A week in security (July 20 – 26)

Last week on Malwarebytes Labs, our Lock and Code podcast delved into Bluetooth and beacon technology. We also dug into APT groups targeting India and Hong Kong, covered a law enforcement bust, and tried to figure out when, exactly, a Deepfake is a Deepfake. Other cybersecurity news Insecure emai...

OilRig APT Drills into Malware Innovation with Unique Backdoor

A series of cyberattacks on a telecom company in the Middle East has signaled the return of the OilRig APT. The attacks also revealed a revised backdoor tool in the group’s arsenal, called RDAT. The attacks were observed in April by Palo Alto Networks’ Unit 42. Researchers there said that the...

Lazarus Group Surfaces with Advanced Malware Framework

The North Korea-linked APT known as Lazarus Group has debuted an advanced, multipurpose malware framework, called MATA, to target Windows, Linux and macOS operating systems. Kaspersky researchers uncovered a series of attacks utilizing MATA so-called because the malware authors themselves call...

Chinese Hackers Escalate Attacks Against India and Hong Kong Amid Tensions

An emerging threat actor out of China has been traced to a new hacking campaign aimed at government agencies in India and residents of Hong Kong intending to steal sensitive information, cybersecurity firm Malwarebytes revealed in the latest report shared with The Hacker News. The attacks were...

Chinese APT group targets India and Hong Kong using new variant of MgBot malware

This blog post was authored by Hossein Jazi and Jérôme Segura On July 2, we found an archive file with an embedded document pretending to be from the government of India. This file used template injection to drop a malicious template which loaded a variant of Cobalt Strike. One day later, the sam...

Fedora: Security Advisory for apt (FEDORA-2020-f03cfe3df5)

The remote host is missing an update for the Copyright C 2020 Greenbone Networks GmbH Some text descriptions might be excerpted from a referenced sources, and are Copyright C by the respective right holders. SPDX-License-Identifier: GPL-2.0-or-later This program is free software; you can...

Fedora 32 : apt (2020-f03cfe3df5)

New upstream release with CVE fixed https://security-tracker.debian.org/tracker/CVE-2020-3810 Note that Tenable Network Security has extracted the preceding description block directly from the Fedora update system website. Tenable has attempted to automatically clean and format it as much as...

[SECURITY] Fedora 32 Update: apt-2.1.7-1.fc32

This package provides commandline tools for searching and managing as well as querying information about packages as a low-level access to all features of the libapt-pkg library. These include: apt-get for retrieval of packages and information about them from authenticated sources and for...

How bad bots are targeting the healthcare sector

Credential cracking, or password spraying, is one of the most effective ways for cybercriminals to get access to user accounts. It refers to the brute-force automated cracking, or pairing of usernames and passwords by using sophisticated high-speed bots. According to a National Cyber Awareness...

Lock and Code S1Ep10: Pulling apart the Internet of Things with JP Taggart

This week on Lock and Code, we discuss the top security headlines generated right here on Labs and around the Internet. In addition, we talk to JP Taggart, senior security researcher at Malwarebytes, about the Internet of Things. For years, Internet capabilities have crept into modern consumer...

StrongPity APT Back with Kurdish-Aimed Watering Hole Attacks

The APT group known as StrongPity is back with a new watering-hole campaign, targeting mainly Kurdish victims in Turkey and Syria. The malware served offers operators the ability to search for and exfiltrate any file or document from a victim’s machine. The group a.k.a. Promethium is operating a...

PROMETHIUM extends global reach with StrongPity3 APT

By Warren Mercer, Paul Rascagneres and Vitor Ventura. News summaryThe threat actor behind StrongPity is not deterred despite being exposed multiple times over the past four years.They continue to expand their victimology and attack seemingly non related countries.This kind of continuous improveme...

USN-4359-1: APT vulnerability | Cloud Foundry

Severity Medium Vendor Canonical Ubuntu Versions Affected Canonical Ubuntu 16.04 Canonical Ubuntu 18.04 Description It was discovered that APT incorrectly handled certain filenames during package installation. If an attacker could provide a specially crafted package to be installed by the system...

Multi-stage APT attack drops Cobalt Strike using Malleable C2 feature

This blog post was authored by Hossein Jazi and Jérôme Segura On June 10, we found a malicious Word document disguised as a resume that uses template injection to drop a .Net Loader. This is the first part of a multi-stage attack that we believe is associated to an APT attack. In the last stage,...

CVE-2020-16122

PackageKit's apt backend mistakenly treated all local debs as trusted. The apt security model is based on repository trust and not on the contents of individual files. On sites with configured PolicyKit rules this may allow users to install malicious packages...

UBUNTU-CVE-2020-16122

PackageKit's apt backend mistakenly treated all local debs as trusted. The apt security model is based on repository trust and not on the contents of individual files. On sites with configured PolicyKit rules this may allow users to install malicious packages...

Microsoft Outlook Users Targeted By Gamaredon's New VBA Macro

The Gamaredon threat group has given its post-compromise toolset a facelift with the addition of a new Visual Basic for Applications VBA macro. The VBA macro leverages compromised victims’ Microsoft Outlook email accounts to send spear-phishing emails to their contacts – rapidly widening the...

Trump, Biden Campaign Staffers Targeted By APT Phishing Emails

With the U.S. presidential election months away, advanced persistent threat APT groups are targeting the campaign staffers of both Donald Trump and Joe Biden in recent phishing attacks. On Thursday, Shane Huntley with Google’s Threat Analysis Group said on Twitter that two separate phishing...

New LNK attack tied to Higaisa APT discovered

This post was authored by Hossein Jazi and Jérôme Segura On May 29th, we identified an attack that we believe is part of a new campaign from an Advanced Persistent Threat actor known as Higaisa. The Higaisa APT is believed to be tied to the Korean peninsula, and was first disclosed by Tencent...

CVE-2020-11091

In Weave Net before version 2.6.3, an attacker able to run a process as root in a container is able to respond to DNS requests from the host and thereby insert themselves as a fake service. In a cluster with an IPv4 internal network, if IPv6 is not totally disabled on the host via ipv6.disable=1 ...