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Sending an email with a forged address is easier than previously thought, due to flaws in the process that allows email forwarding, according to a research team led by computer scientists at the University of California San Diego.

The issues researchers uncovered have a broad impact, affecting the integrity of email sent from tens of thousands of domains, including those representing organizations in the U.S. government—such as the majority of U.S. cabinet email domains, including state.gov, as well as security agencies. Key financial service companies, such as Mastercard, and major news organizations, such as The Washington Post and the Associated Press, are also vulnerable.

It’s called forwarding-based spoofing and researchers found that they can send email messages impersonating these organizations, bypassing the safeguards deployed by email providers such as Gmail and Outlook. Once recipients get the spoofed email, they are more likely to open attachments that deploy malware, or to click on links that install spyware on their machine.

North Korea-linked hackers have stolen hundreds of millions of crypto to fund the regime’s nuclear weapons programs, research shows.

So far this year, from January to Aug. 18, North Korea-affiliated hackers stole $200 million worth of crypto — accounting for over 20% of all stolen crypto this year, according to blockchain intelligence firm TRM Labs.

“In recent years, there has been a marked rise in the size and scale of cyber attacks against cryptocurrency-related businesses by North Korea. This has coincided with an apparent acceleration in the country’s nuclear and ballistic missile programs,” said TRM Labs in a June discussion with North Korea experts.

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Polymorphic malware leverages an encryption key to alter its shape, signature, and behavioral pattern. Using a mutation engine and a self-propagated code strain, it encrypts its code and changes how physical files are created. Many traditional cybersecurity solutions that rely on signature-based detection—a technique in which security systems identify a malware based on its known characteristics—fail to recognize or detect polymorphic threats.

A polymorphic attack typically involves the following stages.

Continue reading “What Is Polymorphic Malware?” »

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Ukraine’s security agency claims that the Russian military intelligence service GRU can access compromised Android devices with a new malware called Infamous Chisel, which is associated with the threat actor Sandworm, previously attributed to the Russian GRU’s Main Centre for Special Technologies (GTsST).

Sandworm uses this new malware to target Android devices used by the Ukrainian military, enables unauthorized access to compromised devices, and is designed to scan files, monitor traffic, and steal information.

Digital information exchange can be safer, cheaper and more environmentally friendly with the help of a new type of random number generator for encryption developed at Linköping University, Sweden. The researchers behind the study believe that the new technology paves the way for a new type of quantum communication.

In an increasingly connected world, cybersecurity is becoming increasingly important to protect not just the individual, but also, for example, national infrastructure and banking systems. And there is an ongoing race between hackers and those trying to protect information. The most common way to protect information is through encryption. So when we send emails, pay bills and shop online, the information is digitally encrypted.

To encrypt information, a random number generator is used, which can either be a computer program or the hardware itself. The random number generator provides keys that are used to both encrypt and unlock the information at the receiving end.

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More remarkably, the advent of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning-based computers in the next century may alter how we relate to ourselves.

Continue reading “Artificial Intelligence: Transforming Healthcare, Cybersecurity, and Communications” »

An emerging China-backed advanced persistent threat (APT) group targeted organizations in Hong Kong in a supply chain attack that leveraged a legitimate software to deploy the PlugX/Korplug backdoor, researchers have found.

During the attack, the group leveraged as its PlugX installer malware signed with another legitimate entity, a Microsoft certificate, in an abuse of Microsoft’s Windows Hardware Developer Program, a vulnerability already known to the software vendor.

A malicious campaign targeting MacOS, Linux, and Windows systems has been attributed to the North Korean threat group Lazarus. Cybersecurity researchers at ReversingLabs made the disclosure after tracking VMConnect for about a month.

ReversingLabs first spotted the VMConnect campaign in early August. Cybersecurity researcher and blogger Karlo Zanki described it as consisting of two dozen “malicious Python packages” posted on the openly accessible PyPI software repository.

Continue reading “North Korean malicious package targets Windows” »

Infamous Chisel is described as a collection of multiple components that’s designed with the intent to enable remote access and exfiltrate information from Android phones.

Besides scanning the devices for information and files matching a predefined set of file extensions, the malware also contains functionality to periodically scan the local network and offer SSH access.

“Infamous Chisel also provides remote access by configuring and executing TOR with a hidden service which forwards to a modified Dropbear binary providing a SSH connection,” the Five Eyes (FVEY) intelligence alliance said.