Back in October 2022, Kaspersky GReAT was looking into a peculiar advertisement on a hacking forum. A cybercriminal had been advertising a UEFI bootkit, dubbed BlackLotus, that could bypass Secure Boot, for $5,000. Given the low price for such powerful capabilities, the cybersecurity community initially took this advertisement with a grain of salt. As no BlackLotus samples were found in the wild, no one could at the time verify the claims made in the forum post.
However, about half a year later, in March 2023, ESET confirmed that the BlackLotus advertisement was genuine. The researchers tracked down samples of this bootkit and confirmed that it can indeed bypass Secure Boot through a vulnerability called Baton Drop (CVE-2022-21894). As this vulnerability was still exploitable in 2023, Microsoft had to release multiple security updates to address it.
Read more…
Source: Kaspersky
Sign up for the Cyber Security Review Newsletter
The latest cyber security news and insights delivered right to your inbox
Related:
- Patch now: Cisco IOS XE routers exposed to rare 10/10-severity security flaw
August 29, 2019
Cisco is urging customers to install updates for a critical bug affecting its popular IOS XE operating system that powers millions of enterprise network devices around the world. The bug has a rare Common Vulnerability Scoring System (CVSS) version 3 rating of 10 out of a possible 10 and allows anyone on the internet to bypass the login ...
- Exploitation of Windows CVE-2019-0708 (BlueKeep): Three Ways to Write Data into the Kernel with RDP PDU
August 29, 2019
In May 2019, Microsoft released an out-of-band patch update for remote code execution vulnerability CVE-2019-0708, which is also known as “BlueKeep” and resides in code to Remote Desktop Services (RDS). This vulnerability is pre-authentication and requires no user interaction, making it particularly dangerous as it has the unsettling potential to be weaponized into a destructive exploit. ...
- ‘Heatstroke’ Campaign Uses Multistage Phishing Attack to Steal PayPal and Credit Card Information
August 29, 2019
Despite having an apparent lull in the first half of 2019, phishing will remain a staple in a cybercriminal’s arsenal, and they’re not going to stop using it. The latest example is a phishing campaign dubbed Heatstroke, based on a variable found in their phishing kit code. Heatstroke demonstrates how far phishing techniques have evolved — from merely mimicking ...
- Spam and phishing in Q2 2019
August 28, 2019
In the second quarter of 2019, scammers were making active use of cloud-based data storage services such as Google Drive and Google Storage to hide their illegal content. The reasoning behind this is simple: a link from a legitimate domain is seen as more trustworthy by both users and spam filters. Most often, such links point to ...
- AMEO ‘concerned’ about nation-state attacks on power grids
August 22, 2019
“For the energy sectors and critical infrastructure sectors, particularly around electricity, we are concerned about nation-state actors,” says Tim Daly, chief security officer (CSO) for the Australian Energy Market Operator (AEMO). “Nation-states are looking to have capability and implants that are persistent within critical organisations,” he told the Gartner Security and Risk Management Summit in Sydney ...
- Russian Hacking Group Targeting Banks Worldwide With Evolving Tactics
August 21, 2019
Silence APT, a Russian-speaking cybercriminal group, known for targeting financial organizations primarily in former Soviet states and neighboring countries is now aggressively targeting banks in more than 30 countries across America, Europe, Africa, and Asia. Active since at least September 2016, Silence APT group’s most recent successful campaign was against Bangladesh-based Dutch-Bangla Bank, which lost over $3 ...