Cyber Defense Advisors

Year: 2023

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  • December 22, 2023

Friday Squid Blogging: Squid Parts into Fertilizer

It’s squid parts from college dissections, so it’s not a volume operation. As usual, you can also use this squid post to talk about the security stories in the news that I haven’t covered. Read my blog posting guidelines here. Tags: squid Sidebar photo of Bruce Schneier by Joe MacInnis.  

Cyber News
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  • December 22, 2023

Ben Rothke’s Review of A Hacker’s Mind

Ben Rothke chose A Hacker’s Mind as “the best information security book of 2023.”  

Cyber News
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  • December 22, 2023

Rogue WordPress Plugin Exposes E-Commerce Sites to Credit Card Theft

Threat hunters have discovered a rogue WordPress plugin that’s capable of creating bogus administrator users and injecting malicious JavaScript code to steal credit card information. The skimming activity is part of a Magecart campaign targeting e-commerce websites, according to Sucuri. “As with many other malicious or fake WordPress plugins it contains some deceptive information at […]

Cyber News
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  • December 22, 2023

Operation RusticWeb: Rust-Based Malware Targets Indian Government Entities

Indian government entities and the defense sector have been targeted by a phishing campaign that’s engineered to drop Rust-based malware for intelligence gathering. The activity, first detected in October 2023, has been codenamed Operation RusticWeb by enterprise security firm SEQRITE. “New Rust-based payloads and encrypted PowerShell commands have been utilized to exfiltrate confidential documents to […]

Cyber News
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  • December 22, 2023

Decoy Microsoft Word Documents Used to Deliver Nim-Based Malware

A new phishing campaign is leveraging decoy Microsoft Word documents as bait to deliver a backdoor written in the Nim programming language. “Malware written in uncommon programming languages puts the security community at a disadvantage as researchers and reverse engineers’ unfamiliarity can hamper their investigation,” Netskope researchers Ghanashyam Satpathy and Jan Michael Alcantara said. Nim-based […]

Cyber News
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  • December 22, 2023

Data Exfiltration Using Indirect Prompt Injection

Interesting attack on a LLM: In Writer, users can enter a ChatGPT-like session to edit or create their documents. In this chat session, the LLM can retrieve information from sources on the web to assist users in creation of their documents. We show that attackers can prepare websites that, when a user adds them as […]

Cyber News
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  • December 22, 2023

UAC-0099 Using WinRAR Exploit to Target Ukrainian Firms with LONEPAGE Malware

The threat actor known as UAC-0099 has been linked to continued attacks aimed at Ukraine, some of which leverage a high-severity flaw in the WinRAR software to deliver a malware strain called LONEPAGE. “The threat actor targets Ukrainian employees working for companies outside of Ukraine,” cybersecurity firm Deep Instinct said in a Thursday analysis. UAC-0099 […]

Cyber News
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  • December 22, 2023

Microsoft Warns of New ‘FalseFont’ Backdoor Targeting the Defense Sector

Organizations in the Defense Industrial Base (DIB) sector are in the crosshairs of an Iranian threat actor as part of a campaign designed to deliver a never-before-seen backdoor called FalseFont. The findings come from Microsoft, which is tracking the activity under its weather-themed moniker Peach Sandstorm (formerly Holmium), which is also known as APT33, Elfin, […]

Cyber News
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  • December 21, 2023

Experts Detail Multi-Million Dollar Licensing Model of Predator Spyware

A new analysis of the sophisticated commercial spyware called Predator has revealed that its ability to persist between reboots is offered as an “add-on feature” and that it depends on the licensing options opted by a customer. “In 2021, Predator spyware couldn’t survive a reboot on the infected Android system (it had it on iOS),” […]

Cyber News