Cyware Weekly Threat Intelligence - May 02–06
Weekly Threat Briefing • May 6, 2022
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Weekly Threat Briefing • May 6, 2022
The Good
The week has brought us a bundle of good news in the form of meaningful initiatives in cybersecurity. As the healthcare sector keeps facing constant threats, a team of healthcare stakeholders devised a framework to secure digital health apps that are not covered by HIPAA. After a multi-year effort, the NIST is finally rolling out its updated guidance for managing supply chain risks.
The American College of Physicians, the Organization for the Review of Care and Health Applications, and the American Telemedicine Association developed a framework to secure mobile health apps and digital health technologies, which are not covered by HIPAA. The Digital Health Assessment Framework can be used by anyone and aims to enable patients and healthcare leaders to make more informed decisions.
The U.K’s NCSC released a report suggesting the Department for Digital, Culture, Media & Sport outline security and privacy requirements for app store operators and developers.
GitHub announced mandating 2FA for all coders and contributors on its platform by the end of 2023. About 16.5% of users currently use 2FA. The new development will impact nearly 83 million users.
NIST released updated cybersecurity guidance for managing risks by identifying, assessing, and responding to threats at different stages of the software supply chain. As the document is a long read, NIST also plans on publishing a quick-start guide to help firms that are at the starting phase of their cybersecurity supply chain risk management.
South Korea, along with Luxembourg and Canada joined the NATO Cooperative Cyber Defense Centre of Excellence (CCDCOE), a think-tank based in Tallinn, Estonia, that supports member nations and NATO with interdisciplinary cyber defense research, training, and exercises.
The Bad
Coming to the noteworthy security incidents reported this week, the U.K National Health Service was once again under attack as its email accounts were targeted by cybercriminals. Social media platforms remained a favorite target as verified Twitter accounts were preyed upon in a phishing campaign. We also witnessed yet another DeFi hack resulting in losses of tens of millions worth of cryptocurrency.
Heroku acknowledged a security breach that occurred due to the compromise of GitHub OAuth tokens last month. This affected its internal customer database. As a precautionary measure, the firm has started performing forced password resets for a subset of its user accounts.
An unprotected ElasticSearch server instance was found exposing around 5.8 GB of financial information about loans from Indian and African financial services. A total of 1,686,363 records containing personal information such as names, loan amounts, dates of birth, and account numbers were compromised in the incident.
Researchers have associated the recently discovered IssacWiper malware with the Sprite Spider threat actor group. The similarities are drawn based on the infrastructure deployed, including the subroutines responsible for error handling, heap memory allocation, and concurrency management.
The Australian state of New South Wales’ transport agency revealed that it was impacted by a cyberattack in early April. The attack was launched via the agency’s Authorised Inspection Scheme (AIS) online application system. During this incident, an unauthorized third party successfully accessed a small number of the application’s user accounts.
Researchers have detected an ongoing phishing attack campaign targeting the National Health Service (NHS). The campaign uses hijacked NHS email accounts to send credential harvesting links to employees based in England and Scotland. So far, around 1,157 phishing emails used for this purpose have been identified in the attack.
Multiple verified Twitter accounts have been targeted in an ongoing phishing email attack operation to collect login credentials from users. These accounts belong to celebrities, politicians, influencers, journalists, and private and public entities. These accounts are particularly sought after by hackers to promote scam campaigns and malicious activities.
An instance of a malicious credit card swiper being injected into WordPress’ wp-settings.php file was observed by researchers. The malicious card swiper was exclusively designed to target online stores using the WooCommerce platform.
Multiple crafting community groups across the U.K were targeted in a scam that promised to help them grab a stall at a fair price. The scammers asked the groups to book their spots using a fake booking form that harvested their personal and financial information. Later, it asked the victims to make payments of £60 to £75 to confirm their booking. However, this ended up with victims losing money at the hand of scammers.
A data breach at Riviera Utilities exposed the personal information of customers after the email accounts of some of its employees were compromised. Exposed details include personal information, such as Social Security Numbers, driver’s license numbers or state identification numbers, passport details, and health insurance information. Investigation reveals that the email accounts were accessed on or about October 17, 2021.
Rari Capital and Fei Protocol suffered a major loss after threat actors stole more than $80 million from both platforms. The hackers exploited a reentrancy vulnerability in Rari’s Fuse lending protocol to hack the platforms. Rari Capital acknowledged the hack, adding that borrowing has been paused globally and no further funds were at risk.
LockBit 2.0 ransomware group—with alleged ties to Russia—threatened to release data it stole from a Bulgarian government agency behind Ukraine-related refugee management.
Cisco Talos laid bare a phishing campaign by Mustang Panda, a China-based threat actor, against European entities. Hackers impersonated official EU reports on the conflict in Ukraine and its effects on NATO countries.
NFT scammers have been impersonating the Cyberpunk Ape Executives to roll out job offers to potential victims. Researchers warned against downloading the attached RAR files containing the apes.
The State Bar of Georgia is struggling to cope with a cyberattack that crippled its network, website, and email systems. The investigation is ongoing and the firm is yet to determine whether any information was accessed in the attack.
McAfee identified several fake YouTube channels that advertised malicious sites that claimed to double the amount of cryptocurrency invested. The fake channels included short videos from the original video called ‘The B Word’ where Elon Musk, Cathie Wood, and Jack Dorsey discussed various aspects of cryptocurrency. To make it look more convincing, the fake sites include a table that is continuously updated with recent transactions.
Researchers investigated a site that popped up in between comments on YouTube. The site offered tweaked apps to break into iPhones without having root access. These tweaked apps were promoted in disguise of OnlyFans Premium, Netflix Premium, and Pokemon Go Spoofer Injector. Once downloaded, these apps could download malicious code, display unwanted surveys or prompt victims to signup for availing premium services.
**New Threats **
The cyberworld is going cuckoo as a new long-term attack campaign was observed. Dubbed CuckooBees, the campaign was launched by the China-linked Winnti hacker group. The notorious APT38 was linked with four new ransomware strains that share code with two other ransomware. A new APT actor—UNC3524—popped up, which is delivering backdoors and stealing Microsoft Exchange emails.