The Good

With cyberattacks against K-12 schools on the rise, the CISA is seeking commitments from ed-tech software manufacturers to design products that are more secure. The new initiative launched by the agency as part of this effort is believed to bolster cybersecurity in K-12 schools. Meanwhile, the U.S. and the U.K governments this week issued new sanctions against members involved in TrickBot/Conti operations. The development comes after both governments sanctioned seven members earlier this year in February.

• The CISA launched a new initiative, the K-12 Education Technology Secure by Design Pledge, as part of its ongoing efforts to bolster cybersecurity in K-12 schools. The agreement is meant for education technology software manufacturers to commit to develop products with enhanced, built-in security measures.
• The U.S. and the U.K governments named and sanctioned 11 additional members of the Trickbot/Conti cybercrime operation. The new sanctions follow a similar move taken in February against alleged Trickbot, Conti, and Ryuk criminals. According to the UK National Crime Agency, the gang has extorted at least $180 million from people globally.
• The CISA released new guidelines to help federal agencies combat DDoS attacks. The guide focuses on attacks targeting websites and related services and requires agencies to make an inventory of agency-owned or -operated web servers to assess the risk.

The Bad

Unfortunately, it remains an uphill task for organizations to protect the sensitive information of individuals. An Alabama-based pediatric dental care provider disclosed a cyberattack that impacted the personal and health details of nearly 130,000 patients, parents, and employees. In a separate incident, an online item exchange platform confirmed a widespread breach that resulted in the exfiltration of data belonging to over seven million users. Apart from data breaches, a global fraud investment campaign made the headlines for duping users worldwide and making a profit of $280,000.

• Alabama-based Acadia Health LLC, which operates as Just Kids Dental, notified that the sensitive information of nearly 130,000 patients, parents, and employees was compromised in a recent cyberattack. The compromised details included names, addresses, email addresses, phone numbers, birthdates, Social Security numbers, driver's license numbers, health insurance policy information, and treatment information.
• The Coffee Meets Bagel dating platform confirmed a cyberattack caused by hackers breaching the company’s systems and wiping sensitive data. This impacted the normal operations of production servers, which were immediately re-established with the help of the technology team.
• Threat actors stole over $40 million in cryptocurrency from the crypto casino platform Stake after gaining unauthorized access to its Ethereum (ETH) and Binance Smart Chain (BSC) hot wallets. Meanwhile, the firm assured that user funds were safe.
• Developers associated with npm, PyPI, and RubyGems repositories were targeted in an organized cybercrime operation that gathered basic system information (OS details and available free memory) and exfiltrated it to a server controlled by the attackers. The campaign was designed to target only macOS systems.
• Ten years’ worth of pathology referral letters and other sensitive details such as patient names, contact details, and Medicare numbers were exposed in a cybersecurity incident affecting the Melbourne-based pathology clinic TissuPath. Russia-based BlackCat claimed responsibility for the attacks by threatening to release 4.95TB of data stolen from the firm.
• In a joint advisory, the CISA revealed that an Iranian hacking group exploited critical Zoho and Fortinet vulnerabilities to breach a U.S. aeronautical organization. The flaws in question were CVE-2022-47966 and CVE-2022-42475, which enabled attackers to establish persistence on the organization’s firewall devices and move laterally through the networks.
• Google reported that North Korean state hackers were involved in a campaign that exploited a zero-day flaw in an undisclosed popular software to target security researchers. The attackers used Twitter and Mastodon to lure researchers into switching to encrypted messaging platforms like Signal, Wire, or WhatsApp. Once communication was established, the attackers sent them malicious files designed to exploit the flaw.
• Cybercriminals abused the Google Looker Studio service to create fake cryptocurrency phishing websites that stole the account details of digital asset holders. These fake websites were propagated via phishing emails, informing recipients that they had won roughly 0.75 Bitcoin ($19,200) as part of their participation in Google’s premium cryptocurrency insights and trading strategies program.
• The city council of Seville, Spain, is still recovering from an alleged ransomware attack by the LockBit group. The attack began on September 4 and has affected a broad range of services, including police, firefighters, and tax collection. Officials are still investigating the incident.
• Group-IB researchers warned of a major global investment fraud campaign that leveraged nearly 900 scam pages to target users in the Middle East and Africa region. These pages impersonated organizations in financial and insurance, stock trading companies, oil and gas, and construction sectors. It was found that scammers managed to steal around $280,000 between March and June as part of the campaign.
• See Tickets suffered another web skimming attack in a span of a year, that enabled threat actors to access customers’ payment data. The information includes debit or credit card numbers, access codes, passwords, and PIN numbers of more than 323,000 customers.
• The ShinyHunters group claimed to have stolen more than 30 million customer order records from Pizza Hut Australia, in addition to the personal information of more than one million customers. The data was stored in an unsecured Amazon Web services bucket used by the pizza chain.
• Used item exchange portal Freecycle suffered a security breach after a hacker gained access to its systems and stole the account details of more than seven million users. The stolen data includes usernames, emails, and passwords, which are now being sold on underground hacking forums.

New Threats

That’s not all! A new phishing kit, capable of helping adversaries conduct scams and impersonation attacks, was observed gaining traction in the cyber threat landscape. Researchers revealed that the kit has been used by around 500 cybercriminals to target more than 56,000 Microsoft 365 corporate accounts. In other headlines, advanced versions of the Chaes malware and the Atomic macOS Stealer (AMOS) emerged to target organizations and users in separate campaigns. There’s also an important piece of news for organizations using the vulnerable MinIO Object Storage systems; attackers were found exploiting two flaws in the systems.

• Morphisec recently identified an advanced version of the Chaes malware, called Chae$ 4, specifically designed to target clients of financial and logistics companies located in Latin America. The variant employs WebSockets as the primary communication method between its modules and the C2 server.
• Researchers from Security Joes identified an unknown threat actor exploiting vulnerabilities in the MinIO Object Storage system to remotely execute arbitrary code on vulnerable servers. Collectively called Evil_MinIO exploit, these vulnerabilities are tracked as CVE-2023-28434 and CVE-2023-28432 and affect versions before RELEASE.2023-03-20T20-16-18Z.
• A new Agent Tesla variant was observed in a new phishing campaign targeting Windows users. The phishing email came disguised as a purchase order notification, asking recipients to confirm an order from an industrial equipment supplier company.
• An updated version of BLISTER malware loader was used as part of SocGholish infection chains to distribute the Mythic framework. The malware was embedded within a legitimate VLC Media Player library in an attempt to bypass security software.
• A phishing kit dubbed W3LL Panel served at least 500 cybercriminals in the last 10 months to compromise more than 56,000 Microsoft 365 corporate accounts in the U.S., Australia, and Europe. The phishing kit is used along with 16 other tools that are primarily designed for BEC attacks. Some of these tools include SMTP senders (PunnySender and W3LL Sender), a malicious link stager (W3LL Redirect), a vulnerability scanner (OKELO), an automated account discovery instrument (CONTOOL), and reconnaissance tools.
• A new version of Atomic macOS Stealer (AMOS) was spotted in a new malvertising campaign, targeting people searching for TradingView software on the Google search engine. Once executed, it exfiltrates users’ system data, including wallet addresses, passwords, auto-fills, keychains, and cookies, to send it to the attackers’ servers.
• ASEC published a report citing an increase in the usage of the BlueShell malware by various threat actors, to target Windows, Mac, and Linux OS across Korea and Thailand. While analyzing BlueShell's activities in the Linux environment, the researchers identified a customized variant of the malware on VirusTotal.
• Pandora, a variant of the Mirai botnet, was observed infiltrating Android-based TV sets and TV boxes to perform DDoS attacks. Some of the targeted devices include Tanix TX6 TV Box, MX10 Pro 6K, and H96 MAX X3.
• Threat actor PYTA31 was found distributing the Whitesnake malware through malicious packages in the PyPI repository from April through August. The malware uses a complex exfiltration mechanism that involves the use of a file-sharing service and Telegram. It is capable of targeting multiple operating systems.
• Zscaler attributed a new Steal-It campaign to the APT28 (aka Fancy Bear) group that utilized a customized version of Nishang’s Start-CaptureServer PowerShell script to steal and exfiltrate system information. The attack chain began with a ZIP archive bundled with a malicious LNK file.