Windows Zero-Day Actively Exploited in Widespread Espionage Campaign

Researchers have discovered a zero-day exploit for Microsoft Windows that was being used to elevate privileges and take over Windows servers as part of a Chinese-speaking advanced persistent threat APT espionage campaign this summer. The exploit chain ended with a freshly discovered remote access...

Office 365 Spy Campaign Targets US Military Defense

A new threat actor, dubbed DEV-0343, has been spotted attacking U.S. and Israeli defense technology companies, Persian Gulf ports of entry and global maritime transportation companies with ties to the Middle East. The threat actor’s goal is Microsoft Office 365 account takeovers. Microsoft, which...

MysterySnail attacks with Windows zero-day

Executive Summary In late August and early September 2021, Kaspersky technologies detected attacks with the use of an elevation of privilege exploit on multiple Microsoft Windows servers. The exploit had numerous debug strings from an older, publicly known exploit for vulnerability CVE-2016-3309,...

ESPecter Bootkit Malware Haunts Victims with Persistent Espionage

A rare Windows UEFI bootkit malware has been discovered, offering attackers a path to cyber-espionage, researchers are warning. According to ESET, the bootkit’s goal is to install a full featured backdoor on a target PC, which “supports a rich set of commands and contains various automatic data...

Iranian Hackers Abuse Dropbox in Cyberattacks Against Aerospace and Telecom Firms

Details have emerged about a new cyber espionage campaign directed against the aerospace and telecommunications industries, primarily in the Middle East, with the goal of stealing sensitive information about critical assets, organizations' infrastructure, and technology while remaining in the dar...

Researchers Discover UEFI Bootkit Targeting Windows Computers Since 2012

Cybersecurity researchers on Tuesday revealed details of a previously undocumented UEFI Unified Extensible Firmware Interface bootkit that has been put to use by threat actors to backdoor Windows systems as early as 2012 by modifying a legitimate Windows Boot Manager binary to achieve persistence...

Criminals were inside Syniverse for 5 years before anyone noticed

"A global privacy disaster", "espionage gold", and "a state-sponsored wet dream" are just some of the comments one can read regarding the breach at Syniverse, a key player in the tech/telecommunications industry that calls itself the "center of the connected world." In a filing with the US Securi...

New Study Links Seemingly Disparate Malware Attacks to Chinese Hackers

Chinese cyber espionage group APT41 has been linked to seemingly disparate malware campaigns, according to fresh research that has mapped together additional parts of the group's network infrastructure to hit upon a state-sponsored campaign that takes advantage of COVID-themed phishing lures to...

‘Tomiris’ Backdoor Linked to SolarWinds Malware

Researchers have discovered a campaign delivering a previously unknown backdoor they’re calling Tomiris. Analysis of the new malware suggests that we may not have heard the last from the Nobelium advanced persistent threat APT behind the sprawling SolarWinds supply-chain attacks of 2020. Namely,...

A New APT Hacker Group Spying On Hotels and Governments Worldwide

A new advanced persistent threat APT has been behind a string of attacks against hotels across the world, along with governments, international organizations, engineering companies, and law firms. Slovak cybersecurity firm ESET codenamed the cyber espionage group FamousSparrow, which it said has...

FamousSparrow APT Spies on Hotels, Governments

A cyberespionage group dubbed “FamousSparrow” by researchers has taken flight, targeting hotels, governments and private organizations around the world with a custom backdoor called, appropriately, “SparrowDoor.” It’s one of the advanced persistent threats APTs that targeted the ProxyLogon...

A New Wave of Malware Attack Targeting Organizations in South America

A spam campaign delivering spear-phishing emails aimed at South American organizations has retooled its techniques to include a wide range of commodity remote access trojans RATs and geolocation filtering to avoid detection, according to new research. Cybersecurity firm Trend Micro attributed the...

Airline Credential-Theft Takes Off in Widening Campaign

A two-year-old espionage campaign against the airline industry is ongoing, with AsyncRAT and other commodity remote-access trojans RATs helping those efforts take flight. The campaign can effectively be a bird strike to the business engine, so to speak, resulting in data theft, financial fraud or...

3 Former U.S. Intelligence Officers Admit to Hacking for UAE Company

The U.S. Department of Justice DoJ on Tuesday disclosed it fined three intelligence community and military personnel $1.68 million in penalties for their role as cyber-mercenaries working on behalf of a U.A.E.-based cybersecurity company. The trio in question — Marc Baier, 49, Ryan Adams, 34, and...

Experts Uncover Mobile Spyware Attacks Targeting Kurdish Ethnic Group

Cybersecurity researchers on Tuesday released new findings that reveal a year-long mobile espionage campaign against the Kurdish ethnic group to deploy two Android backdoors that masquerade as legitimate apps. Active since at least March 2020, the attacks leveraged as many as six dedicated Facebo...

A week in security (August 16 – August 22)

Last week on Malwarebytes Labs: Podcast: Katie Moussouris hacked Clubhouse. Her emails went unanswered for weeks. How to troubleshoot hardware problems that look like malware problems. Analysts “strongly believe” the Russian state colludes with ransomware gangs. macOS 11’s hidden security...

ShadowPad Malware is Becoming a Favorite Choice of Chinese Espionage Groups

ShadowPad, an infamous Windows backdoor that allows attackers to download further malicious modules or steal data, has been put to use by five different Chinese threat clusters since 2017. "The adoption of ShadowPad significantly reduces the costs of development and maintenance for threat actors,...

Chinese State-Sponsored Cyber Operations: Observed TTPs

Summary This advisory uses the MITRE Adversarial Tactics, Techniques, and Common Knowledge ATT &CK® framework, Version 9, and MITRE D3FEND™ framework, version 0.9.2-BETA-3. See the ATT&CK for Enterprise for all referenced threat actor tactics and techniques and the D3FEND framework for referenced...

Tetris: Chinese Espionage Tool

Im starting to see writings about a Chinese espionage tool that exploits website vulnerabilities to try and identify Chinese dissidents...

Iranian Hackers Target Several Israeli Organizations With Supply-Chain Attacks

IT and communication companies in Israel were at the center of a supply chain attack campaign spearheaded by an Iranian threat actor that involved impersonating the firms and their HR personnel to target victims with fake job offers in an attempt to penetrate their computers and gain access to th...