Israeli spyware developer QuaDream has been reported by Israeli tech news site CTech to be preparing to cease its operations following a report by Microsoft and Citizen Lab exposing the company's Reign spyware for iPhone devices that is believed to have been peddled to governments, SiliconAngle reports.
QuaDream employees were noted by CTech to have been informed of layoffs and a hearing as the company shuts down in the coming days, with sources saying that the company has been facing challenges in recent months and that the recent report was the final straw.
Ten countries were discovered by Citizen Lab to have malicious servers associated with the Reign spyware, which was found to leverage calendar invites to infect at least five devices belonging to political dissidents, journalists, and a nongovernmental organization.
While Reign is thought to be targeting devices on iOS 14, Microsoft noted that the spyware has been updated by QuaDream to facilitate personal and technical data theft and additional compromise in iPhones running on newer software.
Golden Chickens malware developer unmasked SecurityWeek reports that Golden Chickens malware, which has been used by the Russian Cobalt Group and FIN6 cybercrime operations, had its second developer identified by eSentire to be a Romanian named Jack, also known as Lucky and badbullzvenom. Password stealers were Jack's main specialty when he began engaging in cybercrime as a teen, releasing the Voyer malware tool for exfiltrating Yahoo instant messages between 2007 and 2008, followed by the FlyCatcher tool for keystroke logging between 2008 and 2009, and the Con password stealer for browser, instant messenger, VPN, and FTP app credential theft in 2010, according to the eSentire report. Jack was noted by researchers to have met with Golden Chickens co-developer 'Chuck from Montreal' in the dark web from late 2012 to October 2013, before proceeding to release Multiplier and VenomKit in 2015 and 2017, respectively, which were later consolidated into Golden Chickens. "Security experts assert that in 2017 the Cobalt Group used badbullzvenoms (aka: Lucky) VenomKit to deploy Cobalt Strike in attacks on banks and then they used it again in 2018," said eSentire, which noted that the malware suite was leveraged by FIN6 in 2019, the same year when the suite included the PureLocker ransomware plugin.
Different information-stealing malware strains have been distributed in separate campaigns leveraging websites masquerading as the TikTok video editor CapCut, according to BleepingComputer.
Open source password manager KeePass is being impacted by a security flaw, tracked as CVE-2023-32784, which could be exploited to facilitate master password retrieval from program memory, SecurityWeek reports. "The memory dump can be a KeePass process dump, swap file (pagefile.sys), hibernation file (hiberfil.sys), or RAM dump of the entire system.
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