Technology

The loader-as-a-service (LaaS) known as FakeBat has become one of the most widespread loader malware families distributed using the drive-by download technique this year, findings from Sekoia reveal. “FakeBat primarily aims to download and execute the next-stage payload, such as IcedID, Lumma, RedLine, SmokeLoader, SectopRAT, and Ursnif,” the company said in a Tuesday analysis. Drive-by […]

Unknown threat actors have been observed exploiting a now-patched security flaw in Microsoft MSHTML to deliver a surveillance tool called MerkSpy as part of a campaign primarily targeting users in Canada, India, Poland, and the U.S. “MerkSpy is designed to clandestinely monitor user activities, capture sensitive information, and establish persistence on compromised systems,” Fortinet FortiGuard

Recently the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) unveiled a new strategy for open-source intelligence (OSINT) and referred to OSINT as the “INT of first resort”. Public and private sector organizations are realizing the value that the discipline can provide but are also finding that the exponential growth of digital data in recent

An unnamed South Korean enterprise resource planning (ERP) vendor’s product update server has been found to be compromised to deliver a Go-based backdoor dubbed Xctdoor. The AhnLab Security Intelligence Center (ASEC), which identified the attack in May 2024, did not attribute it to a known threat actor or group, but noted that the tactics overlap

An Australian man has been charged with running a fake Wi-Fi access point during a domestic flight with an aim to steal user credentials and data. The unnamed 42-year-old “allegedly established fake free Wi-Fi access points, which mimicked legitimate networks, to capture personal data from unsuspecting victims who mistakenly connected to them,” the Australian Federal

A China-nexus cyber espionage group named Velvet Ant has been observed exploiting a zero-day flaw in Cisco NX-OS Software used in its switches to deliver malware. The vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2024-20399 (CVSS score: 6.0), concerns a case of command injection that allows an authenticated, local attacker to execute arbitrary commands as root on the underlying

Meta’s decision to offer an ad-free subscription in the European Union (E.U.) has faced a new setback after regulators accused the social media behemoth of breaching the bloc’s competition rules by forcing users to choose between seeing ads or paying to avoid them. The European Commission said the company’s “pay or consent” advertising model is

Modern CPUs from Intel, including Raptor Lake and Alder Lake, have been found vulnerable to a new side-channel attack that could be exploited to leak sensitive information from the processors. The attack, codenamed Indirector by security researchers Luyi Li, Hosein Yavarzadeh, and Dean Tullsen, leverages shortcomings identified in Indirect Branch Predictor (IBP) and the Branch

The cybersecurity threat landscape has witnessed a dramatic and alarming rise in the average ransomware payment, an increase exceeding 500%. Sophos, a global leader in cybersecurity, revealed in its annual “State of Ransomware 2024” report that the average ransom payment has increased 500% in the last year with organizations that paid a ransom reporting an

A trio of security flaws has been uncovered in the CocoaPods dependency manager for Swift and Objective-C Cocoa projects that could be exploited to stage software supply chain attacks, putting downstream customers at severe risks. The vulnerabilities allow “any malicious actor to claim ownership over thousands of unclaimed pods and insert malicious code into many