Lifeboat Foundation

The threat actors behind the PikaBot malware have made significant changes to the malware in what has been described as a case of “devolution.”

“Although it appears to be in a new development cycle and testing phase, the developers have reduced the complexity of the code by removing advanced obfuscation techniques and changing the network communications,” Zscaler ThreatLabz researcher Nikolaos Pantazopoulos said.

PikaBot, first documented by the cybersecurity firm in May 2023, is a malware loader and a backdoor that can execute commands and inject payloads from a command-and-control (C2) server as well as allow the attacker to control the infected host.

A multinational company was scammed out of $25.6 million by hackers who fooled employees at the company’s Hong Kong branch into believing their digital recreation of its chief financial officer — as well as several other video conference participants — were real.

The hack, believed to be the first of its kind, highlights just how far deepfake technology has progressed.

As the South China Morning Post reports, scammers are believed to have used publicly available footage to create deepfake representations of the staff. Some of the fake video calls apparently only had a single human on the line, with the rest being deepfakes created by the hackers.

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The operators of Raspberry Robin are now using two new one-day exploits to achieve local privilege escalation, even as the malware continues to be refined and improved to make it stealthier than before.

This means that “Raspberry Robin has access to an exploit seller or its authors develop the exploits themselves in a short period of time,” Check Point said in a report this week.

Raspberry Robin (aka QNAP worm), first documented in 2021, is an evasive malware family that’s known to act as one of the top initial access facilitators for other malicious payloads, including ransomware.

Threat actor “Patchwork” uses romance scams to spread espionage apps in India and Pakistan! Learn how they infiltrated Android devices with VajraSpy.

Linux developers are in the process of patching a high-severity vulnerability that, in certain cases, allows the installation of malware that runs at the firmware level, giving infections access to the deepest parts of a device where they’re hard to detect or remove.

The vulnerability resides in shim, which in the context of Linux is a small component that runs in the firmware early in the boot process before the operating system has started. More specifically, the shim accompanying virtually all Linux distributions plays a crucial role in secure boot, a protection built into most modern computing devices to ensure every link in the boot process comes from a verified, trusted supplier. Successful exploitation of the vulnerability allows attackers to neutralize this mechanism by executing malicious firmware at the earliest stages of the boot process before the Unified Extensible Firmware Interface firmware has loaded and handed off control to the operating system.

The vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2023–40547, is what’s known as a buffer overflow, a coding bug that allows attackers to execute code of their choice. It resides in a part of the shim that processes booting up from a central server on a network using the same HTTP that the Internet is based on. Attackers can exploit the code-execution vulnerability in various scenarios, virtually all following some form of successful compromise of either the targeted device or the server or network the device boots from.

Welcome to the latest edition of Security & Tech Insights. In this newsletter, predictions on topics of cybersecurity, emerging computing, artificial intelligence, and space will be explored. Thanks for reading and sharing!

Chuck Brooks, Editor.

https://enterprise.spectrum.com/insights/blog/2024-enterpris…aid-Social.

Not all software is perfect—many apps, programs, and websites are released despite bugs. But the software behind critical systems like cryptographic protocols, medical devices, and space shuttles must be error-free, and ensuring the absence of bugs requires going beyond code reviews and testing. It requires formal verification.

Formal verification involves writing a mathematical proof of your code and is “one of the hardest but also most powerful ways of making sure your code is correct,” says Yuriy Brun, a professorat the University of Massachusetts Amherst.

To make formal verification easier, Brun and his colleagues devised a new AI-powered method called Baldur to automatically generate proofs. The accompanying paper, presented in December 2023 at the ACM Joint European Software Engineering Conference and Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering in San Francisco, won a Distinguished Paper award. The team includes Emily First, who completed the study as part of her doctoral dissertation at UMass Amherst; Markus Rabe, a former researcher at Google, where the study was conducted; and Talia Ringer, an assistant professor at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.

Scientists use DNA hacking to create a variety of 3D metallic and semiconductor nanostructures for advanced technologies.