Citizen Lab's digital threat researchers have discovered a new zero-click iMessage exploit that was exploited to install NSO Group's Pegasus spyware on Bahraini activists' smartphones. In total, nine Bahraini activists (including members of the Bahrain Center for Human Rights, Waad, and Al Wefaq) had their iPhones hacked in a campaign conducted by a Pegasus operator linked to the Bahraini government with high confidence, according to Citizen Lab. 

After being compromised using two zero-click iMessage exploits (that do not involve user participation), the spyware was installed on their devices: the 2020 KISMET exploit and a new never-before-seen exploit named FORCEDENTRY. 

In February 2021, Citizen Lab first noticed NSO Group deploying the new zero-click FORCEDENTRY iMessage attack, which bypasses Apple's BlastDoor protection. BlastDoor, a structural change in iOS 14 aimed to stop message-based, zero-click attacks like this, had just been released the month before. BlastDoor was designed to prevent Pegasus attacks by operating as a "tightly sandboxed" service responsible for "almost all" of the parsing of untrusted data in iMessages, according to Samuel Groß of Google Project Zero.

“We saw the FORCEDENTRY exploit successfully deployed against iOS versions 14.4 and 14.6 as a zero-day,” Citizen Lab said. “With the consent of targets, we shared these crash logs and some additional phone logs relating to KISMET and FORCEDENTRY with Apple, Inc., which confirmed they were investigating.” 

Attacks like the ones revealed by Citizen Lab, according to Ivan Krstić, head of Apple Security Engineering and Architecture, are highly targeted and hence nothing to worry about for most people, at least. Such attacks are "very complex, cost millions of dollars to design, often have a short shelf life, and are used to target specific individuals," according to Krstić. 

In addition to Apple's iMessage, NSO Group has a history of using other messaging apps, such as WhatsApp, to spread malware. Nonetheless, Citizen Lab believes that disabling iMessage and FaceTime in this circumstance, with these specific threats, may have blocked the threat actors. Researchers emphasized that disabling iMessage and FaceTime would not provide total security from zero-click assaults or adware.

NSO Group stated in a statement to Bloomberg that it hasn't read the report yet, but it has concerns about Citizen Lab's techniques and motivations. According to the company's statement, "If NSO gets reliable evidence relating to the system's misuse, the company will thoroughly investigate the claims and act accordingly."

A new extortion fraud attempts to profit from the recent Pegasus iOS spyware attacks to threaten victims to pay a blackmail demand. 

Last month, Amnesty International and the non-profit project Forbidden Stories disclosed that the Pegasus spyware was installed on completely updated iPhones via a zero-day zero-click iMessage vulnerability. 

A zero-click vulnerability is a flaw that can be exploited on a device without requiring the user's interaction. For instance, a zero-click hack would be a vulnerability that could be exploited just by visiting a website or getting a message. 

Governments are believed to have employed this spyware to eavesdrop on politicians, journalists, human rights activists, and corporate leaders worldwide. This week, a threat actor began contacting users, informing them that their iPhone had been compromised with a zero-click vulnerability that allowed the Pegasus spyware software to be installed. 

According to the fraudster, Pegasus has tracked the recipient's actions and captured recordings of them at "the most private moments" of their lives. According to the email, the threat actor will disseminate the recordings to the recipient's family, friends, and business partners if a 0.035 bitcoin (roughly $1,600) payment is not made. 

The full text of the email stated: 

Apparently, the bitcoin address indicated in the sample email seen by BleepingComputer has not received any payments. However, other bitcoin addresses might be utilized in this fraud. One may believe that no one would fall for this swindle, yet similar methods in the past have fetched over $50,000 in a week.

Microsoft as part of its Patch on Tuesday fixed two of the zero-day Windows flaws weaponized by Candiru, an Israeli firm in a series of "precision attacks" to hack more than 100 journalists, academics, activists, and political dissidents globally. 

According to a report published by the University of Toronto's Citizen Lab, the spyware vendor has also been formally identified as the commercial surveillance firm that Google's Threat Analysis Group (TAG) revealed was exploiting multiple zero-day vulnerabilities in Chrome browser to attack victims in Armenia. 

"Candiru's apparent widespread presence, and the use of its surveillance technology against global civil society, is a potent reminder that the mercenary spyware industry contains many players and is prone to widespread abuse," Citizen Lab researchers stated.

"This case demonstrates, yet again, that in the absence of any international safeguards or strong government export controls, spyware vendors will sell to government clients who will routinely abuse their services." 

Founded in 2014, the private-sector offensive actor (PSOA) — codenamed "Sourgum" by Microsoft — is stated to be the creator of DevilsTongue, an espionage toolkit able to infect and track a wide range of devices across multiple platforms, including iPhones, Androids, Macs, PCs, and cloud accounts. 

After gaining a hard drive from "a politically active victim in Western Europe," Citizen Lab stated it was able to restore a copy of Candiru's Windows spyware, which was then reverse engineered to identify two never-before-seen Windows zero-day exploits for vulnerabilities tracked as CVE-2021-31979 and CVE-2021-33771 that were leveraged to install malware on victim boxes. 

The infection chain used a combination of browser and Windows vulnerabilities, with the latter being transmitted through single-use URLs emailed on WhatsApp to targets. On July 13, Microsoft patched both privilege escalation issues, which allow an attacker to bypass browser sandboxes and obtain kernel code execution. 

The attacks resulted in the deployment of DevilsTongue, a modular C/C++-based backdoor capable of exfiltrating files, exporting messages saved in the encrypted messaging app Signal, and stealing cookies and passwords from Chrome, Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safari, and Opera browsers. Microsoft discovered that the digital weapon could gather data, read the victim's messages, get photos, and even send messages on their behalf using stolen cookies from logged-in email and social media accounts including Facebook, Twitter, Gmail, Yahoo, Mail.ru, Odnoklassniki, and Vkontakte.

Furthermore, the Citizen Lab study linked two Google Chrome vulnerabilities — CVE-2021-21166 and CVE-2021-30551 — to the Tel Aviv firm, citing similarities in the websites used to disseminate the exploits. 

A total of 764 domains related to Candiru's spyware infrastructure were discovered, many of which purported to be advocacy groups such as Amnesty International, the Black Lives Matter movement, media businesses, and other civil-society-oriented enterprises. 

Saudi Arabia, Israel, the United Arab Emirates, Hungary, and Indonesia were among the countries that ran systems under their authority. 

According to a Microsoft report, an Israeli hacking-for-hire firm has assisted government clients in spying on more than 100 people throughout the world, including politicians, dissidents, human rights activists, diplomatic staff, and journalists.

Among other well-known news outlets, the Guardian and the Washington Post released information of what they termed "global surveillance operations" using Pegasus. The surveillance is said to be aimed at journalists and according to the claims, Pegasus malware is being used to spy on people by over ten nations. 

SOURGUM's malware has so far targeted over 100 victims in Palestine, Israel, Iran, Lebanon, Yemen, Spain (Catalonia), United Kingdom, Turkey, Armenia, and Singapore. 

These attacks mostly targeted consumer accounts, implying that Sourgum's users were pursuing part of the attack. TAG researchers Maddie Stone and Clement Lecigne noticed a rise in attackers utilizing more zero-day vulnerabilities in their cyber offensives in the early 2010s, which they attribute to more commercial vendors offering access to zero-day flaws. 

Microsoft Threat Intelligence Center (MSTIC) stated in a technical rundown, "Private-sector offensive actors are private companies that manufacture and sell cyberweapons in hacking-as-a-service packages, often to government agencies around the world, to hack into their targets' computers, phones, network infrastructure, and other devices.” 

"With these hacking packages, usually the government agencies choose the targets and run the actual operations themselves. The tools, tactics, and procedures used by these companies only add to the complexity, scale, and sophistication of attacks," MSTIC added.

Experts cautioned that a text message scam infecting Android phones is expanding across the UK. The message, which appears to be from a parcel delivery company and instructs users to download a tracking program, is actually a malicious piece of spyware. Flubot can seize over smartphones and spy on phones in order to collect sensitive data, such as online banking information. Vodafone, the network provider, said that millions of text messages had now been transmitted through all networks. 

Flubot is the name of malicious malware that attacks Android devices. Flubot is distributed by cybercriminals through SMS messages that include links to download websites for a bogus FedEx program (in at least three languages, including German, Polish, and Hungarian). These websites download a malicious APK file (Android Package File) that installs the banking malware Flubot. 

“We believe this current wave of Flubot malware SMS attacks will gain serious traction very quickly, and it's something that needs awareness to stop the spread," a spokesman said. Customers should "be extra cautious about this specific piece of malware,” he said, and avoid clicking on any links in text messages. 

Later, the National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) provided guidelines on the threat, with instructions on what to do if you accidentally accessed the attacker's program. "If users have clicked a malicious link it's important not to panic - there are actionable steps they can take to protect their devices and their accounts," the NCSC said in a statement. The ransomware may also send further text messages to the contacts of an infected person, aiding its propagation. 

"The seriousness of these malicious text messages is underlined by Vodafone making the decision to alert its customers," said Ben Wood, chief analyst at CCS Insight. "This has the potential to become a denial-of-service attack on mobile networks, given the clear risk that a rogue application can be installed on users' smartphones and start spewing out endless text messages. The broader risk for users is a loss of highly sensitive personal data from their phones," he added. 

Although text message scams pretending to be from a package delivery company are popular, they have mainly focused on phishing, which involves tricking the recipient into filling out a form with personal information such as bank account numbers.

Spying malware "FinSpy" has come back again in Egypt. This time in new campaigns is attacking activists and protestor organizations. Cyber experts have found evidence that the malware is attacking Linus and macOS users. In earlier campaigns, the spyware used to attack Android, Windows, and iOS users. But now, according to researchers, these campaigns are using malware that attacks Linux and macOS systems. FinSpy is a spying malware used for monitoring and surveillance purposes. According to the findings by Amnesty International, the new malware variants can record target's calls, control audio, and video, monitor chats and steal personal data. Law enforcement agencies and government has been using this software since 2011. But in recent findings, the experts identified new variants of the spyware operating since October 2019. The sample "PDF" targets Linux, and the sample "Jabuka.app" targets macOS users; both the samples are FinSpy variants. Researchers announced the samples to the public last week.

Android is vulnerable anew owing it to a new vulnerability which goes by the name of “StrandHogg 2.0”

That is right. StrandHogg is back and now has affected numerous Android devices putting over a Billion Android devices in jeopardy.

The vulnerability is a pretty typical way aids hackers disguise illegitimate applications as legitimate ones with the ultimate aim of making them grant permissions which could end up releasing really important information.

The posing applications then find a way to the users’ sensitive data that too in real-time. Surprisingly, the worst part about the vulnerability is that the users would have no idea at all that they have been attacked and they’d be completely unaware of the malicious applications on their device.

This vulnerability is referenced as “CVE-2020-0096” and is known by the name “StrandHogg 2.0”. This version aids the hackers to make more sophisticated attacks.

As of last year StrandHogg was already listening in on conversations and recording them, accessing login credentials, read/sending unwanted texts and with complete control of the photo album, call logs, and contacts.

Allegedly, StrandHogg 2.0 excepting the latest version of the Android 10 OS, exists on most Android devices.

As per sources, the Google website has it that from a minimum of 2 Billion Android users, just 16% of them have updated to Android 10 hence the rest are allegedly vulnerable.

To fight or prevent any mishap that could be caused by StrandHogg 2.0, steer clear off pop up notifications asking permission for sending notifications, messages, or other related things and applications asking to log in again despite being already logged in.

Due to the Coronavirus Pandemic, not as per usual, Google will be releasing its Android 11 Beta version via an online conference at the Google I/O. Reportedly this conference is scheduled for June 3, 2020.

Sources mention that this conference will be a fresh source for many new updates and news about official events. The schedule for the launching of Android 11 has been released and according to it Android 11 will undergo 3 Beta releases in the upcoming months that are June, July, and August. Word has it that the official version would finally hash out in or near October.

As per several reports, Facebook was imitated by an Israeli security company that is known as the “NSO Group” to get the targets to install their “phone-hacking software”.

Per sources, a Facebook-like doppelganger domain was engineered to distribute the NSO’s “Pegasus” hacking contrivance. Allegedly, serves within the boundaries of the USA were employed for the spreading of it.

The Pegasus, as mentioned in reports, if installed once, can have access to text messages, device microphone, and camera as well as other user data on a device along with the GPS location tracking.

NSO has denied this but it still happens to be in a legal standoff with Facebook, which contends that NSO on purpose distributed its software on WhatsApp that led to the exploitation of countless devices. Another allegation on NSO is about having delivered the software to spy on journalist Jamal Khashoggi before his killing, to the government of Saudi Arabia, citing sources.

Facebook also claimed that NSO was also behind the operation of the spyware to which NSO appealed to the court to dismiss the case insisting that sovereign governments are the ones who use the spyware.

Per sources, NSO’s ex-employee, allegedly, furnished details of a sever which was fabricated to spread the spyware by deceiving targets into clicking on links. The server was connected with numerous internet addresses which happened to include the one that pretended to be Facebook’s. And Facebook had to buy it to stop the abuse of it.

As per reports, package tracking links from FedEx and other links for unsubscribing from emails were also employed on other such domains.

NSO still stand their ground about never using the software, themselves. In fact they are pretty proud of their contribution to fighting crime and terrorism, mention sources.

Security researchers say that it’s almost impossible for one of the servers to have helped in the distribution of the software to be within the borders of the USA. Additionally, reports mention, NSO maintains that its products could not be employed to conduct cyber-surveillance within the United States of America.

Facebook still holds that NSO is to blame for cyber-attacks. And NSO maintains that they don’t use their own software.

Phishing attacks recorded a remarkable surge in H2 2019, the growth has been alarming with the number of phishing websites blockages soaring by 230 percent per year. Earlier, phishers would terminate the fraudulent campaign once their webpages were blocked, however, now they are immediately mobilizing the phishing attack onto other brands. It serves as the main reason as to why the number grew so rampantly.

As the lifespan of phishing attacks increased tremendously, attackers became specific about their target pool and have increasingly targeted online services and cloud storage providers, the primary reason being the huge chunks of sensitive data stored in them that can be downloaded by the attackers to later threaten the victims for a ransom.

Turning towards a diligent attacking method, phishers have improved upon the ways they choose their campaigns and targets – preferring quantity over quality. Client software, e-commerce, online streaming, and delivery services were some online services that contributed to 29.3 percent of the phishers' targets, cloud storages amounted to 25.4 percent while financial organizations made for a total of 17.6 percent, as per the statistics for the last year.

While spotting and preventing the distribution of threats online, a total of 8,506 phishing web resources were blocked by Group-IB's Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT-GIB).

While providing insights on the matter to Help Net Security, Yaroslav Kargalev, CERT-GIB deputy head said, “Several years ago, creators of phishing pages were likely to have some technical background, they created phishing pages, putting much effort into the launch of their campaigns, preventing them from being detected and relentlessly supporting their sustainability....”

“This industry has changed its face — those pioneers no longer create phishing pages, they create tools for operators of web phishing campaigns who do not necessarily have any programming skills, and last year became the culmination of this trend. Since this new generation of phishers is not that experienced in maintaining the web resources viable, the phishing community’s focus has shifted toward the number of scam resources,” he added.

Banking Trojans and cryptocurrency projects have seen a steep decline in their preference amongst cybercriminals. As the functionality of backdoors has continued to expand, spyware and backdoors have stolen the show to reach the number one spot in the popularity rankings with a whopping 35 percent share.

Dear social media mongers, amidst all the talk about the Coronavirus and keeping your body’s health in check, your digital safety needs kicking up a notch too.

Because, pretty recently, security researchers discovered, what is being called as a “Stalkerware”, which stalks your activities over various social platforms like WhatsApp, Instagram, Gmail, Facebook, and others.

‘MonitorMinor’, per the sources, is definitely the most formidable one in its line.

Stalkerware are “monitoring software” or ‘Spyware’ that are employed either by people with serious trust issues or officials who need to spy for legitimate reasons.

Via this extremely creepy spyware kind, gathering information like the target’s ‘Geographical location’ and Messaging and call data is a cakewalk. Geo-fencing is another spent feature of it.

This particular stalkerware is hitting the headlines this hard because, MonitorMinor has the competence to spy on ‘Communication channels’, like most of our beloved messaging applications.

The discoverers of this stalkerware issued a report in which they mentioned that in a “clean” Android system, direct communication between applications is blocked by the “Sandbox” to kill the possibilities of the likes of this spyware gaining access to any social media platform’s data. This is because of the model called “Discretionary Access Control” (DAC).

Per sources, the author of the stalkerware in question manipulates the “SuperUser-type app” (SU utility) (if present) allowing them root-access to the system.

The presence of the SU utility makes all the difference for the worse. Because owing to it and its manipulation, MonitorMinor gains root access to the system.

The applications on the radar are BOTIM, Facebook, Gmail, Hangouts, Hike News & Content, Instagram, JusTalk, Kik, LINE, Skype, Snapchat, Viber, and Zalo-Video Call.

From lock patterns to passwords, MonitorMinor has the power to dig out files that exist in the system as ‘data’. And it obviously can use them to unlock devices. This happens to be the first stalkerware to be able to do so, mention sources.

Per reports, the procedure is such that the “persistence mechanism” as a result of the malware manipulates the root access. The stalkerware then reverts the system section to read/write from the initial read-only mode, copies itself on it, deletes itself from the user section, and conveniently goes back to read-only mode again.

Reports mention that even without the root access, MonitorMinor can do a consequential amount of harm to targets. It can control events in apps by manipulating the “Accessibility Services”. A “keylogger” is also effected via the API to permit forwarding of contents.
Unfortunately, victims can’t do much to eradicate the stalkerware form their systems, yet.

Other functions of the stalkerware include:
• Access to real-time videos from the device’s camera
• Access to the system log, contact lists, internal storage contents, browsing history of on Chrome, usage stats of particular apps
• Access to sound recordings from the device’s microphone
• Control over the device’s SMS commands.

The security researchers released a report by the contents of which, it was clear that the installation rate of it was the maximum in India, closely followed by Mexico and then Germany, Saudi Arabia, and the UK.

The researchers also per reports have reasons to believe that possibly the MonitorMinor might have been developed by an Indian because they allegedly found a ‘Gmail account with an Indian name’ in the body of MonitorMinor.

NSO's spyware Pegasus has been revealed to assume control for mobile devices through various apps; this is a matter of grave concern as cybersecurity firms have in the past also discovered the Pegasus software to exist in both the Apple and Android operating systems.

While WhatsApp said the number of infected users may go up from the present gauge of 1,400, as more users come forward with this issue, Newswire Reuters even reported citing to sources familiar with WhatsApp's internal investigation that the snooping may also include prominent government and military authorities in about 20 nations, aside from activists and journalists.

Raman Jit Singh Chima, Asia Policy Director, and Senior International Counsel at open internet advocacy group Access Now says that “Surveillance tech firms such as NSO and others market these capabilities with the intent of allowing their clients to hack and surveil all of the everyday smartphone activity of the targeted victim.”

He further included this may also include services, like Gmail, iMessage, Facebook, and Viber.

NSO's utilization of malware to control Apple devices is said to have been first discovered in 2016, and Apple along these lines had even released software upgrades in September 2016 after it found that hackers could have accessed its devices by making a victim click on a link and it was then speculated that Pegasus spyware could have been installed by misusing vulnerabilities in its software.

University of Toronto-based Citizen Lab, which aided WhatsApp in its investigation for the aforementioned issue, said in a 2018 report that Pegasus seems, by all accounts, to be being used by nations with 'dubious' human rights records and histories of harsh conduct by state security administrations.

This includes India too, as one NSO administrator named the Ganges is said to have been operated in India and was discovered by Citizen Lab. Most recently WhatsApp stresses the fact that the number of users affected may go up later on particularly in India because of the total absence of any surveillance reform or data protection laws.

FinCEN's analysis describes the broader picture of BEC scams

It's not every day that security researchers discover a new state-sponsored hacking group.

Spyware is inherently intriguing primarily because of the complexity that allows it to carry out its malicious plans, and breaking them down is something that security researchers have to do on a regular basis. However, a unique form of spyware with a phenomenal 80 different components and all kinds of tricks has been discovered by a group of analysts after it. Also, this spyware had been under wraps for more than five years.

A technically sophisticated cyberespionage framework that has been active since at least 2013 has been outed by security researchers.

In a recent talk at the Kaspersky Security Analyst Summit in Singapore, researcher Alexey Shumin shed light on the firm’s groundbreaking discovery of an adaptable Swiss Army spyware framework called TajMahal.

Security researchers still aren't sure who's behind the versatile TajMahal spyware—or how they went undetected for so long. ‘TajMahal’ modules and bundles functionality which have never been before seen in an advanced persistent threat, such as the ability to steal information from printer queues and to grab previously seen files from a USB device the next time it reconnects. And that unique spyware toolkit, Kaspersky says, bears none of the fingerprints of any known nation-state hacker group.

The 80 distinct modules include not just the standard ones like keylogging and screen-grabbing but also completely new tools.

TajMahal include two main packages: ‘Tokyo’ and ‘Yokohama’. Tokyo contains the main backdoor functionality, and periodically connects with the command and control servers.

TajMahal is a wonder to behold.

"Such a large set of modules tells us that this APT is extremely complex," Shulmin wrote in an email interview ahead of his talk, using the industry jargon—short for advanced persistent threat—to refer to a sophisticated hackers who maintain long-term and stealthy access to victim networks. "TajMahal is an extremely rare, technically advanced and sophisticated framework, which includes a number of interesting features we have not previously seen in any other APT activity. Coupled with the fact that this APT has a completely new code base—there are no code similarities with other known APTs and malware—we consider TajMahal to be special and intriguing."