Cyware Daily Threat Intelligence

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Daily Threat Briefing • December 21, 2023

New rounds of phishing attacks are underway across the globe. Israel National Cyber Directorate (INCD) warned organizations and citizens of phishing emails pretending to be security updates for an F5 BIG-IP zero-day flaw and ultimately deploying wiper malware variants— Hamsa and Hatef—on Linux and Windows devices. In another incident, threat actors deceived Instagram users with fake copyright infringement complaints via emails in an attempt to steal the backup codes required to hijack the accounts.

In other stories, Google addressed a new actively exploited zero-day flaw impacting the Chrome browser. This is the eighth such vulnerability patched by Google this year. Users are urged to apply the recommended security patches to stay safe.

Top Breaches Reported in the Last 24 Hours

HCLTech suffers ransomware attack

HCLTech disclosed the discovery of a ransomware incident within an isolated cloud environment associated with one of its projects. While the investigation is underway to understand the scope of the attack, the company currently has confirmed that the event has not caused a significant impact on the network.

ESO Solution updates on ransomware attack

In an update, Austin-based ESO Solution revealed that the information of nearly 3 million people was affected in the October ransomware attack. The impacted data includes names, dates of birth, injury type, injury date, treatment date, treatment type, and, in some cases, Social Security numbers. The data was stolen from hospitals associated with ESO solution, including the likes of Mississippi Baptist Medical Center, Forrest General Hospital, Providence Alaska Medical Center, Manatee Memorial Hospital, and Desert View Hospital, among others.

Blink Mobility exposes data

Los Angeles-based electric car-sharing provider Blink Mobility left a misconfigured MongoDB database open to the public, thus exposing the personal data of more than 22,000 users. The database contained around 181,000 records that included phone numbers, email addresses, encrypted passwords, and registration dates of customers and administrators.

Real Estate Wealth Network leaks data

An unprotected database with a size of 1.16 TB, leaked the real estate records of several people, including major celebrities. The database belonged to Real Estate Wealth Network and contained 1.5 billion records spanning from April 2022 to October 2023. It is unclear how long the database was exposed or who else may have accessed the data but researchers reported that user names, phone numbers, emails, and device information were among the leaked data.

Top Malware Reported in the Last 24 Hours

Data wipers distributed via fake updates

The Israel National Cyber Directorate (INCD) warned of a new phishing attack that deployed a new data wiper through emails pretending to be the security update for an F5 BIG-IP zero-day vulnerability. The data wiper is capable of wiping data from Windows and Linux systems through its two variants, Hamsa and Hatef, respectively. When launched, both the Windows and Linux versions attempt to impersonate a security update for F5 by displaying the company's logo on the screen. The commands are executed and received through a Telegram channel controlled by the attackers.

Banking trojan steals banking details

McAfee shared details of a banking trojan, named Android/Banker.AFX, which is designed to steal victims’ banking account details. The trojan is distributed via WhatsApp messages, enticing users to install a seemingly legitimate app serving as a verification tool. Once installed, the trojan collects personal and financial data, intercepts SMS messages, and steals one-time passwords.

Top Vulnerabilities Reported in the Last 24 Hours

Flaws in Mozilla products

Mozilla products are impacted by several vulnerabilities, the most severe (CVE-2023-50762) of which could allow for arbitrary code execution. Other flaws are associated with use-after-free bugs, heap buffer overflow issues, and clickjacking. The flaws affect Firefox versions prior to 121, Firefox ESR versions prior to 115.6, and Thunderbird versions prior to 115.6. It is recommended to apply appropriate security updates provided by Mozilla to stay safe.

Another Chrome zero-day flaw fixed

Google released emergency updates for another Chrome zero-day vulnerability (CVE-2023-7024) exploited in the wild. Tracked as a heap buffer overflow issue in the open-source WebRTC framework, the flaw has been addressed with the release of version 120.0.6099.129 for Mac or Linux, and 120.0.6099.129/130 for Windows. While Google is aware of the exploitation of the flaw in the wild, it has not yet shared the details about these incidents.

Ivanti issues security updates

Ivanti issued security updates for 13 critical security vulnerabilities affecting its enterprise MDM solution. These security flaws are due to WLAvalancheService stack or heap-based buffer overflow weaknesses. Unauthenticated attackers can exploit these flaws to perform DDoS attacks, remote code execution attacks, or cause memory corruption on unpatched systems.

Top Scams Reported in the Last 24 Hours

Fake giveaway scams spotted on X

Scammers have been found abusing a feature in X (formerly known as Twitter) to promote fake giveaway scams and fraudulent Telegram channels to steal cryptocurrency and NFTs from users. As part of the infection chain, the scammers take a URL for a tweet and modify the account name, while keeping the status ID unchanged, to trick users into believing that the tweet is from a legitimate organization. Some of the scam accounts were found to be mimicking cryptocurrency firms such as Binance, Ethereum Foundation, zkSync, and Chainlink.

Instagram users targeted in phishing

A phishing email pretending to be a copyright infringement complaint was found prompting users to resolve the issue by clicking on an appeal form. This redirected them to a phishing site impersonating Meta’s actual violation portal that asked them to share their username and password. After siphoning these details, the phishing site asks the target if their account is protected by 2FA and, upon confirmation, requests the 8-digit backup code. The ultimate goal of the attack is to steal the backup codes that can be used to hijack Instagram accounts.

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