Cyber Defense Advisors

Year: 2024

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  • April 22, 2024

Using Legitimate GitHub URLs for Malware

Interesting social-engineering attack vector: McAfee released a report on a new LUA malware loader distributed through what appeared to be a legitimate Microsoft GitHub repository for the “C++ Library Manager for Windows, Linux, and MacOS,” known as vcpkg. The attacker is exploiting a property of GitHub: comments to a particular repo can contain files, and […]

Cyber News
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  • April 22, 2024

ToddyCat Hacker Group Uses Advanced Tools for Industrial-Scale Data Theft

The threat actor known as ToddyCat has been observed using a wide range of tools to retain access to compromised environments and steal valuable data. Russian cybersecurity firm Kaspersky characterized the adversary as relying on various programs to harvest data on an “industrial scale” from primarily governmental organizations, some of them defense related, located in […]

Cyber News
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  • April 22, 2024

Pentera’s 2024 Report Reveals Hundreds of Security Events per Week, Highlighting the Criticality of Continuous Validation

Over the past two years, a shocking 51% of organizations surveyed in a leading industry report have been compromised by a cyberattack. Yes, over half. And this, in a world where enterprises deploy an average of 53 different security solutions to safeguard their digital domain. Alarming? Absolutely. A recent survey of CISOs and CIOs, commissioned […]

Cyber News
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  • April 22, 2024

MITRE Corporation Breached by Nation-State Hackers Exploiting Ivanti Flaws

The MITRE Corporation revealed that it was the target of a nation-state cyber attack that exploited two zero-day flaws in Ivanti Connect Secure appliances starting in January 2024. The intrusion led to the compromise of its Networked Experimentation, Research, and Virtualization Environment (NERVE), an unclassified research and prototyping network. The unknown adversary “performed reconnaissance of […]

Cyber News
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  • April 22, 2024

Ransomware Double-Dip: Re-Victimization in Cyber Extortion

Between crossovers – Do threat actors play dirty or desperate? In our dataset of over 11,000 victim organizations that have experienced a Cyber Extortion / Ransomware attack, we noticed that some victims re-occur. Consequently, the question arises why we observe a re-victimization and whether or not this is an actual second attack, an affiliate crossover […]

Cyber News
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  • April 22, 2024

Researchers Uncover Windows Flaws Granting Hackers Rootkit-Like Powers

New research has found that the DOS-to-NT path conversion process could be exploited by threat actors to achieve rootkit-like capabilities to conceal and impersonate files, directories, and processes. “When a user executes a function that has a path argument in Windows, the DOS path at which the file or folder exists is converted to an […]

Cyber News
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  • April 22, 2024

Microsoft Warns: North Korean Hackers Turn to AI-Fueled Cyber Espionage

Microsoft has revealed that North Korea-linked state-sponsored cyber actors have begun to use artificial intelligence (AI) to make their operations more effective and efficient. “They are learning to use tools powered by AI large language models (LLM) to make their operations more efficient and effective,” the tech giant said in its latest report on East […]

Cyber News
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  • April 21, 2024

New RedLine Stealer Variant Disguised as Game Cheats Using Lua Bytecode for Stealth

A new information stealer has been found leveraging Lua bytecode for added stealth and sophistication, findings from McAfee Labs reveal. The cybersecurity firm has assessed it to be a variant of a known malware called RedLine Stealer owing to the fact that the command-and-control (C2) server IP address has been previously identified as associated with […]

Cyber News
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  • April 20, 2024

Palo Alto Networks Discloses More Details on Critical PAN-OS Flaw Under Attack

Palo Alto Networks has shared more details of a critical security flaw impacting PAN-OS that has come under active exploitation in the wild by malicious actors. The company described the vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2024-3400 (CVSS score: 10.0), as “intricate” and a combination of two bugs in versions PAN-OS 10.2, PAN-OS 11.0, and PAN-OS 11.1 of […]

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