Cyware Weekly Threat Intelligence - March 27–31

The Good

To beat a hacker, you have to think like one! This is why the NCA, along with several international law enforcement agencies, have come up with an idea to crack down on wannabe cybercriminals. The agency has set up multiple fake cybercrime markets as part of the Operation PowerOFF project to gather information on cybercriminals. Yet another new FDA cybersecurity guideline has been issued for organizations in the healthcare sector and it is about enhancing the security of internet-connected devices.

• The U.K’s National Crime Agency (NCA) has created multiple fake DDoS-for-hire service websites as a part of Operation PowerOFF to track down naive and low-skilled cybercriminals. Several international law enforcement agencies such as the FBI, the Dutch Police Corps, Germany’s Federal Criminal Police Office, and Poland’s National Police Cybercrime Bureau are also involved in this ongoing operation.
• The FDA has published new guidelines to strengthen the cybersecurity posture of internet-connected products in the healthcare sector. According to the guidelines, the applicants seeking approval for new medical devices must submit a plan to monitor, identify, and address cybersecurity issues found in devices. Further, the applicants must outline a process to update the devices with the latest security patches.
• A bipartisan group of senators has reintroduced a bill to boost the physical and digital security of federal data centers against a range of potential threats, including cyber threats. One of the requirements includes setting standards for the amount of time a data center needs to be available per year despite suffering physical intrusions and other natural disasters.

The Bad

The cyber community also witnessed pernicious threats, all of which led to the exposure of sensitive data. While Toyota Italy had inadvertently left access to its marketing tools exposed for more than a year due to a flaw in its website, NCB Management Services revealed that the personal information of over 500,000 users was stolen after threat actors gained unauthorized access to its systems. In the latest update on the infamous GoAnywhere hacking incident, Procter & Gamble and the U.K. Pension Protection Fund admitted to falling victim to the attack pulled off by the Cl0p ransomware gang.

• The Winter Vivern APT group has been found exploiting a Zimbra flaw to gain access to emails and steal sensitive information of NATO officials, government agencies, military personnel, and diplomats involved in the Russia-Ukraine war. The attack is launched via phishing emails from a compromised address.
• Consumer goods giant Procter & Gamble confirmed that it was one of the many companies affected by a breach due to the Fortra GoAnywhere bug. As a result, the hackers stole the information of some employees. Separately, the U.K Pension Protection Fund also confirmed falling victim to the incident.
• Enterprise communications software maker 3CX confirmed that it was a victim of a supply chain attack that affected multiple versions of its desktop app for Windows and macOS. The affected versions include 18.12.407 and 18.12.416 for Windows and 18.11.1213, 18.12.402, 18.12.407, and 18.12.416 for macOS. Evidence reveals that the attack occurred due to either a compromise of 3CX’s software build pipeline that distributes the app packages for Windows and macOS or the poisoning of an upstream dependency.
• Researchers discovered a vulnerability in Microsoft’s Azure platform, which enabled users to alter Bing search results and access other private information from Office 365 applications like Outlook, Teams, and OneDrive. The flaw existed in Azure Active Directory (AAD) identity and access management service.
• Latitude Financial, Australia, updated that a cyberattack earlier this month resulted in the theft of over 14 million customer records. While the investigation is underway, the firm further added that 6.1 million records dating back to 2005 were also stolen.
• Researchers discovered that a series of cyberespionage attacks launched by subgroups of Earth Preta APT affected over 200 organizations. Among the targets included educational institutions and financial services organizations, the maritime industry, the energy production industry, and ore and material refineries.
• Around 500,000 individuals were impacted by a data breach at debt buyer NCB Management Services. The incident occurred after attackers gained unauthorized access to NCB’s systems and stole information such as names, addresses, phone numbers, email addresses, birth dates, and social security numbers of users.
• Toyota Italy accidentally leaked access to its marketing tools — Salesforce and Mapbox API — for more than one-and-a-half years. Threat actors could have abused these tools to gain access to the phone numbers and email addresses of clients and used them to launch phishing attacks.
• The LockBit RaaS group leaked the data stolen from the Washington County Sheriff's Office in Northeast Florida. The published data included warrants and information on employees. The officials confirmed the attack and said it recovered from the incident about two weeks ago.

New Threats

Moving on to new threats, researchers warned of a new swiss-army-knife toolset for cybercriminals that can be used to harvest private information from 18 cloud services. Named AlienFox, the toolset is being sold on a private Telegram channel. New variants of the IcedID trojan have also been spotted in multiple phishing campaigns since February. It is touted that one of them, tracked as Lite, is being used alongside Emotet. DBatLoader also made a comeback, targeting various businesses in European countries with Remcos and Formbook trojans.

• Researchers have sounded alarms on ransomware attacks against IBM’s file transfer software. The attacks are launched by two never-before-seen ransomware groups, tracked as Buhti and IceFire. The flaw, designated CVE-2022-47986, has a CVSS score of 9.8 and can allow attackers to execute arbitrary code on target systems by sending a specially crafted API call.
• Version 4.3 of the Xloader information stealer malware is active in the wild since January. The malware comes with several layers of obfuscation and encryption methods to evade detection.
• Moobot, a variant of Mirai, was discovered in a new threat campaign targeting Cacti and Realtek vulnerabilities. The campaign was active between January and March and was also used to distribute ShellBot. The targeted flaws include CVE-2021-35394 in Realtek Jungle SDK and CVE-2022-46169 in the Cacti fault management monitoring tool.
• A fast-evolving toolkit named AlienFox is being used to harvest API keys and other secrets from compromised cloud services such as AWS SES and Microsoft Office 365. Additionally, the attackers are relying on misconfigurations associated with popular web frameworks including Laravel, Drupal, Magento, Opencart, Prestashop, and WordPress. So far, there are four versions of the toolset.
• Emotet was spotted in a new phishing campaign that targeted U.S taxpayers. The campaign impersonated the IRS and asked recipients to click on a malicious document disguised as a W-9 tax form. However, the document installed the malware onto the victim’s device.
• Kaspersky identified unique clipboard-injector malware attacks that have been active since September 2022. These attacks are designed to steal cryptocurrency from users. As much as $400,000 in cryptocurrency has been stolen by attackers that are using trojanized Tor installation to hide the malware.
• A DBatLoader malware campaign was found actively targeting various businesses in European countries with Remcos and Formbook trojans. The malware was distributed through WordPress sites that had authorized SSL certificates, a common tactic used by threat actors to bypass security checks.
• Proofpoint reported two new variants of the IcedID trojan that are used by different threat actors. One of these variants is tracked as Lite and is believed to be used by Emotet operators to expand their activities. The other variant is dubbed Forked and delivers the bot with minimal functionality.
• A Chinese state-sponsored threat group has been linked to a new malware dubbed Mélofée, targeting Linux servers. There are two versions of the malware and the newest of these versions is designed to drop a kernel-mode rootkit that’s based on an open-source project referred to as Reptile.