Lumen Technologies' Black Lotus Labs identified a cyberthreat type called "watering hole attacks" that installs a malicious JavaScript function into a target website's code, FierceTelecom reports. The recently discovered threat have been used for several years, including in an April 2020 incident involving the San Francisco International Airport. The threat, which was identified on one website in Canada and on several websites in Ukraine, infects anyone who visited the sites, leaving them vulnerable to a theft of their Windows authentication credentials that could be used to impersonate the victims. According to researchers, the attack enables threat actors to obtain the New Technology LAN Manager hashes from the victims' devices which they will then use to get usernames and passwords. "To protect against this type of attack, organizations should configure their firewalls to prevent outbound SMB-based communications from leaving the network or consider turning off or limiting SMB in the corporate environment," said Black Lotus Labs' Mike Benjamin.
Jill Aitoro is senior vice president of content strategy for CyberRisk Alliance. She has more than 20 years of experience editing and reporting on technology, business and policy. Prior to joining CRA, she worked at Sightline Media as editor of Defense News and executive editor of the Business-to-Government Group. She previously worked at Washington Business Journal and Nextgov, covering federal technology, contracting and policy, as well as CMP Media’s VARBusiness and CRN and Penton Media’s iSeries News.
Kaspersky tells SC Media that the cybersecurity firm is unaware of victims outside the company and is not attributing the activity to a government or other actor.
Officials, journalists, and activists across Armenia were reported by Access Now, Citizen Lab, Amnesty International, CyberHUB-AM, and independent researcher Ruben Muradyan to have been targeted in at least 12 instances with the NSO Group's Pegasus spyware, Reuters reports.
Intellexa's commercial Predator spyware, which has been used in surveillance operations targeted at European politicians, Meta executives, and journalists, has been deploying its Alien loader to the 'zygote64' Android process to enable more spyware components, according to BleepingComputer.