June 20, 2024

Ransomware Rebounds: Extortion Threat Surges in 2023, Attackers Rely on Publicly Available and Legitimate Tools

Ransomware activity increased in 2023 compared to 2022, according to Google-owned Mandiant.This is despite broadscale law enforcement operations against prominent ransomware groups, including ALPHV/BlackCat. In 2023, Mandiant noted a rise in ransomware activity, reflected by more posts on data leak sites and a moderate increase in ransomware investigations. Around a third of new ransomware families were variants of existing ones. […]
May 25, 2024

New Chrome Zero-Day Vulnerability CVE-2024-4761 Under Active Exploitation

Google has announced that it patched its 10th zero-day exploit of 2024. The vulnerability, tagged as CVE-2024-7965, was found in Google Chrome and is linked to an issue in V8, Chrome’s JavaScript engine. This flaw, present in versions before 128.0.6613.84, could allow attackers to exploit heap corruption using a crafted HTML page. The problem, described as an “inappropriate implementation in […]
March 13, 2024

Researchers Uncover Kubernetes Flaw allowing Full Control of Windows Nodes

There is a vulnerability that allows remote code execution with SYSTEM privileges on all Windows machines within a Kubernetes cluster. Tracked as CVE-2023-5528 (CVSS score: 7.2), the shortcoming affects all versions of Kubelet, both prior to and after version 1.8.0. A successful exploit of the vulnerability could result in the complete takeover of all Windows nodes in a cluster, and it […]
March 4, 2024

NTLM authentication hashes are stolen during phishing attacks by hackers

As a result of a recent shift in tactics, the hacking group known as TA577 has employed phishing emails to steal the authentication hashes of NT LAN Manager (NTLM) accounts in order to use them for account hijackings. The NTLM hash is a key component of Windows authentication and session security and can be used for offline password cracking to […]
February 29, 2024

Suspected Iranian Threat Actor UNC1549 Targets Israeli and Middle East Aerospace and Defense Sectors

Suspected Iran-nexus espionage activity targeting the aerospace, aviation and defense industries in Middle East countries, including Israel and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and potentially Turkey, India, and Albania. Mandiant attributes this activity with moderate confidence to the Iranian actor UNC1549, which overlaps with Tortoiseshell—a threat actor that has been publicly linked to Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC). Tortoiseshell […]
February 29, 2024

Black Basta ransomware attacks ZircoDATA company

ZircoDATA is the leading provider of secure document storage and records management (RIM) solutions from information governance and digital conversion to storage, language services and secure shredding since 1995.ZircoDATA has been attacked by the Black Basta Group, claiming 395 GB of data, including financial documents, personal user folders, and confidentiality agreements. There are at least 46 passport scans and 12 […]
June 8, 2023

MOVEit extortion attacks claimed by Clop ransomware gang

The Clop ransomware gang has confirmed that they are behind the MOVEit Transfer attacks where they have been exploiting a zero-day vulnerability to breach servers belonging to “hundreds of companies” and steal data. It has been revealed that the gang had started exploiting the vulnerability on Saturday 27th of May 2023, during the US Memorial Day holiday. At this time, the […]
June 8, 2023

Japanese pharmaceutical giant Eisai discloses ransomware attack

On Tuesday 6th of June 2023, Eisai, a Tokyo-based pharmaceutical company Eisai disclosed it suffered a ransomware incident over the weekend that impacted its operations following the threat actors encrypting some of its servers. In response to the attack, Eisai has taken many of its IT systems offline to contain the damage and prevent the spread of the locker to […]
June 1, 2023

2.5 million individuals impacted following ransomware against Harvard Pilgrim Health Care

Last week, Harvard Pilgrim Health Care (HPHC), a Massachusetts-based non-profit health services provider released a data breach notice disclosing that a ransomware attack it suffered in April 2023 impacted 2,550,922 people, as well as the threat actors stealing their sensitive data from compromised systems. The notice revealed that the threat actors had maintained access to HPHC’s systems between March 28 […]