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Mailchimp, a veteran email marketing platform, has confirmed that hackers used an internal tool on it platform to steal data from 102 of its clients, with the data being used to send phishing emails to users of cryptocurrency services.

MailChimp have confirmed that their service has been compromised by an insider targeting crypto companies.

We have managed to take the phishing domain offline. We are trying to determine how many email addresses have been affected. 1/

— Trezor (@Trezor) April 3, 2022

The breach became more apparent when users of the Trezor hardware cryptocurrency wallet reported being targeted by sophisticated phishing emails. Trezor users received emails claimed to be from Trezor, telling them that their accounts were compromised in a data breach. The email included a link to an updated version of Trezor Suite, along with instructions on how to set up a new pin. In reality, the email was pointing to a phishing site meant to capture the contents of their digital wallets.

Users of Trezor devices have been advised to report any new phishing attempts directly to Trezor, at security@trezor.io.

Read more about it here.

On March 25, 2022, the US Federal Communications Commission (FCC) added Kaspersky and two Chinese companies to its Covered List, because it poses unacceptable risk to US national security.

“The Federal Communications Commission’s Public Safety and Homeland Security Bureau today added equipment and services from three entities – AO Kaspersky Lab, China Telecom (Americas) Corp, and China Mobile International USA Inc. – to its list of communications equipment and services that have been deemed a threat to national security, consistent with requirements in the Secure and Trusted Communications Networks Act of 2019.” reads the FCC statement.

The FCC’s decision follows an advisory released by Germany’s Federal Office of Information Security (BSI) this month against using the company’s security solutions in the country over doubts about the reliability of the manufacturer, as it still has to abide by Russian laws and regulation.

Read more about it here.

A new hacking campaign infecting hundreds of sites hosted by GoDaddy-hosted sites has been uncovered. The discovery comes from Wordfence, whose team first observed the malicious activity on March 11, 2022, with 298 websites infected by the backdoor within 24 hours, 281 of which were hosted on GoDaddy’s Managed WordPress service.

The backdoor infecting the sites is a 2015 Google search SEO-poisoning tool implanted on PHP file wp-config.php to get spam link templates from Command and Control (C2) domains that are used to inject malicious pages into search results. The campaign uses mostly pharmaceutical spam templates, served to visitors of the compromised websites instead of the actual websites content.

Users of GoDaddy’s Managed WordPress platform should scan the wp-config.php file to locate potential backdoor injections.

Read more about it here.

Internet security companies have recorded a massive wave of cyberattacks against Ukrainian WordPress sites since Russia invaded Ukraine.

Cybersecurity firm Wordfence, which protects 8,320 WordPress websites belonging to universities, government, military, and law enforcement entities in Ukraine, reported 144,000 attacks on February 25, 2022 alone, which is three times the number of daily attacks from earlier in February across the Ukrainian websites that they protect. The attacks compromised at least 30 Ukrainian university websites. The hacking group behind these attacks is a pro-Russian group called “theMx0nday”.

For the first time in its history, Wordfence has decided to automatically deploy real-time threat intelligence to all Ukrainian websites using this WordPress plugin, regardless of their subscription tier. Normally, this feature is only available to Premium customers. “We are doing this to assist in blocking cyberattacks targeting Ukraine. This update requires no action from users of the Free version of Wordfence on the UA top-level domain.” says their blog post.

Read more about it here.

The U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) announced that it has compiled a list of free cybersecurity tools and services that can help organizations further advance their security capabilities. This living repository includes cybersecurity services provided by CISA, widely used open source tools, and free tools and services offered by private and public sector organizations across the cybersecurity community. CISA will also implement a process for organizations to submit additional free tools and services for inclusion on this list in the future.

The resources include guidelines on phishing assessment services, remote penetration tests, distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) protection, Project Shield, repositories for threat data, antivirus tools, forensics software, and backup services, among others.

CISO doesn’t endorse the resources for specific use case, so organizations would need to evaluate the tools and services listed to determine if they meet their needs.

Read more about it here.

The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) issued an announcement to inform mobile carriers and the public of the increasing use of Subscriber Identity Module (SIM) swapping by criminals to steal money. From January 2018 to December 2020, the FBI Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3) received 320 complaints related to SIM swapping incidents with adjusted losses of about $12 million. In 2021, IC3 received 1,611 SIM swapping complaints with adjusted losses of more than $68 million.

SIM swapping is a malicious technique where cyber criminals target mobile carriers to gain access to victims’ bank accounts and virtual currency accounts. Criminal actors conduct SIM swap schemes using these techniques:
Social engineering, insider threat, or phishing techniques.

• Social engineering: Cyber criminals impersonate a victim to trick the mobile carrier into switching the victim’s mobile number to a SIM card in the criminal’s possession
• Insider Threat: Cyber criminals pay off a mobile carrier employee to switch a victim’s mobile number to a SIM card in the criminal’s possession.
• Phishing: Cyber criminals deceive mobile carrier employees into downloading malware used to hack the mobile carrier systems that handle SIM swaps.

“Once the SIM is swapped, the victim’s calls, texts, and other data are diverted to the criminal’s device. This access allows criminals to send ‘Forgot Password’ or ‘Account Recovery’ requests to the victim’s email and other online accounts associated with the victim’s mobile telephone number. Using SMS-based two-factor authentication, mobile application providers send a link or one-time passcode via text to the victim’s number, now owned by the criminal, to access accounts. The criminal uses the codes to login and reset passwords, gaining control of online accounts associated with the victim’s phone profile.”

The FBI recommends individuals take the following precautions:

• Do not advertise information about financial assets, including ownership or investment of cryptocurrency, on social media websites and forums.
• Do not provide your mobile number account information over the phone to representatives that request your account password or pin. Verify the call by dialing the customer service line of your mobile carrier.
• Avoid posting personal information online, such as mobile phone number, address, or other personal identifying information.
• Use a variation of unique passwords to access online accounts.
• Be aware of any changes in SMS-based connectivity.
• Use strong multi-factor authentication methods such as biometrics, physical security tokens, or standalone authentication applications to access online accounts.
• Do not store passwords, usernames, or other information for easy login on mobile device applications.

Read more about it here.

Office 365 and Azure Active Directory (Azure AD) customers were the targets of tens of billions of phishing emails and brute force attacks successfully blocked in 2021 by Microsoft.

“From January 2021 through December 2021, we’ve blocked more than 25.6 billion Azure AD brute force authentication attacks and intercepted 35.7 billion phishing emails with Microsoft Defender for Office 365,” said Vasu Jakkal, Corporate Vice President for Security, Compliance and Identity at Microsoft.

“Strong identity authentication, such as multifactor authentication (MFA) and passwordless solutions would make it a lot harder for threat actors to brute force their way into their targets’ Microsoft accounts,” Jakkal added.

“Across industries, only 22 percent of customers using Microsoft Azure Active Directory (Azure AD), Microsoft’s Cloud Identity Solution, have implemented strong identity authentication protection as of December 2021,” Jakkal said.

Microsoft introduced Cyber Signals, a cyber threat intelligence brief informed by the latest Microsoft threat data and research.

Cyber Signals will provide trend analysis and practical guidance to strengthen the defense of its customers.

Read more about it here.

Microsoft says it encountered and successfully mitigated the largest Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack on record in November 2021, when an adversary tried to take down a customer’s Azure services.

The incident involved an unnamed customer in Asia, who uses Microsoft’s Azure cloud computing service. The hacker harnessed 10,000 computers across the globe, including in the US, China, South Korea, Russia, Thailand, India, Vietnam, Iran, Indonesia, and Taiwan, to generate a massive 3.47Tbps DDoS attack, at a packet rate of 340 million packets per second (pps). The attack lasted for 15 minutes.

“Attack vectors were UDP reflection on port 80 using Simple Service Discovery Protocol (SSDP), Connection-less Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (CLDAP), Domain Name System (DNS), and Network Time Protocol (NTP) comprising one single peak”, Microsoft added.

The amount of traffic exceeds two other DDoS attacks that occuured in December 2021, both in Asia. One was over 2.5 Tbps, and the other was 3.25 Tbps.

Microsoft seems to have defended all attacks without an incident.

Read more about it here.

Researchers from security firm Avanan uncovered in December 2020 a phishing campaign with a new technique that abuses the commenting feature of Google Docs to send out malicious emails. Google Docs is used by many users working or collaborating remotely, so most recipients of these emails are familiar with these Google notifications.

Hackers use their Google account to create a Google Document, and then add a comment to it, mentioning the target with an @. Google then sends an email notification to the target’s inbox, informing them that another user has commented on a document and mentioned them. The comment on the email notification can contain malicious links that lead to a malicious or phishing web site. The phishing emails bypass email security checkpoints, because they are coming from a trusted source, Google. To make matters worse, the hackers’ email address isn’t shown in the email notification, and the recipient only sees a name. This makes impersonation very easy, and raises the chances of success for the hackers.

The researchers reported the same outcome when attempting to exploit Google Slides, Google Suite’s presentation app.

What users can do:

• Avoid clicking on links that arrive via email and are embedded on comments
• Confirm that the sender’s email address matches your colleague’s (or claimed person)
• If unsure, reach out to the sender and confirm they meant to send that document
• Deploy additional security measures that apply stricter file sharing rules on Google Suite

Read more about it here.

The US Federal Trade Commission issued a warning that it will take legal action against companies that fail to remediate the recent Log4j vulnerability.

“When vulnerabilities are discovered and exploited, it risks a loss or breach of personal information, financial loss, and other irreversible harms. The duty to take reasonable steps to mitigate known software vulnerabilities implicates laws including, among others, the Federal Trade Commission Act and the Gramm Leach Bliley Act. It is critical that companies and their vendors relying on Log4j act now, in order to reduce the likelihood of harm to consumers, and to avoid FTC legal action.”

The post adds: “According to the complaint in Equifax, a failure to patch a known vulnerability irreversibly exposed the personal information of 147 million consumers… The FTC intends to use its full legal authority to pursue companies that fail to take reasonable steps to protect consumer data from exposure as a result of Log4j, or similar known vulnerabilities in the future.”

The FTC recommends companies use the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) guidance, and:

• Update the Log4j software package to the most current version found here.
• Consult CISA guidance to mitigate this vulnerability.
• Ensure remedial steps are taken to ensure that your company’s practices do not violate the law. Failure to identify and patch instances of this software may violate the FTC Act. 
• Distribute this information to any relevant third-party subsidiaries that sell products or services to consumers who may be vulnerable. 

Read more about it here.