The Tale of Two Exploits - Breaking Down CVE-2023-36884 and the Infection Chain

The Tale of Two Exploits - Breaking Down CVE-2023-36884 and the Infection Chain By Chintan Shah · August 24, 2023 Executive Summary On July 11 2023, Microsoft released a patch fixing multiple actively exploited RCE vulnerabilities and disclosed a phishing campaign conducted by the threat actor,...

"Mysterious Team Bangladesh" Targeting India with DDoS Attacks and Data Breaches

A hacktivist group known as Mysterious Team Bangladesh has been linked to over 750 distributed denial-of-service DDoS attacks and 78 website defacements since June 2022. "The group most frequently attacks logistics, government, and financial sector organizations in India and Israel,"...

RomCom RAT Targeting NATO and Ukraine Support Groups

The threat actors behind the RomCom RAT have been suspected of phishing attacks targeting the upcoming NATO Summit in Vilnius as well as an identified organization supporting Ukraine abroad. The findings come from the BlackBerry Threat Research and Intelligence team, which found two malicious...

North Korea's Kimsuky Group Mimics Key Figures in Targeted Cyber Attacks

U.S. and South Korean intelligence agencies have issued a new alert warning of North Korean cyber actors' use of social engineering tactics to strike think tanks, academia, and news media sectors. The "sustained information gathering efforts" have been attributed to a state-sponsored cluster dubb...

North Korea's Kimsuky Group Mimics Key Figures in Targeted Cyber Attacks

U.S. and South Korean intelligence agencies have issued a new alert warning of North Korean cyber actors' use of social engineering tactics to strike think tanks, academia, and news media sectors. The "sustained information gathering efforts" have been attributed to a state-sponsored cluster dubb...

Iranian Tortoiseshell Hackers Targeting Israeli Logistics Industry

At least eight websites associated with shipping, logistics, and financial services companies in Israel were targeted as part of a watering hole attack. Tel Aviv-based cybersecurity company ClearSky attributed the attacks with low confidence to an Iranian threat actor tracked as Tortoiseshell,...

China Bans U.S. Chip Giant Micron, Citing "Serious Cybersecurity Problems"

China has banned U.S. chip maker Micron from selling its products to Chinese companies working on key infrastructure projects, citing national security risks. The development comes nearly two months after the country's cybersecurity authority initiated a probe in late March 2023 to assess potenti...

Escalating China-Taiwan Tensions Fuel Alarming Surge in Cyber Attacks

The rising geopolitical tensions between China and Taiwan in recent months have sparked a noticeable uptick in cyber attacks on the East Asian island country. "From malicious emails and URLs to malware, the strain between China's claim of Taiwan as part of its territory and Taiwan's maintained...

China-Taiwan Tensions Spark Surge in Cyberattacks on Taiwan

China-Taiwan Tensions Spark Surge in Cyberattacks on Taiwan By Daksh Kapur, Leandro Velasco · May 17, 2023 Figure 1 image from freepik.com “In the past few years, we noticed that geopolitical conflicts are one of the main drivers for cyber-attacks on a variety of industries and institutions...

China-Taiwan Tensions Spark Surge in Cyberattacks on Taiwan

China-Taiwan Tensions Spark Surge in Cyberattacks on Taiwan By Daksh Kapur, Leandro Velasco · May 17, 2023 Figure 1 image from freepik.com “In the past few years, we noticed that geopolitical conflicts are one of the main drivers for cyber-attacks on a variety of industries and institutions...

New ransomware trends in 2023

Ransomware keeps making headlines. In a quest for profits, attackers target all types of organizations, from healthcare and educational institutions to service providers and industrial enterprises, affecting almost every aspect of our lives. In 2022, Kaspersky solutions detected over 74.2M...

Unraveling North Korea’s Cyber Espionage Group APT43 Targeting Geopolitical Interests

Threat Level Actor Report For a detailed threat advisory, download the pdf file here Summary APT43 is a cyber espionage group that serves North Korean regime interests by targeting government organizations, academics, and think tanks focused on Korean peninsula geopolitical issues, mainly in Sout...

KillNet and affiliate hacktivist groups targeting healthcare with DDoS attacks

In the last year, geopolitical tension has led to an uptick of reported cybercrime events fueled by hacktivist groups. The US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency CISA published an advisory to warn organizations about these attacks and teamed with the FBI on a distributed...

Threat Source newsletter (Feb. 9, 2023): Don't let criminals exploit your empathy

Welcome to this weeks edition of the Threat Source newsletter. Our hearts are with the people of Turkey and Syria and all those impacted by the tragic earthquake. The Cisco Foundation has launched a matching campaign to support local disaster relief organizations. As a person its always difficult...

Ransomware and Commodity Loader Topic Summary Report: Cisco Talos Year in Review 2022

The ransomware space is dynamic, continually adapting to changes in the geopolitical environment, actions by defenders, and efforts by law enforcement, which increased in scope and intensity in 2022. This leads groups to rebrand under different names, shut down operations, and form new strategic...

Researchers Uncover Connection b/w Moses Staff and Emerging Abraham's Ax Hacktivists Group

New research has linked the operations of a politically motivated hacktivist group known as Moses Staff to another nascent threat actor named Abraham's Ax that emerged in November 2022. This is based on "several commonalities across the iconography, videography, and leak sites used by the groups,...

Earth Bogle Campaign Unleashes NjRAT Trojan on Middle East and North Africa

An ongoing campaign dubbed Earth Bogle is leveraging geopolitical-themed lures to deliver the NjRAT remote access trojan to victims across the Middle East and North Africa. "The threat actor uses public cloud storage services such as files.fm and failiem.lv to host malware, while compromised web...

Earth Bogle Campaign Unleashes NjRAT Trojan on Middle East and North Africa

An ongoing campaign dubbed Earth Bogle is leveraging geopolitical-themed lures to deliver the NjRAT remote access trojan to victims across the Middle East and North Africa. "The threat actor uses public cloud storage services such as files.fm and failiem.lv to host malware, while compromised web...

Iranian Government Entities Under Attack by New Wave of BackdoorDiplomacy Attacks

The threat actor known as BackdoorDiplomacy has been linked to a new wave of attacks targeting Iranian government entities between July and late December 2022. Palo Alto Networks Unit 42, which is tracking the activity under its constellation-themed moniker Playful Taurus, said it observed the...

Earth Bogle: Campaigns Target the Middle East with Geopolitical Lures

We discovered an active campaign ongoing since at least mid-2022 which uses Middle Eastern geopolitical-themed lures to distribute NjRAT also known as Bladabindi to infect victims across the Middle East and North Africa...