All news with #data exfil via tools tag

Phishing Campaign Uses UpCrypter to Deploy Multiple RATs

🔒 FortiGuard Labs has detailed a global phishing campaign that uses personalized HTML attachments and spoofed websites to deliver a custom loader, UpCrypter, which installs multiple remote access tools. The operation uses tailored lures—voicemail notices and purchase orders—embedding recipient emails and company logos to appear legitimate. The delivered ZIPs contain obfuscated JavaScript that runs PowerShell, fetches further payloads (sometimes hidden via steganography) and ultimately loads RATs such as PureHVNC, DCRat and Babylon, while UpCrypter checks for sandboxes, enforces persistence and can force reboots to hinder analysis.

Cloudflare Introduces MCP Server Portals for Zero Trust

🔒 Cloudflare has launched MCP Server Portals in Open Beta to centralize and secure Model Context Protocol (MCP) connections between large language models and application backends. The Portals provide a single gateway where administrators register MCP servers and enforce identity-driven policies such as MFA, device posture checks, and geographic restrictions. They deliver unified visibility and logging, curated least-privilege user experiences, and simplified client configuration to reduce the risk of prompt injection, supply chain attacks, and data leakage.

Widespread Data Theft via Salesloft Drift Targets Salesforce

🔒 GTIG warns of a widespread data-theft campaign by UNC6395 that abused compromised OAuth tokens for the Salesloft Drift connected app to export data from multiple Salesforce customer instances between Aug. 8 and Aug. 18, 2025. The actor executed SOQL queries against objects including Accounts, Cases, Users, and Opportunities to harvest credentials and secrets—observed items include AWS access keys, Snowflake tokens, and passwords. Salesloft and Salesforce revoked tokens and removed the Drift app from the AppExchange; impacted organizations should search for exposed secrets, rotate credentials, review Event Monitoring logs, and tighten connected-app scopes and IP restrictions.

ShadowCaptcha Exploits WordPress Sites to Spread Malware

🔒 ShadowCaptcha is a large-scale campaign abusing over 100 compromised WordPress sites to push visitors to fake Cloudflare or Google CAPTCHA pages using the ClickFix social‑engineering lure. Injected JavaScript initiates redirection chains, employs anti‑debug techniques, and silently copies commands to the clipboard to coerce users into running built‑in Windows tools or saving and executing HTA files. Attackers weaponize LOLBins and DLL side‑loading to deliver installers and payloads — observed outcomes include credential stealers (Lumma, Rhadamanthys), Epsilon Red ransomware, and XMRig cryptocurrency miners — with some miner variants fetching configs from Pastebin and dropping a vulnerable driver (WinRing0x64.sys) to seek kernel access. Affected sites span multiple countries and sectors, underscoring the importance of timely WordPress hardening, network segmentation, user training, and MFA.

HOOK Android Trojan Adds Ransomware Overlays, Expands

🔒 Cybersecurity researchers at Zimperium zLabs have identified a new HOOK Android banking trojan variant that deploys full-screen ransomware-style overlays to extort victims. The overlay is remotely triggered via the command "ransome" and displays a warning, wallet address and amount, and can be dismissed by the attacker with "delete_ransome". An offshoot of ERMAC, the latest HOOK builds on banking malware techniques and now supports 107 remote commands, introducing transparent gesture-capture overlays, fake NFC and payment screens, and deceptive unlock prompts to harvest credentials and crypto recovery phrases.

UNC6384 Uses Captive Portal Hijacks to Deploy PlugX

🔐 Google’s Threat Intelligence Group (GTIG) detected a March 2025 campaign attributed to UNC6384 that uses captive-portal hijacks to deliver a digitally signed downloader called STATICPLUGIN. The downloader (observed as AdobePlugins.exe) retrieves an MSI and, via DLL sideloading through Canon’s IJ Printer Assistant Tool, stages a PlugX variant tracked as SOGU.SEC entirely in memory. Operators used valid TLS and GlobalSign-signed certificates issued to Chengdu Nuoxin Times Technology Co., Ltd, aiding evasion while targeting diplomats and other entities.

Code Insight Expands to Cover Software Supply Chain Risks

🛡️ VirusTotal’s Code Insight now analyzes a broader set of software supply chain formats — including CRX, XPI, VSIX, Python WHL, NPM packages, and MCP protocol integrations. The tool inspects code logic to detect obfuscation, dynamic code fetching, credential theft, and remote command execution in extensions and packages. Recent findings include malicious Chrome and Firefox extensions, a deceptive VS Code extension, and compromised Python and NPM packages. This capability complements traditional signature- and ML-based classification by surfacing behavior-based risks.

Unmasking Shadow AI: Visibility and Control with Cloudflare

🛡️ This post outlines the rise of Shadow AI—unsanctioned use of public AI services that can leak sensitive data—and presents how Cloudflare One surfaces and governs that activity. The Shadow IT Report classifies AI apps such as ChatGPT, GitHub Copilot, and Leonardo.ai, showing which users, locations, and bandwidth are involved. Under the hood, Gateway collects HTTP traffic and TimescaleDB with materialized views enables long-range analytics and fast queries. Administrators can proxy traffic, enable TLS inspection, set approval statuses, enforce DLP, block or isolate risky AI, and audit activity with Log Explorer.

Fake macOS Help Sites Spread SHAMOS Infostealer via Ads

🔒 CrowdStrike disrupted a malvertising campaign that redirected users to counterfeit macOS help pages and urged them to run a malicious one-line installation command. Observed between June and August 2025, the operation sought to deliver the SHAMOS variant of the Atomic macOS Stealer (AMOS), a Mach-O binary distributed by MaaS operator Cookie Spider. The installer decoded a Base64 string, executed a Bash script that captured credentials and fetched the payload from icloudservers[.]com.

Chinese Groups Escalate Cloud and Telecom Espionage

🛡️ CrowdStrike warns that China-linked groups Murky Panda, Genesis Panda, and Glacial Panda have intensified cloud and telecommunications espionage, abusing trusted cloud relationships and internet-facing appliances to gain access. The actors exploit N-day and zero-day flaws, deploy web shells, and steal cloud credentials to establish persistence with tools such as CloudedHope. Targets include government, technology, financial, and telecom sectors, with operations tailored to covert intelligence collection and long-term access.

Russian State-Backed Static Tundra Exploits Cisco Devices

🧭 The author opens with a travel anecdote and practical reminders on securing devices while on the road, urging readers to update, back up, and avoid public charging or untrusted Wi‑Fi. The newsletter highlights field-tested precautions including disabling auto-connect, using VPNs or phone hotspots, enabling device tracking, and carrying power banks. It also warns of an active campaign by a Russian state-backed group targeting Cisco devices via CVE-2018-0171, urging immediate patching and hardening.

Analyzing ClickFix: A Rising Click-to-Execute Threat

🛡️ Microsoft Threat Intelligence and Microsoft Defender Experts describe the ClickFix social engineering technique, where attackers trick users into copying and pasting commands that execute malicious payloads. Observed since early 2024 and active through 2025, these campaigns deliver infostealers, RATs, loaders, and rootkits that target Windows and macOS devices. Lures arrive via phishing, malvertising, and compromised sites and often impersonate legitimate services or CAPTCHA verifications. Organizations should rely on user education, device hardening, and Microsoft Defender XDR layered protections to detect and block ClickFix activity.

Google research improves Retbleed exploit on Zen 2

🔬 Google researchers demonstrated practical improvements to the Retbleed speculative-execution attack, showing that on AMD Zen 2 CPUs attackers can read arbitrary RAM at roughly 13 KB/s with perfect cache-extraction accuracy. They adapted a modified Speculative ROP technique to evade Spectre v2 mitigations and showed ways to bypass Linux kernel defenses. The exploit still requires prior knowledge of kernel configuration, but common default builds and probing reduce that hurdle, and Google has already restricted Zen 2 in certain cloud workloads.

Falcon Stops COOKIE SPIDER's SHAMOS macOS Delivery

🔒 Between June and August 2025, the CrowdStrike Falcon platform blocked a widespread malware campaign that attempted to compromise more than 300 customer environments. The campaign, operated by COOKIE SPIDER and renting the SHAMOS stealer (an AMOS variant), used malvertising and malicious one-line install commands to bypass Gatekeeper and drop a Mach-O executable. Falcon detections—machine learning, IOA behavior rules and threat prevention—prevented SHAMOS at download, execution and exfiltration stages. CrowdStrike published hunting queries, mitigation guidance and IOCs including domains, a spoofed GitHub repo and multiple script and Mach-O hashes.

PS1Bot Malvertising and Black Hat Takeaways from Talos

🔍 Cisco Talos describes a widespread malvertising campaign delivering a modular malware framework called PS1Bot. The multi-stage operation uses in-memory PowerShell and C# components to steal browser credentials, target cryptocurrency wallets, capture screenshots and keylogs, and maintain persistent access through modular updates. Active and evolving through 2025, PS1Bot minimizes its footprint to evade detection. Talos urges caution when downloading files, keeping security software current, and using dedicated password managers instead of browser-stored credentials.

Defending Against SCATTERED SPIDER with Falcon SIEM

🔒 Falcon Next-Gen SIEM provides real-time, cross-domain detection to help organizations detect and respond to the identity-centric eCrime group SCATTERED SPIDER. The platform correlates identity, cloud, SaaS, network and email telemetry, offering out-of-the-box rule templates for phishing, MFA fatigue, suspicious SSO events and exfiltration. CrowdStrike recommends comprehensive log ingestion and tuning of these templates to improve detection and response across the full attack lifecycle.

Malvertising Campaign Delivers PS1Bot Multi-Stage Malware

🔍 Cisco Talos reports an active malvertising campaign delivering a multi-stage PowerShell/C# malware framework dubbed PS1Bot. The modular framework executes modules in-memory to minimize artifacts and supports information theft, keylogging, screenshot capture and cryptocurrency wallet exfiltration. Delivery begins with SEO-poisoning archives containing a downloader that writes a polling PowerShell script to C:\ProgramData and executes received code with Invoke-Expression.

Full PowerShell RAT Campaign Targets Israeli Organizations

🔒 The FortiMail Workspace Security team uncovered a targeted intrusion campaign that abused compromised internal email to deliver a multi-stage, fully PowerShell-based Remote Access Trojan targeting Israeli organizations. Phishing links redirected users to a spoofed Microsoft Teams page that instructed victims to press Windows+R, paste an obfuscated Base64 loader, and execute a PowerShell IEX fetch from a hard-coded C2 (hxxps[:]//pharmacynod[.]com), which in turn staged scripts and a compressed, in-memory RAT. The operation uses layered obfuscation, native Windows APIs, and living-off-the-land techniques to enable remote access, surveillance, persistence, lateral movement, and data exfiltration; Fortinet protections detect and block this activity.

Defending Against Indirect Prompt Injection in LLMs

🔒 Microsoft outlines a layered defense-in-depth strategy to protect systems using LLMs from indirect prompt injection attacks. The approach pairs preventative controls such as hardened system prompts and Spotlighting (delimiting, datamarking, encoding) to isolate untrusted inputs with detection via Microsoft Prompt Shields, surfaced through Azure AI Content Safety and integrated with Defender for Cloud. Impact mitigation uses deterministic controls — fine-grained permissions, Microsoft Purview sensitivity labels, DLP policies, explicit user consent workflows, and blocking known exfiltration techniques — while ongoing research (TaskTracker, LLMail-Inject, FIDES) advances new design patterns and assurances.

Unmasking AsyncRAT: Mapping Forks and Variants in the Wild

🛡️ ESET Research reviews the sprawling ecosystem of AsyncRAT, an open-source C# remote access trojan first published in 2019, and the many forks that have proliferated since. The post maps major families—most notably DcRat and VenomRAT—and outlines rapid identification techniques based on client configuration, embedded certificates, and behavior. It highlights uncommon plugins (USB spreaders, screamers, clipboard clippers, distributed brute modules) and stresses evolving obfuscation and evasion tactics.