Category: News

From tomshardware.com

A cybersecurity expert has created a proof of concept for CPU ransomware.

Rapid7’s Chrstiaan Beek has written proof-of-concept code for ransomware that can attack your CPU, and warns of future threats that could lock your drive until a ransom is paid. This attack would circumvent most traditional forms of ransomware detection.

In an interview with The Register, Beek, who is Rapid7’s senior director of threat analytics, revealed that an AMD Zen chip bug gave him the idea that a highly skilled attacker could in theory “allow those intruders to load unapproved microcode into the processors, breaking encryption at the hardware level and modifying CPU behavior at will.”

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from theregister.com

A group of miscreants tracked as UNC6032 is exploiting interest in AI video generators by planting malicious ads on social media platforms to steal credentials, credit card details, and other sensitive info, according to Mandiant.

The Google-owned threat hunters identified thousands of malicious ads on Facebook and about 10 on LinkedIn since November 2024. These ads directed viewers to more than 30 phony websites masquerading as legitimate AI video generator tools, including Luma AI, Canva Dream Lab, and Kling AI, falsely promising text- and image-to-video generation.

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From bbc.com

The hackers behind a cyber-attack on Marks & Spencer (M&S) managed to gain entry through a third party who had access to its systems, the BBC understands.

The cyber-attack, which happened in April, has caused millions of pounds of lost sales for M&S and left it struggling to get services back to normal, with online orders paused for more than three weeks.

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From welivesecurity.com

ESET analysts dissect a novel phishing method tailored to Android and iOS users.

[They] discovered a series of phishing campaigns targeting mobile users that used three different URL delivery mechanisms. These mechanisms include automated voice calls, SMS messages, and social media malvertising.

The voice call delivery is done via an automated call that warns the user about an out-of-date banking app and asks the user to select an option on the numerical keyboard. After pressing the correct button, a phishing URL is sent via SMS. This was reported in a tweet, by Michal Bláha.

Initial delivery by SMS was performed by sending messages indiscriminately to Czech phone numbers. The message sent included a phishing link and text to socially engineer victims into visiting the link.

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From bleepingcomputer.com

Threat actors have hijacked more than 35,000 registered domains in so-called Sitting Ducks attacks that allow claiming a domain without having access to the owner’s account at the DNS provider or registrar.

In a Sitting Ducks attack, cybercriminals exploit configuration shortcomings at the registrar level and insufficient ownership verification at DNS providers.

Researchers at DNS-focused security vendor Infoblox and at firmware and hardware protection company Eclypsium discovered that there are more than a million domains that can be hijacked every day via the Sitting Ducks attacks.

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Late yesterday, LockBit claimed the Federal Reserve Board as a victim. Exfiltrated data was claimed to be 33TB of data. No sample data was provided at the time of post. Ransom deadline: June 25th, 2024.

From darkreading.com

Nation-state espionage operations are increasingly using native Microsoft services to host their command-and-control (C2) needs.

A number of unrelated groups in recent years have all come to the same realization: Rather than building and maintaining their own infrastructure, it’s more economical and effective to simply use Microsoft’s own services against their targets. Besides the costs and headaches saved from not having to set up and maintain their own infrastructure, using legitimate services allows attackers’ malicious behavior to more subtly mix in with legitimate network traffic.

This is where Microsoft Graph comes in handy. Graph offers an application programming interface (API) that developers use to connect to a wide range of data — email, calendar events, files, etc. — across Microsoft cloud services. Harmless on its own, it provides an easy means for hackers to run C2 infrastructure using those same cloud services.

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