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Altered versions of legitimate Android apps associated with Spotify, WhatsApp, and Minecraft have been used to deliver a new version of a known malware loader called Necro. Kaspersky said some of the malicious apps have also been found on the Google Play Store. They have been cumulatively downloaded 11 million times. They include - Wuta Camera - Nice Shot Always (com.benqu.wuta) - 10+ million downloads Max Browser-Private & Security (com.max.browser) - 1+ million downloads As of writing, Max Browser is no longer available for download from the Play Store. Wuta Camera, on the other hand, has been updated (version 6.3.7.138) to remove the malware. The latest version of the app, 6.3.8.148, was released on September 8, 2024. It's currently not clear how both the apps were compromised with the malware in the first place, although it's believed that a rogue software developer kit (SDK) for integrating advertising capabilities is the culprit. Necro (not to be confused w

Cybersecurity researchers have discovered a new version of an Android banking trojan called Octo that comes with improved capabilities to conduct device takeover ( DTO ) and perform fraudulent transactions. The new version has been codenamed Octo2 by the malware author, Dutch security firm ThreatFabric said in a report shared with The Hacker News, adding campaigns distributing the malware have been spotted in European countries like Italy, Poland, Moldova, and Hungary. "The malware developers took actions to increase the stability of the remote actions capabilities needed for Device Takeover attacks," the company said . Some of the malicious apps containing Octo2 are listed below - Europe Enterprise (com.xsusb_restore3) Google Chrome (com.havirtual06numberresources) NordVPN (com.handedfastee5) Octo was first flagged by the company in early 2022, describing it as the work of a threat actor who goes by the online aliases Architect and goodluck. It has been assessed

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,

In a major policy reversal, the popular messaging app Telegram has announced it will give users' IP addresses and phone numbers to authorities in response to valid legal requests in an attempt to rein in criminal activity on the platform. "We've made it clear that the IP addresses and phone numbers of those who violate our rules can be disclosed to relevant authorities in response to valid legal requests," Telegram CEO Pavel Durov said in a post. To that end, the company now explicitly states - "If Telegram receives a valid order from the relevant judicial authorities that confirms you're a suspect in a case involving criminal activities that violate the Telegram Terms of Service, we will perform a legal analysis of the request and may disclose your IP address and phone number to the relevant authorities." Such data disclosures, it said, will be included in its periodic transparency reports . It further noted that the service may collect metadata

Law enforcement authorities have announced the takedown of an international criminal network that leveraged a phishing platform to unlock stolen or lost mobile phones. The phishing-as-a-service (PhaaS) platform, called iServer, is estimated to have claimed more than 483,000 victims globally, led by Chile (77,000), Colombia (70,000), Ecuador (42,000), Peru (41,500), Spain (30,000), and Argentina (29,000). "The victims are mainly Spanish-speaking nationals from European, North American and South American countries," Europol said in a press statement. The action, dubbed Operation Kaerb, involved the participation of law enforcement and judicial agencies from Spain, Argentina, Chile, Colombia, Ecuador, and Peru. Pursuant to the joint exercise that took place between September 10 and 17, an Argentinian national responsible for developing and running the PhaaS service since 2018 has been arrested. In total, the operation led to 17 arrests, 28 searches, and the seizure of 92

A previously undocumented malware called SambaSpy is exclusively targeting users in Italy via a phishing campaign orchestrated by a suspected Brazilian Portuguese-speaking threat actor. "Threat actors usually try to cast a wide net to maximize their profits, but these attackers are focused on just one country," Kaspersky said in a new analysis. "It's likely that the attackers are testing the waters with Italian users before expanding their operation to other countries." The starting point of the attack is a phishing email that either includes an HTML attachment or an embedded link that initiates the infection process. Should the HTML attachment be opened, a ZIP archive containing an interim downloader or dropper is used to deploy and launch the multi-functional RAT payload. The downloader, for its part, is responsible for fetching the malware from a remote server. The dropper, on the other hand, does the same thing, but extracts the payload from the archive

Cybersecurity in healthcare has never been more urgent. As the most vulnerable industry and largest target for cybercriminals, healthcare is facing an increasing wave of cyberattacks. When a hospital's systems are held hostage by ransomware, it's not just data at risk — it's the care of patients who depend on life-saving treatments. Imagine an attack that forces emergency care to halt, surgeries to be postponed, or a cancer patient's private health information used for extortion. This is the reality healthcare faces as cybercriminals exploit people who need care. Healthcare accounted for 17.8% of all breach events and 18.2% of destructive ransomware events since 2012 1 , surpassing other sectors like finance, government, and education. This alarming rise in attacks makes one thing clear: poor cybersecurity hygiene is the root cause, and the consequences for failing to address these vulnerabilities are devastating. Organizations that neglect basic cybersecurity practices, like sof

A Chinese national has been indicted in the U.S. on charges of conducting a "multi-year" spear-phishing campaign to obtain unauthorized access to computer software and source code created by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), research universities, and private companies. Song Wu, 39, has been charged with 14 counts of wire fraud and 14 counts of aggravated identity theft. If convicted, he faces a maximum sentence of a jail term of 20 years for each count of wire fraud and a two-year consecutive sentence in prison for aggravated identity theft. He was employed as an engineer at the Aviation Industry Corporation of China (AVIC), a Chinese state-owned aerospace and defense conglomerate founded in 2008 and headquartered in Beijing. According to information listed on AVIC's website, it has "over 100 subsidiaries, nearly 24 listed companies, and more than 400,000 employees." In November 2020 and June 2021, the company and some of its subsi

Cryptocurrency exchange Binance is warning of an "ongoing" global threat that's targeting cryptocurrency users with clipper malware with the goal of facilitating financial fraud. Clipper malware, also called ClipBankers , is a type of malware that Microsoft calls cryware , which comes with capabilities to monitor a victim's clipboard activity and steal sensitive data a user copies, including replacing cryptocurrency addresses with those under an attacker's control. In doing so, digital asset transfers initiated on a compromised system are routed to a rogue wallet instead of the intended destination address. "In clipping and switching, a cryware monitors the contents of a user's clipboard and uses string search patterns to look for and identify a string resembling a hot wallet address," the tech giant noted way back in 2022. "If the target user pastes or uses CTRL + V into an application window, the cryware replaces the object in the clipbo

Cybersecurity researchers have warned of ongoing phishing campaigns that abuse refresh entries in HTTP headers to deliver spoofed email login pages that are designed to harvest users' credentials. "Unlike other phishing webpage distribution behavior through HTML content, these attacks use the response header sent by a server, which occurs before the processing of the HTML content," Palo Alto Networks Unit 42 researchers Yu Zhang, Zeyu You, and Wei Wang said . "Malicious links direct the browser to automatically refresh or reload a web page immediately, without requiring user interaction." Targets of the large-scale activity, observed between May and July 2024, include large corporations in South Korea, as well as government agencies and schools in the U.S. As many as 2,000 malicious URLs have been associated with the campaigns. Over 36% of the attacks have singled out the business-and-economy sector, followed by financial services (12.9%), government (6.9%)

British authorities on Thursday announced the arrest of a 17-year-old male in connection with a cyber attack affecting Transport for London (TfL). "The 17-year-old male was detained on suspicion of Computer Misuse Act offenses in relation to the attack, which was launched on TfL on 1 September," the U.K. National Crime Agency (NCA) said . The teenager, who's from Walsall, is said to have been arrested on September 5, 2024, following an investigation that was launched in the incident's aftermath. The law enforcement agency said the unnamed individual was questioned and subsequently let go on bail. "Attacks on public infrastructure such as this can be hugely disruptive and lead to severe consequences for local communities and national systems," Deputy Director Paul Foster, head of the NCA's National Cyber Crime Unit, said. "The swift response by TfL following the incident has enabled us to act quickly, and we are grateful for their continued co

Cybersecurity researchers have uncovered a new variant of an Android banking trojan called TrickMo that comes packed with new capabilities to evade analysis and display fake login screens to capture victims' banking credentials. "The mechanisms include using malformed ZIP files in combination with JSONPacker," Cleafy security researchers Michele Roviello and Alessandro Strino said . "In addition, the application is installed through a dropper app that shares the same anti-analysis mechanisms." "These features are designed to evade detection and hinder cybersecurity professionals' efforts to analyze and mitigate the malware." TrickMo, first caught in the wild by CERT-Bund in September 2019, has a history of targeting Android devices, particularly targeting users in Germany to siphon one-time passwords (OTPs) and other two-factor authentication (2FA) codes to facilitate financial fraud. The mobile-focused malware is assessed to be the work of

Cybersecurity researchers have uncovered a new malware campaign targeting Linux environments to conduct illicit cryptocurrency mining and deliver botnet malware. The activity, which specifically singles out the Oracle Weblogic server, is designed to deliver a malware strain dubbed Hadooken , according to cloud security firm Aqua. "When Hadooken is executed, it drops a Tsunami malware and deploys a crypto miner," security researcher Assaf Moran said . The attack chains exploit known security vulnerabilities and misconfigurations, such as weak credentials, to obtain an initial foothold and execute arbitrary code on susceptible instances. This is accomplished by launching two nearly-identical payloads, one written in Python and the other, a shell script, both of which are responsible for retrieving the Hadooken malware from a remote server (" 89.185.85[.]102 " or " 185.174.136[.]204 "). "In addition, the shell script version attempts to iterate ov

Bank customers in the Central Asia region have been targeted by a new strain of Android malware codenamed Ajina.Banker since at least November 2023 with the goal of harvesting financial information and intercepting two-factor authentication (2FA) messages. Singapore-headquartered Group-IB, which discovered the threat in May 2024, said the malware is propagated via a network of Telegram channels set up by the threat actors under the guise of legitimate applications related to banking, payment systems, and government services, or everyday utilities. "The attacker has a network of affiliates motivated by financial gain, spreading Android banker malware that targets ordinary users," security researchers Boris Martynyuk, Pavel Naumov, and Anvar Anarkulov said . Targets of the ongoing campaign include countries such as Armenia, Azerbaijan, Iceland, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Pakistan, Russia, Tajikistan, Ukraine, and Uzbekistan. There is evidence to suggest that some aspects of

Cato CTRL (Cyber Threats Research Lab) has released its Q2 2024 Cato CTRL SASE Threat Report . The report highlights critical findings based on the analysis of a staggering 1.38 trillion network flows from more than 2,500 of Cato's global customers, between April and June 2024. Key Insights from the Q2 2024 Cato CTRL SASE Threat Report The report is packed with unique insights that are based on thorough data analysis of network flows. The top three insights for enterprises are as follows. 1) IntelBroker: A Persistent Threat Actor in the Cyber Underground During an in-depth investigation into hacking communities and the dark web, Cato CTRL identified a notorious threat actor known as IntelBroker. IntelBroker is a prominent figure and moderator within the BreachForums hacking community and has been actively involved in the sale of data and source code from major organizations. These include AMD, Apple, Facebook, KrypC, Microsoft, Space-Eyes, T-Mobile and the US Army Aviation and Mi