While supply chain threats have been quietly compounding over the past decade, the last 12–18 months have triggered a drastic shift in the scale and velocity of these attacks. Rather than just hunting for bugs in finished software, attackers are targeting the everyday tools and code developers rely on.
Unit 42 research shows this happening at every step of the building process. We’ve observed attackers spending years pretending to be helpful contributors just to hide backdoors in core software, as seen in the XZ Utils vulnerability (CVE-2024-3094). We’ve seen attackers hijack accounts to drop malware into popular libraries, like in the Axios supply chain attack. And we’ve seen them misuse setup scripts to automatically steal credentials using the Shai-Hulud npm worm.
Read more…
Source: Palo Alto Unit 42
Sign up for the Cyber Security Review Newsletter
The latest cyber security news and insights delivered right to your inbox
Related:
- New Astaroth Trojan Variant Exploits Anti-Malware Software to Steal Info
February 13, 2019
A new Astaroth Trojan campaign targeting Brazil and European countries is currently exploiting the Avast antivirus and security software developed by GAS Tecnologia to steal information and load malicious modules. According to Cybereason’s Nocturnus team which discovered the new Astaroth strain, just like previous instalments, the malware uses “legitimate, built-in Windows OS processes to perform malicious activities and deliver a payload without being ...
- Snapd Flaw Lets Attackers Gain Root Access On Linux Systems
February 13, 2019
Ubuntu and some other Linux distributions suffer from a severe privilege escalation vulnerability that could allow a local attacker or a malicious program to obtain root privileges and total control over the targeted system. Dubbed “Dirty_Sock” and identified as CVE-2019-7304, the vulnerability was discovered by security researcher Chris Moberly, who privately disclosed it to Canonical, the maker ...
- Trickbot Adds Remote Application Credential-Grabbing Capabilities to Its Repertoire
February 12, 2019
In November 2018, we covered a Trickbot variant that came with a password-grabbing module, which allowed it to steal credentials from numerous applications. In January 2019, we saw Trickbot (detected as TrojanSpy.Win32.TRICKBOT.AZ and Trojan.Win32.MERETAM.AD) with new capabilities added to its already extensive bag of tricks. Its authors clearly aren’t done updating Trickbot — we recently found a ...
- Windows App Runs on Mac, Downloads Info Stealer and Adware
February 11, 2019
EXE is the official executable file format used for Windows to signify that they only run on Windows platforms, and to serve as a security feature. By default, attempting to run an EXE file on a Mac or Linux OS will only show an error notification. However, we found EXE files in the wild delivering a ...
- Banks Under Attack: Tactics and Techniques Used to Target Financial Organizations
February 8, 2019
US$100 – 300 billion: That’s the estimated losses that financial institutions can potentially incur annually from cyberattacks. Despite the staggering amount, it’s unsurprising — over the past three years, several banks suffered $87 million in combined losses from attacks that compromised their SWIFT (Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication)infrastructures. That’s just the tip of the iceberg: A ...
- New macOS zero-day allows theft of user passwords
February 6, 2019
A German security researcher has published a video over the weekend showing a new zero-day affecting Apple’s macOS desktop operating system. In an interview to German tech site Heise, Linus Henze, the security researcher, says the vulnerability allows a malicious app running on a macOS system to get access to passwords stored inside the Keychain –the password management ...

