AitM phishing | Breaking Cybersecurity News | The Hacker News

A new  malvertising campaign  has been found to employ fake sites that masquerade as legitimate Windows news portal to propagate a malicious installer for a popular system profiling tool called CPU-Z. "This incident is a part of a larger malvertising campaign that targets other utilities like Notepad++, Citrix, and VNC Viewer as seen in its infrastructure (domain names) and cloaking templates used to avoid detection," Malwarebytes' Jérôme Segura  said . While malvertising campaigns are known to set up replica sites advertising widely-used software, the latest activity marks a deviation in that the website mimics WindowsReport[.]com. The goal is to trick unsuspecting users searching for CPU-Z on search engines like Google by serving malicious ads that, when clicked, redirect them to the fake portal (workspace-app[.]online). At the same time, users who are not the intended victims of the campaign are served an innocuous blog with different articles, a technique known a

Microsoft is warning of an increase in adversary-in-the-middle ( AiTM ) phishing techniques, which are being propagated as part of the phishing-as-a-service (PhaaS) cybercrime model. In addition to an uptick in AiTM-capable PhaaS platforms, the tech giant noted that existing phishing services like PerSwaysion are incorporating AiTM capabilities. "This development in the PhaaS ecosystem enables attackers to conduct high-volume phishing campaigns that attempt to circumvent MFA protections at scale," the Microsoft Threat Intelligence team  said  in a series of posts on X (formerly Twitter). Phishing kits with AiTM capabilities work in two ways, one of which concerns the use of reverse proxy servers (i.e., the phishing page) to relay traffic to and from the client and legitimate website and stealthily capture user credentials, two-factor authentication codes, and session cookies. A second method involves synchronous relay servers. "In AiTM through synchronous relay s

For years, securing a company's systems was synonymous with securing its "perimeter." There was what was safe "inside" and the unsafe outside world. We built sturdy firewalls and deployed sophisticated detection systems, confident that keeping the barbarians outside the walls kept our data and systems safe. The problem is that we no longer operate within the confines of physical on-prem installations and controlled networks. Data and applications now reside in distributed cloud environments and data centers, accessed by users and devices connecting from anywhere on the planet. The walls have crumbled, and the perimeter has dissolved, opening the door to a new battlefield: identity . Identity is at the center of what the industry has praised as the new gold standard of enterprise security: "zero trust." In this paradigm, explicit trust becomes mandatory for any interactions between systems, and no implicit trust shall subsist. Every access request, regardless of its origin,

Banking and financial services organizations are the targets of a new multi-stage adversary-in-the-middle ( AitM ) phishing and business email compromise (BEC) attack, Microsoft has revealed. "The attack originated from a compromised trusted vendor and transitioned into a series of AiTM attacks and follow-on BEC activity spanning multiple organizations," the tech giant  disclosed  in a Thursday report. Microsoft, which is tracking the cluster under its emerging moniker  Storm-1167 , called out the group's use of indirect proxy to pull off the attack. This enabled the attackers to flexibly tailor the phishing pages to their targets and carry out session cookie theft, underscoring the continued sophistication of AitM attacks. The modus operandi is unlike other AitM campaigns where the decoy pages act as a  reverse proxy  to harvest credentials and time-based one-time passwords (TOTPs) entered by the victims. "The attacker presented targets with a website that mi