For the past few years, hackers have increasingly targeted customers and businesses with tainted software boosted via ads. The recipe is simple – cyber-criminal groups set up fake websites for high-interest software and promote them on top of the results page through advertisements.

It takes just one search and one click for a user to fall victim to the trick.…

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Updated 19:35 UTC, 26 July 2023 to add information about additional research available on Nitrogen.

In mid-June, Sophos X-Ops identified a previously unreported initial-access malware campaign leveraging malicious advertising (malvertising) and impersonating legitimate software to compromise business networks.

This campaign – which we have dubbed Nitrogen based on strings found in the code – is a primarily opportunistic attack campaign abusing Google and Bing ads to target users seeking certain IT tools, with the goal of gaining access to enterprise environments to deploy second-stage attack tools such as Cobalt Strike.…

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Introduction

In the ever-evolving landscape of cyber threats, banking trojans continue to pose a significant risk to organizations worldwide. Among them, Qakbot, also known as QBot or Pinkslipbot, stands out as a highly sophisticated and persistent malware active since 2007, targeting businesses across different countries. With a primary focus on stealing financial data and login credentials from web browsers, Qakbot also serves as a backdoor to inject next-stage payloads like Cobalt Strike and ransomware.…

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Introduction

At the end of 2019, the team at the Positive Technologies Expert Security Center (PT ESC) discovered a new cybercrime group, which they dubbed Space Pirates. It had been active since at least 2017. The first-ever comprehensive research paper describing the group saw light in early 2022. The Space Pirates group have since stepped up attacks on Russian companies: we have come across the group frequently while investigating cyberattacks in the past year.…

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In cloud environments, cryptojacking – a type of cyberattack that uses computing power to mine cryptocurrency – takes the form of cloud compute resource abuse, which involves a threat actor compromising legitimate tenants. Cloud compute resource abuse could result in financial loss to targeted organizations due to the compute fees that can be incurred from the abuse.…

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The Amadey Trojan Stealer, an active and prominent malware, first emerged on the cybersecurity landscape in 2018 and has maintained a persistent botnet infrastructure ever since. Several campaigns have used this malware, like the previous Splunk Threat Research blog related to RedLine loader, the multi-stage attack distribution article from McAfee in May 2023 and the campaign where it uses N-day vulnerabilities to deliver Amadey malware noted in March 2023 by DarkTrace.…

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In 2022 we investigated a series of attacks against industrial organizations in Eastern Europe. In the campaigns, the attackers aimed to establish a permanent channel for data exfiltration, including data stored on air-gapped systems.

Based on similarities found between these campaigns and previously researched campaigns (e.g., ExCone, DexCone),…

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“And us? No money, no people, nothing. We have only a conscience and a tiny bit of power.” “If we fall, please still believe: the Bauhinia is still beautiful1. Please don’t abandon Hong Kong.”— Quotes from “A Distress Call From Hong Kong”, manifesto letter disseminated by the operation’s actors in November 2019, and purportedly written by alleged grassroots volunteers fighting against the protesters’ “mob violence”.…
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Executive Summary

Lumen Black Lotus Labs® identified another multi-year campaign involving compromised routers across the globe. This is a complex operation that infects small-office/home-office (SOHO) routers, deploying a Linux-based Remote Access Trojan (RAT) we’ve dubbed “AVrecon.” Apart from a single reference to AVrecon in May 2021, the malware has been operating undetected for more than two years.…

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The Wordfence Threat Intelligence team has been monitoring an ongoing exploit campaign targeting a recently disclosed vulnerability in WooCommerce Payments, a plugin installed on over 600,000 sites. Large-scale attacks against the vulnerability, assigned CVE-2023-28121, began on Thursday, July 14, 2023 and continued over the weekend, peaking at 1.3 million attacks against 157,000 sites on Saturday, July 16, 2023.…

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Last updated at Thu, 10 Aug 2023 21:06:28 GMT

Rapid7 is tracking a new, more sophisticated and staged campaign using the Blackmoon trojan, which appears to have originated in November 2022. The campaign is actively targeting various businesses primarily in the USA and Canada. However, it is not used to steal credentials, instead, it implements different evasion and persistence techniques to drop several unwanted programs and stay in victims’ environment for as long as possible.…

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