Star Blizzard’s new spear-phishing campaign, while novel in that it uses and targets WhatsApp for the first time, exhibits familiar spear-phishing TTPs for Star Blizzard, with the threat actor initiating email contact with their targets, to engage them, before sending them a second message containing a malicious link.
The sender address used by the threat actor in this campaign impersonates a US government official, continuing Star Blizzard’s practice of impersonating known political/diplomatic figures, to further ensure target engagement. The initial email sent to targets contains a quick response (QR) code purporting to direct users to join a WhatsApp group on “the latest non-governmental initiatives aimed at supporting Ukraine NGOs.”
Read more…
Source: Microsoft
Related:
- Hive ransomware enters big league with hundreds breached in four months
December 16, 2021
The Hive ransomware gang is more active and aggressive than its leak site shows, with affiliates attacking an average of three companies every day since the operation became known in late June. Security researchers gleaning information straight from Hive’s administrator panel found that affiliates had breached more than 350 organizations over four months. The gang’s data leak ...
- Lenovo laptops vulnerable to bug allowing admin privileges
December 16, 2021
Lenovo laptops, including ThinkPad and Yoga models, are vulnerable to a privilege elevation bug in the ImControllerService service allowing attackers to execute commands with admin privileges. The flaws are tracked as CVE-2021-3922 and CVE-2021-3969 and affect the ImControllerService component of all Lenovo System Interface Foundation versions below 1.1.20.3. When viewing the Windows services screen, this service ...
- Suspected Iranian hackers target airline with new backdoor
December 16, 2021
A suspected, state-sponsored Iranian threat group has attacked an airline with a never-before-seen backdoor. On Wednesday, cybersecurity researchers from IBM Security X-Force said an Asian airline was the subject of the attack, which likely began in October 2019 until 2021. The advanced persistent threat (APT) group ITG17, also known as MuddyWater, leveraged a free workspace channel on ...
- Owowa: the add-on that turns your OWA into a credential stealer and remote access panel
December 14, 2021
While looking for potentially malicious implants that targeted Microsoft Exchange servers, Kaspersky researchers identified a suspicious binary that had been submitted to a multiscanner service in late 2020. Analyzing the code, researchers determined that the previously unknown binary is an IIS module, aimed at stealing credentials and enabling remote command execution from OWA. Kaspersky named ...
- Second Log4j vulnerability CVE 2021-45046 discovered, patch already released
December 14, 2021
A second vulnerability involving Apache Log4j was found on Tuesday after cybersecurity experts spent days attempting to patch or mitigate CVE-2021-44228. The description of the new vulnerability, CVE 2021-45046, says the fix to address CVE-2021-44228 in Apache Log4j 2.15.0 was “incomplete in certain non-default configurations.” “This could allow attackers… to craft malicious input data using a JNDI ...
- Artificial Intelligence: How to make Machine Learning Cyber Secure?
December 14, 2021
Machine learning (ML) is currently the most developed and the most promising subfield of artificial intelligence for industrial and government infrastructures. By providing new opportunities to solve decision-making problems intelligently and automatically, artificial intelligence (AI) is applied in almost all sectors of our economy. While the benefits of AI are significant and undeniable, the development of ...