unnamed government entity associated with the United Arab Emirates U.A.E. was targeted by a likely Iranian threat actor to breach the victim's Microsoft Exchange Server with a "simple yet effective" backdoor dubbed PowerExchange. According to a new report from Fortinet FortiGuard Labs, the...

Iranian Agrius Hackers Targeting Israeli Organizations with Moneybird Ransomware

The Iranian threat actor known as Agrius is leveraging a new ransomware strain called Moneybird in its attacks targeting Israeli organizations. Agrius, also known as Pink Sandstorm formerly Americium, has a track record of staging destructive data-wiping attacks aimed at Israel under the guise of...

CVE-2023-2712

Unrestricted Upload of File with Dangerous Type vulnerability in "Rental Module" developed by third-party for Ideasoft's E-commerce Platform allows Command Injection, Using Malicious Files, Upload a Web Shell to a Web Server.This issue affects Rental Module: before 23.05.15...

PT-2023-20965

Name of the Vulnerable Software and Affected Versions Rental Module versions prior to 23.05.15 Description The issue allows Command Injection and enables attackers to upload malicious files, including web shells, to a web server. This is due to an Unrestricted Upload of File with Dangerous Type...

Threat Source newsletter (May 4, 2023) — Recapping the biggest headlines to come out of RSA

Welcome to this weeks edition of the Threat Source newsletter. I didnt attend the RSA Conference in person, and on top of that, I was at the NFL Draft while the conference was going on. Im behind on the biggest talks, panels and presentations that came out during the annual security conference, s...

Operation Soft Cell: Chinese Hackers Breach Middle East Telecom Providers

Telecommunication providers in the Middle East are the subject of new cyber attacks that commenced in the first quarter of 2023. The intrusion set has been attributed to a Chinese cyber espionage actor associated with a long-running campaign dubbed Operation Soft Cell based on tooling overlaps...

North Korean Hackers Exploit Unpatched Zimbra Devices in 'No Pineapple' Campaign

A new intelligence gathering campaign linked to the prolific North Korean state-sponsored Lazarus Group leveraged known security flaws in unpatched Zimbra devices to compromise victim systems. That's according to Finnish cybersecurity company WithSecure formerly F-Secure, which codenamed the...

Cacti Servers Under Attack as Majority Fail to Patch Critical Vulnerability

A majority of internet-exposed Cacti servers have not been patched against a recently patched critical security vulnerability that has come under active exploitation in the wild. That's according to attack surface management platform Censys, which found only 26 out of a total of 6,427 servers to ...

IIS modules: The evolution of web shells and how to detect them

Web exploitation and web shells are some of the most common entry points in the current threat landscape. Web servers provide an external avenue directly into your corporate network, which often results in web servers being an initial intrusion vector or mechanism of persistence. Monitoring for...

IIS modules: The evolution of web shells and how to detect them

Web exploitation and web shells are some of the most common entry points in the current threat landscape. Web servers provide an external avenue directly into your corporate network, which often results in web servers being an initial intrusion vector or mechanism of persistence. Monitoring for...

Iran-based Agrius deploys Fantasy wiper to attack IT firms in Israel

Threat Level Attack Report For a detailed threat advisory, download the pdf file here Summary Iran-based Agrius group has targeted Israel and the United Arab Emirates since 2020. In the beginning, the group deployed a wiper called Apostle, disguised as ransomware, which was later modified into...

Zimbra Releases Patch for Actively Exploited Vulnerability in its Collaboration Suite

Zimbra has released patches to contain an actively exploited security flaw in its enterprise collaboration suite that could be leveraged to upload arbitrary files to vulnerable instances. Tracked as CVE-2022-41352 CVSS score: 9.8, the issue affects a component of the Zimbra suite called Amavis, a...

Mitigation for Exchange Zero-Days Bypassed! Microsoft Issues New Workarounds

Microsoft has revised its mitigation measures for the newly disclosed and actively exploited zero-day flaws in Exchange Server after it was found that they could be trivially bypassed. The two vulnerabilities, tracked as CVE-2022-41040 and CVE-2022-41082, have been codenamed ProxyNotShell due to...

WARNING: New Unpatched Microsoft Exchange Zero-Day Under Active Exploitation

Security researchers are warning of previously undisclosed flaws in fully patched Microsoft Exchange servers being exploited by malicious actors in real-world attacks to achieve remote code execution on affected systems. The advisory comes from Vietnamese cybersecurity company GTSC, which...

Researchers Warn of Ongoing Mass Exploitation of Zimbra RCE Vulnerability

The U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency CISA on Thursday added two flaws to its Known Exploited Vulnerabilities Catalog, citing evidence of active exploitation. The two high-severity issues relate to weaknesses in Zimbra Collaboration, both of which could be chained to achieve...

Malicious IIS extensions quietly open persistent backdoors into servers

Attackers are increasingly leveraging Internet Information Services IIS extensions as covert backdoors into servers, which hide deep in target environments and provide a durable persistence mechanism for attackers. While prior research has been published on specific incidents and variants, little...

Hackers Targeting VoIP Servers By Exploiting Digium Phone Software

VoIP phones using Digium's software have been targeted to drop a web shell on their servers as part of an attack campaign designed to exfiltrate data by downloading and executing additional payloads. "The malware installs multilayer obfuscated PHP backdoors to the web server's file system,...

Microsoft Warns of Cryptomining Malware Campaign Targeting Linux Servers

A cloud threat actor group tracked as 8220 has updated its malware toolset to breach Linux servers with the goal of installing crypto miners as part of a long-running campaign. "The updates include the deployment of new versions of a crypto miner and an IRC bot," Microsoft Security Intelligence...