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...

NSA Watchdog Will Review Tucker Carlson Spy Claims

The National Security Agency’s Inspector General Robert Storch has announced a review of whether the agency illegally conducted cyber-espionage and collected the electronic communications of Fox News opinion-show host Tucker Carlson, who has accused the NSA of trying to capture embarrassing...

UNC215: Spotlight on a Chinese Espionage Campaign in Israel

This blog post details the post-compromise tradecraft and operational tactics, techniques, and procedures TTPs of a Chinese espionage group we track as UNC215. While UNC215’s targets are located throughout the Middle East, Europe, Asia, and North America, this report focuses on intrusion activity...

Experts Believe Chinese Hackers Are Behind Several Attacks Targeting Israel

A Chinese cyber espionage group has been linked to a string of intrusion activities targeting Israeli government institutions, IT providers, and telecommunications companies at least since 2019, with the hackers masquerading themselves as Iranian actors to mislead forensic analysis. FireEye's...

Russian Federal Agencies Were Attacked With Chinese Webdav-O Virus

An amalgam of multiple state-sponsored threat groups from China may have been behind a string of targeted attacks against Russian federal executive authorities in 2020. The latest research, published by Singapore-headquartered company Group-IB, delves into a piece of computer virus called...

New Chinese Spyware Being Used in Widespread Cyber Espionage Attacks

A threat actor presumed to be of Chinese origin has been linked to a series of 10 attacks targeting Mongolia, Russia, Belarus, Canada, and the U.S. from January to July 2021 that involve the deployment of a remote access trojan RAT on infected systems, according to new research. The intrusions ha...

Chinese Hackers Target Major Southeast Asian Telecom Companies

Three distinct clusters of malicious activities operating on behalf of Chinese state interests have staged a series of attacks to target networks belonging to at least five major telecommunications companies located in Southeast Asian countries since 2017. "The goal of the attackers behind these...

Experts Uncover Several C&C Servers Linked to WellMess Malware

Cybersecurity researchers on Friday unmasked new command-and-control C2 infrastructure belonging to the Russian threat actor tracked as APT29, aka Cozy Bear, that has been spotted actively serving WellMess malware as part of an ongoing attack campaign. More than 30 C2 servers operated by the...

Hackers Posed as Aerobics Instructors for Years to Target Aerospace Employees

An Iranian cyberespionage group masqueraded as an aerobics instructor on Facebook in an attempt to infect the machine of an employee of an aerospace defense contractor with malware as part of a years-long social engineering and targeted malware campaign. Enterprise security firm Proofpoint...

Indictments, Attribution Unlikely to Deter Chinese Hacking

The federal government is fighting back against what it says are China-based cyberattacks against U.S. universities and companies with indictments and a “naming-and-shaming” approach — but researchers aren’t convinced the efforts will come to much in terms of deterring future activity. On Monday,...

US, EU, UK, NATO blame china for “reckless” Exchange attacks

Do you remember back when the latest urgent update was a vulnerability in Microsoft Exchange? How is that only four months ago? The trigger for the urgent advice in March was the fact that Microsoft detected multiple zero-day exploits being used to attack on-premises versions of Microsoft Exchang...

U.S. Government Releases Indictment and Several Advisories Detailing Chinese Cyber Threat Activity

CISA, the Federal Bureau of Investigation FBI, and the National Security Agency NSA have observed increasingly sophisticated Chinese state-sponsored activity targeting U.S. political, economic, military, educational, and critical infrastructure personnel and organizations. In response: The White...