More than a decade ago, researchers at antivirus company Kaspersky identified suspicious internet traffic of what they thought was a known government-backed group, based on similar targeting and its phishing techniques.
Soon, the researchers realized they had found a much more advanced hacking operation that was targeting the Cuban government, among others. Eventually the researchers were able to attribute the network activity to a mysterious — and at the time completely unknown — Spanish-speaking hacking group that they called Careto, after the Spanish slang word (“ugly face” or “mask” in English), which they found buried within the malware’s code.
Read more…
Source: TechCrunch News
Sign up for our Newsletter
The latest news and insights delivered right to your inbox.
Related:
- One Year After WannaCry: A Fundamentally Changed Threat Landscape
May 17, 2018
It’s been one year this week since the ransomware known as WannaCry infected more than 200,000 machines in 150 countries, causing billions of dollars in damages and grinding global business to a halt. The speed and scale of the attack – helped along by leaked National Security Agency hacking tools – was obviously notable, but ...
- Critical Linux Flaw Opens the Door to Full Root Access
May 16, 2018
Red Hat has patched a vulnerability affecting the DHCP client packages that shipped with Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 and 7. A successful exploit could give an attacker root access and full control over enterprise endpoints. According to an alert issued Wednesday from US-CERT, the critical-rated flaw, first reported by Google researcher Felix Wilhelm, would “allow attackers to ...
- Nethammer—Exploiting DRAM Rowhammer Bug Through Network Requests
May 16, 2018
Last week, we reported about the first network-based remote Rowhammer attack, dubbed Throwhammer, which involves the exploitation a known vulnerability in DRAM through network cards using remote direct memory access (RDMA) channels. However, a separate team of security researchers has now demonstrated a second network-based remote Rowhammer technique that can be used to attack systems using uncached memory or ...
- Shadowy Hackers Accidentally Reveal Two Zero-Days to Security Researchers
May 15, 2018
An unidentified hacker group appears to have accidentally exposed two fully-working zero-days when they’ve uploaded a weaponized PDF file to a public malware scanning engine. The zero-days where spotted by security researchers from Slovak antivirus vendor ESET, who reported the issues to Adobe and Microsoft, which in turn, had them patched within two months. Anton Cherepanov, ...
- This malware checks your system temperature to sidestep sandboxing
May 1, 2018
GravityRAT is a Trojan which checks the temperature of a system to detect the presence of virtual machines (VMs) and prevent efforts at analysis by researchers. By taking thermal readings, the Remote Access Trojan (RAT), which has become a recent menace in India, attempts to find out whether or not VMs are being employed for the ...
- Millions of Home Fiber Routers Vulnerable to Complete Takeover
May 1, 2018
Consumers lucky enough to have blazing-fast 1Gbps internet access in their homes are likely to use the internet more than lower-broadband households; however, millions of them are at risk for hackers to gain wide-ranging access to their internet activities (including being able to view full browsing histories). A comprehensive assessment of various GPON home routers by vpnMentor has ...