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Cybersecurity researchers are continuing to warn about North Korean threat actors' attempts to target prospective victims on LinkedIn to deliver malware called RustDoor. The latest advisory comes from Jamf Threat Labs, which said it spotted an attack attempt in which a user was contacted on the professional social network by claiming to be a recruiter for a legitimate decentralized cryptocurrency exchange (DEX) called STON.fi. The malicious cyber activity is part of a multi-pronged campaign unleashed by cyber threat actors backed by the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK) to infiltrate networks of interest under the pretext of conducting interviews or coding assignments. The financial and cryptocurrency sectors are among the top targets for the state-sponsored adversaries seeking to generate illicit revenues and meet an ever-evolving set of objectives based on the regime's interests. These attacks manifest in the form of "highly tailored, difficult-to-d

Threat actors affiliated with North Korea have been observed leveraging LinkedIn as a way to target developers as part of a fake job recruiting operation. These attacks employ coding tests as a common initial infection vector, Google-owned Mandiant said in a new report about threats faced by the Web3 sector. "After an initial chat conversation, the attacker sent a ZIP file that contained COVERTCATCH malware disguised as a Python coding challenge," researchers Robert Wallace, Blas Kojusner, and Joseph Dobson said . The malware functions as a launchpad to compromise the target's macOS system by downloading a second-stage payload that establishes persistence via Launch Agents and Launch Daemons. It's worth pointing out that this is one of many activity clusters – namely Operation Dream Job , Contagious Interview , and others – undertaken by North Korean hacking groups that make use of job-related decoys to infect targets with malware. Recruiting-themed lures have

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,

Threat actors linked to North Korea have accounted for one-third of all the phishing activity targeting Brazil since 2020, as the country's emergence as an influential power has drawn the attention of cyber espionage groups. "North Korean government-backed actors have targeted the Brazilian government and Brazil's aerospace, technology, and financial services sectors," Google's Mandiant and Threat Analysis Group (TAG) divisions said in a joint report published this week. "Similar to their targeting interests in other regions, cryptocurrency and financial technology firms have been a particular focus, and at least three North Korean groups have targeted Brazilian cryptocurrency and fintech companies." Prominent among those groups is a threat actor tracked as UNC4899 (aka Jade Sleet, PUKCHONG, and TraderTraitor), which has targeted cryptocurrency professionals with a malware-laced trojanized Python app. The attack chains involve reaching out to pote

Cybersecurity researchers have spotted a phishing attack distributing the More_eggs malware by masquerading it as a resume, a technique originally detected more than two years ago. The attack, which was unsuccessful, targeted an unnamed company in the industrial services industry in May 2024, Canadian cybersecurity firm eSentire disclosed last week. "Specifically, the targeted individual was a recruiter that was deceived by the threat actor into thinking they were a job applicant and lured them to their website to download the loader," it said. More_eggs, believed to be the work of a threat actor known as the Golden Chickens (aka Venom Spider), is a modular backdoor that's capable of harvesting sensitive information. It's offered to other criminal actors under a Malware-as-a-Service (MaaS) model. Last year, eSentire unmasked the real-world identities of two individuals – Chuck from Montreal and Jack – who are said to be running the operation. The latest atta

North Korean threat actors have been linked to two campaigns in which they masquerade as both job recruiters and seekers to distribute malware and obtain unauthorized employment with organizations based in the U.S. and other parts of the world. The activity clusters have been codenamed Contagious Interview and Wagemole, respectively, by Palo Alto Networks Unit 42. While the first set of attacks aims to "infect software developers with malware through a fictitious job interview," the latter is designed for financial gain and espionage. "The first campaign's objective is likely cryptocurrency theft and using compromised targets as a staging environment for additional attacks," the cybersecurity company  said . The fraudulent job-seeking activity, on the other hand, involves the use of a GitHub repository to host resumes with forged identities that impersonate individuals of various nationalities. The Contagious Interview attacks pave the way for two hitherto undocumented cross-plat

Attacks leveraging the DarkGate commodity malware targeting entities in the U.K., the U.S., and India have been linked to Vietnamese actors associated with the use of the infamous  Ducktail stealer . "The overlap of tools and campaigns is very likely due to the effects of a cybercrime marketplace," WithSecure  said  in a report published today. "Threat actors are able to acquire and use multiple different tools for the same purpose, and all they have to do is come up with targets, campaigns, and lures." The development comes amid an  uptick in malware campaigns  using DarkGate in recent months, primarily driven by its author's decision to rent it out on a malware-as-a-service (MaaS) basis to other threat actors after using it privately since 2018. It's not just DarkGate and Ducktail, for the Vietnamese threat actor cluster responsible for these campaigns is leveraging same or very similar lures, themes, targeting, and delivery methods to also deliver  L

A sophisticated stealer-as-a-ransomware threat dubbed  RedEnergy  has been spotted in the wild targeting energy utilities, oil, gas, telecom, and machinery sectors in Brazil and the Philippines through their LinkedIn pages. The .NET malware "possesses the ability to steal information from various browsers, enabling the exfiltration of sensitive data, while also incorporating different modules for carrying out ransomware activities," Zscaler researchers Shatak Jain and Gurkirat Singh  said  in a recent analysis. The objective, the researchers noted, is to couple data theft with encryption with the goal of inflicting maximum damage to the victims. The starting point for the multi-stage attack is a  FakeUpdates  (aka SocGholish) campaign that tricks users into downloading JavaScript-based malware under the guise of web browser updates. What makes it novel is the use of reputable LinkedIn pages to target victims, redirecting users clicking on the website URLs to a bogus lan

The notorious North Korea-aligned state-sponsored actor known as the  Lazarus Group  has been attributed to a new campaign aimed at Linux users. The attacks are part of a persistent and long-running activity tracked under the name  Operation Dream Job , ESET said in a  new report  published today. The findings are crucial, not least because it marks the first publicly documented example of the adversary using Linux malware as part of this social engineering scheme. Operation Dream Job , also known as  DeathNote or NukeSped , refers to multiple attack waves wherein the group leverages fraudulent job offers as a lure to trick unsuspecting targets into downloading malware. It also  exhibits overlaps  with two other Lazarus clusters known as Operation In(ter)ception and Operation North Star. The attack chain discovered by ESET is no different in that it delivers a fake HSBC job offer as a decoy within a ZIP archive file that's then used to launch a Linux backdoor named SimplexTea

A new set of phishing attacks delivering the more_eggs malware has been observed striking corporate hiring managers with bogus resumes as an infection vector, a year after potential candidates looking for work on LinkedIn were lured with weaponized job offers . "This year the more_eggs operation has flipped the social engineering script, targeting hiring managers with fake resumes instead of targeting jobseekers with fake job offers," eSentire's research and reporting lead, Keegan Keplinger, said in a statement . The Canadian cybersecurity company said it identified and disrupted four separate security incidents, three of which occurred at the end of March. Targeted entities include a U.S.-based aerospace company, an accounting business located in the U.K., a law firm, and a staffing agency, both based out of Canada. The malware, suspected to be the handiwork of a threat actor called Golden Chickens (aka Venom Spider ), is a stealthy, modular backdoor suite capable

A new spear-phishing campaign is targeting professionals on LinkedIn with weaponized job offers in an attempt to infect targets with a sophisticated backdoor trojan called "more_eggs." To increase the odds of success, the phishing lures take advantage of malicious ZIP archive files that have the same name as that of the victims' job titles taken from their LinkedIn profiles. "For example, if the LinkedIn member's job is listed as Senior Account Executive—International Freight the malicious zip file would be titled Senior Account Executive—International Freight position (note the 'position' added to the end)," cybersecurity firm eSentire's Threat Response Unit (TRU)  said  in an analysis. "Upon opening the fake job offer, the victim unwittingly initiates the stealthy installation of the fileless backdoor, more_eggs." Campaigns delivering more_eggs using the  same modus operandi  have been spotted at least since 2018, with the backdo

A Russian hacker who was found guilty of  hacking LinkedIn ,  Dropbox , and Formspring over eight years ago has finally been  sentenced  to 88 months in United States prison, that's more than seven years by a federal court in San Francisco this week. Yevgeniy Aleksandrovich Nikulin , 32, of Moscow hacked into servers belonging to three American social media firms, including LinkedIn, Dropbox, and now-defunct social-networking firm Formspring, and stole data on over 200 million users. Between March and July 2012, Nikulin hacked into the computers of LinkedIn,  Dropbox, and Formspring , and installed malware on them, which allowed him to remotely download user databases of over  117 Million LinkedIn  users and more than  68 Million Dropbox  users. According to the prosecutor, Nikulin also worked with unnamed co-conspirators of a Russian-speaking cybercriminal forum to sell customer data he stole as a result of his hacks. Besides hacking into the three social media firms, Nikulin

Cybersecurity researchers today took the wraps off a new sophisticated cyber-espionage campaign directed against aerospace and military organizations in Europe and the Middle East with an aim to spy on key employees of the targeted firms and, in some case, even to siphon money. The campaign, dubbed " Operation In(ter)ception " because of a reference to "Inception" in the malware sample, took place between September to December 2019, according to a new report cybersecurity firm ESET shared with The Hacker News. "The primary goal of the operation was espionage," the researchers told The Hacker News. "However, in one of the cases we investigated, the attackers tried to monetize access to a victim's email account through a business email compromise (BEC) attack as the final stage of the operation." The financial motivation behind the attacks, coupled with similarities in targeting and development environment, have led ESET to suspect Laz

Two grey hat hackers have pleaded guilty to blackmailing Uber , LinkedIn, and other U.S. corporations for money in exchange for promises to delete data of millions of customers they had stolen in late 2016. In a San Jose courthouse in California on Wednesday, Brandon Charles Glover (26) of Florida and Vasile Mereacre (23) of Toronto admitted they accessed and downloaded confidential corporate databases on Amazon Web Services using stolen credentials. After downloading the data, the duo contacted affected companies to report security vulnerabilities and demanded money in exchange for the deletion of the data, according to a press release published by the US Justice Department. "I was able to access backups upon backups, me and my team would like a huge reward for this," the hackers said to the victim company in an email. "Please keep in mind, we expect a big payment as this was hard work for us, we already helped a big corp which paid close to 7 digits, all

Not just Facebook , a new vulnerability discovered in Linkedin's popular AutoFill functionality found leaking its users' sensitive information to third party websites without the user even knowing about it. LinkedIn provides an AutoFill plugin for a long time that other websites can use to let LinkedIn users quickly fill in profile data, including their full name, phone number, email address, ZIP code, company and job title, with a single click. In general, the AutoFill button only works on specifically "whitelisted websites," but 18-year-old security researcher Jack Cable of Lightning Security said it is not just the case. Cable discovered that the feature was plagued with a simple yet important security vulnerability that potentially enabled any website (scrapers) secretly harvest user profile data and the user would not even realize of the event. A legitimate website would likely place a AutoFill button near the fields the button can fill, but accordin

Reportedly, at least one senior cyber security analyst working with Mandiant, a Virginia-based cybersecurity firm owned by the FireEye, appears to have had its system compromised by hackers, exposing his sensitive information on the Internet. On Sunday, an anonymous group of hackers posted some sensitive details allegedly belonged to Adi Peretz , a ‎Senior Threat Intelligence Analyst at Mandiant, claiming they have had complete access to the company's internal networks since 2016. The recent hack into Mandiant has been dubbed Operation # LeakTheAnalyst . Further Leaks from Mandiant Might Appear The hackers have leaked nearly 32 megabytes of data—both personal and professional—belonging to Peretz on Pastebin as proof, which suggests they have more Mandiant data that could be leaked in upcoming days. "It was fun to be inside a giant company named "Mandiant" we enjoyed watching how they try to protect their clients and how their dumb analysts are trying to reverse

The alleged Russian hacker, who was arrested by the Czech police in Prague last October on suspicion of massive 2012 data breach at LinkedIn, can be extradited to either the United States or Russia, a Czech court ruled on Tuesday. Yevgeniy Aleksandrovich Nikulin , a 29-years-old Russian national, is accused of allegedly hacking not just LinkedIn , but also the online cloud storage platform Dropbox , and now-defunct social-networking company Formspring. However, he has repeatedly denied all accusations. Nikulin was arrested in Prague on October 5 by the Czech police after Interpol issued an international arrest warrant against him. Nikulin appeared at a court hearing held inside a high-security prison in Prague on Tuesday and emaciated after eight months in solitary confinement. The court ruling, pending appeals, left the final decision in the hands of Czech Justice Minister Robert Pelikan, who can approve extradition to one of the countries and block the other. The United

2017 is the year of Artificial Intelligence (A.I.), Big Data, Virtual Reality (VR) and Cyber Security with major companies like Google, Facebook, Apple, IBM and Salesforce and technology pioneers like SpaceX founder Elon Musk investing in these hot technologies. Since everyone seems to be talking about the hottest trend — artificial intelligence and machine learning — broadly, 62 percent of large enterprises will be using AI technologies by 2018, says a report from Narrative Science. But why AI is considered to be the next big technology? Because it can enhance and change everything about the way we think, interact, manufacture and deliver. Last year, we saw a significant number of high-profile hacks targeting big organizations, governments, small enterprises, and individuals — What's more worrisome? It's going to get worse, and we need help. No doubt, we, the human, can find vulnerabilities but can not analyze millions of programs with billions of lines of codes at o