Cyware Weekly Threat Intelligence - May 02–06

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.

• Threat hunters have documented a fileless malware attack that abuses Windows event logs to stash and launch trojans in the last stage of the infection stage. The attack also employs Cobalt Strike Beacon, NetSPI, and various custom modules.
• A newly discovered Operation CuckooBees campaign associated with the Winnti APT group was found stealing intellectual property from several organizations across North America, Europe, and Asia. The campaign leveraged the Windows Common Log Files System (CLFS) mechanism to evade detection and distribute a variety of new malware loaders, such as a new DEPLOYLOG loader, and different new versions of Spyder Loader, PRIVATELOG, and WINNKIT.
• Researchers have shared technical details of two new Go variants of recently found BlackByte ransomware. The first variant was seen-in-the-wild in September 2021 and the second variant, referred to as BlackByte v2, was discovered in February 2022. Both variants employ various anti-analysis techniques, including a multitude of encryption algorithms to stay under the radar.
• Researchers have linked several new ransomware strains to the APT38 hacking group. These ransomware strains are Beaf, PXJ, ZZZZ, and ChiChi. It is believed that Beaf, PXJ, and ZZZZ share a notable amount of source code and functionalities with VHD and TFlower ransomware.
• A new phishing attack leveraging Google’s SMTP relay service has been detected delivering phishing emails to users. The end goal of the attack is to bypass spam detections and trick users into opening a malicious link or downloading a malicious file to steal user credentials.
• Researchers have released details of an Apple Silicon vulnerability called Augury. It exists in Apple’s implementation of the Data-Memory Dependent Prefetcher (DMP). The microarchitectural flaw affects the M1, M1 Max, and A14 Bionic chips from Apple.
• Researchers at Armis have found a set of five new vulnerabilities in Aruba and Avaya network infrastructure equipment. Dubbed TLStorm 2.0, the flaws exist in the implementation of TLS communications in multiple models of network switches. It is a variant of the original TLStorm vulnerabilities discovered earlier this year. Patches have been issued to address the flaws.
• A new APT group, tracked as UNC3524, uses IP cameras to deploy backdoors and steal Microsoft Exchange emails. The APT group primarily targets employees that focus on corporate development, mergers, and acquisitions, and large corporate transactions. It also uses a backdoor, tracked as QUIETEXIT, that borrows code from the open-source Dropbear SSH client-server software, in order to maintain persistence on infected networks.
• Researchers observed a new variant of AvosLocker ransomware that makes use of a legitimate driver file to disable anti-virus solutions. In addition, the ransomware is also capable of scanning multiple endpoints for the Log4j vulnerability using Nmap NSE script. In one instance, the ransomware variant leveraged a flaw in Zoho ManageEngine ADSelfService Plus to gain initial entry.
• Researchers believe that the new Black Basta ransomware is possibly linked to the notorious Conti group. The assumption is based on similarities between their leak sites, payment sites, and the way their support employees talk and behave.
• A new malicious threat cluster dubbed Moshen Dragon, with links to China-linked RedFoxtrot and Nomad Panda hacker groups, was found targeting telecommunication service providers in Central Asia, reported researchers at Sentinel Labs.
• Chinese APT Override Panda, aka Naikon, was found launching new phishing attacks to collect intelligence from ASEAN members to steal sensitive data. The gang sent spear-phishing emails to deploy a Red Team beacon, Viper.
• A new malware framework, named NetDooka, is being distributed by PrivateLoader’s Pay-Per-Install (PPI) service. The malware framework features a loader, a dropper, a protection driver, and a powerful NetDooka RAT, enabling threat actors to take full control of devices. Researchers explain that the framework is still under development.
• Raspberry Robin is a newly discovered malware strain that is often installed via USB drives. The malware, which was first observed in September 2021, is being used to compromise QNAP devices.
• Scammers are locking users out of their Instagram accounts in a newly found scheme. They attempt to engage the targeted users in backstories, such as the infamous 419 scam, and later trick them into sharing their credentials over a link sent via SMS.