Displaying items by tag: Malware

You have to love Microsoft Teams. Teams is the Frankenstein Monster of Microsoft’s Lync, which then became Skype for Business, and then morphed into the problematic service we now know as Teams. The journey from Lync to Teams has been a mishmash of features added in and removed while trying to maintain the semblance of feature parity with the products that came before it. One of the big pushes for teams was the integration of SharePoint for file storage and collection. SharePoint integration has been and continues to be a HUGE push from Microsoft in all of their MS365 products and it is not always for the better.

IoT (Internet of Things) devices have long been a source of security concerns. Back in 2012-2014 we wrote a series of articles following the comedy of errors that is the IoT market. At the time I dubbed it the Internet of Fails simply because the companies making these internet connected devices were leaving them so open to compromise. Everything from a lack of encrypted communication with cloud services, to no passwords on administrative functions, to using images that had open files and folders in the firmware were found in popular connected products that were shipped to customers. Supply chain compromises were also found in generous quantities, making the mad rush to connect everything a serious concern.

Remember the iMessage flaw that allowed for a zero click installation of malware? You know, the one that was discovered by Russian cybersecurity firm Kaspersky which was allegedly targeting Russian Apple devices? The one that Russia said was a US cyber op? Yeah, that one. Well, it seems that Apple has rolled out a patch for this flaw which was part of an operation dubbed Triangulation with the backdoor actually being called TriangleBD.

There is nothing like hearing about a new information stealer on a Monday. In this case the malware in question goes by the name of Mystic Stealer and was first pushed onto the world in April of 2023. It boasts some pretty impressive features like being able to steal data from 40 different web browsers and over 70 browser extensions. This list of features is on top of targeting crypto wallets, Steam accounts, and Telegram Accounts.

As I have often said, the idea that an operating system, or brand of computer is somehow immune to attack or malware is just a false one. We have seen time and time again where attackers are all too capable of compromising what was once considered “secure”. Now security researchers have found evidence of a sophisticated cross platform toolkit which could indicate an increased focus on macOS.

There is a new threat in town from the ChamelGang. This new threat is a Linux backdoor that just been identified and shows that the threat group is expanding their capabilities. Identified by Stairwell and dubber ChamelDoH (for DNS over HTTPS), this new malware is written in C++, which is not all that unusual even if the method of communication is not completely normal. ChamelGang was first identified in 2021 and was associated with attacks on energy, fuel, and aviation industries in multiple countries including the US, Russia, Nepal, Japan, Taiwan, and India.

A 20-year-old Russian National Magomedovich Astamirov was arrested in Arizona and had his initial appearance in court yesterday. The arrest and charges come after a lengthy investigation into the Ransomware as a Service Group, LockBit. This is the second arrest in six months related to the group’s activities with a third warrant/indictment issued for another individual, Mikhail Pavlovich Matveev, who is still at large. According to the DOJ press release Astamirov is suspected of conspiring with other LockBit members to attack multiple organizations in the US and around the globe. Astamirov is believed to have managed various IP and Email addresses used for ransomware deployment and communication with the victims of attacks.

If there is one thing you can say about modern threat groups, it is that they are clever. The new tactics and techniques they identify, and implement are impressive. A recent technique identified is the use of abandoned S3 buckets. The attackers search for and locate S3 buckets that are no longer in use and claim them as their own. If the bucket happens to be part of an existing or previous deployment workflow, so much the better. Checkmarx recently identified a supply chain attack that involved this type of scenario. The attackers took claimed an abandoned S3 bucket for an NPM package called bignum.

After the disclosure of a serious Zero-Day that allowed an unauthenticated user to basically own the device. Barracuda is now saying that remediation action for any device that was compromised is a full replacement regardless of the firmware version. It seems that once an attacker gets their malware into the device, it is done. There is not a clean way to remove it and simply patching it does not disable the control that the attacker has on the device. It also seems that at factory resent does not clear it out.

As we hear more about Supply Chain attacks and the need for Software Build of Materials we are now hearing of an attack on the popular game, Minecraft. It seems that attackers are leveraging popular Modding platforms to push out information stealing malware (Fractureiser). They are accomplishing this by injecting malicious code into modifications that are then uploaded to different platforms. These are then downloaded and installed by unwary gamers.