Cyber Attacks Strike Ukraine's State Bodies in Espionage Operation

The Computer Emergency Response Team of Ukraine CERT-UA has warned of cyber attacks targeting state bodies in the country as part of an espionage campaign. The intrusion set, attributed to a threat actor tracked by the authority as UAC-0063 since 2021, leverages phishing lures to deploy a variety...

Emotet resumes spam operations, switches to OneNote

Emotet resumed spamming operations on March 7, 2023, after a months-long hiatus. Initially leveraging heavily padded Microsoft Word documents to attempt to evade sandbox analysis and endpoint protection, the botnets switched to distributing malicious OneNote documents on March 16. Since returning...

Lazarus Targets Job-Seeking Engineers with Malicious Documents

The notorious Lazarus advanced persistent threat APT group has been identified as the cybergang behind a campaign spreading malicious documents to job-seeking engineers. The ploy involves impersonating defense contractors seeking job candidates. Researchers have been tracking Lazarus activity for...

Rubella Crimeware Kit: Cheap, Easy and Gaining Traction

A crimeware kit dubbed the Rubella Macro Builder is betting on a “dirty deeds done dirt cheap” approach to gain popularity in the criminal underground. The kit does two things: with a point-and-click builder functionality, it generates an initial malware payload for social-engineering spam...

MS Office Built-In Feature Could be Exploited to Create Self-Replicating Malware

Earlier this month a cybersecurity researcher shared details of a security loophole with The Hacker News that affects all versions of Microsoft Office, allowing malicious actors to create and spread macro-based self-replicating malware. Macro-based self-replicating malware, which basically allows...

Microsoft Extends Macro Protection to Office 2013

Microsoft is combating a surge in macro-based malware with a new feature that allows system administrators to configure Office 2013 to block Word, Excel, and PowerPoint macros. The capability had previously been introduced in March by Microsoft for its Office 2016 software. Microsoft said inciden...

Enable this New Setting to Secure your Computer from Macro-based Malware

Do you deal with MS Word files on the daily basis? If yes, then are you aware that even opening a simple doc file could compromise your system? It is a matter to think that the virus does not directly affect you, but it is you who let the virus carry out the attack by enabling deadly "Macros" to...

Bartalex Variants Spotted Dropping Pony, Dyre Malware

Some strains of Bartalex malware, a macro-based malware that first surfaced earlier this year, have recently been spotted dropping Pony loader malware and the Dyre banking Trojan. Primarily spread through spam, the first iterations of Bartalex were observed in late March embedded in Microsoft Wor...