The number of victims affected by a mass-ransomware attack, caused by a bug in a popular data transfer tool used by businesses around the world, continues to grow as another organization tells TechCrunch that it was also hacked.

The City of Toronto told TechCrunch in a revised statement on March 23: “Today, the City of Toronto has confirmed that unauthorized access to City data did occur through a third party vendor. The access is limited to files that were unable to be processed through the third party secure file transfer system.”

• Emotet resumed spamming operations on March 7, 2023, after a months-long hiatus.
• Initially leveraging heavily padded Microsoft Word documents to attempt to evade sandbox analysis and endpoint protection, the botnets switched to distributing malicious OneNote documents on March 16.
• Since returning, Emotet has leveraged several distinct infection chains, indicating that they are modifying their approach based on their perceived success in infecting new systems.
• The initial emails delivered to victims are consistent with what has been observed from Emotet over the past several years.

Large Language Models (LLM) have made amazing progress in recent years. Most recently, they have demonstrated to answer natural language questions at a surprising performance level. In addition, by clever prompting, these models can change their behavior. In this way, these models blur the line between data and instruction. From "traditional" cybersecurity, we know that this is a problem. The importance of security boundaries between trusted and untrusted inputs for LLMs was underestimated. We show that Prompt Injection is a serious security threat that needs to be addressed as models are deployed to new use-cases and interface with more systems.

[PDF DOC] https://arxiv.org/pdf/2302.12173.pdf

Dive into the analysis and exploitation of a vulnerability in the Windows Ancillary Function Driver for Winsock for Local Privilege Escalation on Windows 11. More from X-Force Red experts.

Ecuador's government condemns the attack after journalists nationwide are targeted.

Related:

Stealing data from Mac devices can unlock the door for both financially-motivated cybercrime and espionage. Learn how recent macOS malware does it.

Recently (On March 18 2023 at 23:44), a new malspam campaign has been observed in the wild ( HERE ), which caused a significant amount of concern. This campaign is designed to distribute malicious emails, which contain a harmful payload that can infect a user’s system, steal sensitive information, or launch other types of attacks.

ChatGPT for a long time on March 20th posted a giant orange warning on top of their interface that they’re unable to load chat history.

• Mandiant tracked 55 zero-day vulnerabilities that we judge were exploited in 2022. Although this count is lower than the record-breaking 81 zero-days exploited in 2021, it still represents almost triple the number from 2020.
• Chinese state-sponsored cyber espionage groups exploited more zero-days than other cyber espionage actors in 2022, which is consistent with previous years.
• We identified four zero-day vulnerabilities exploited by financially motivated threat actors. 75% of these instances appear to be linked to ransomware operations.
• Products from Microsoft, Google, and Apple made up the majority of zero-day vulnerabilities in 2022, consistent with previous years. The most exploited product types were operating systems (OS) (19), followed by browsers (11), security, IT, and network management products (10), and mobile OS (6).

This blog post describes the details and methodology of our research targeting the Windows Installer (MSI) installation technology.

The rise of publicly-accessible Al models like ChatGPT has produced some interesting attempts to create malware. How seriously should defenders take them?

On February 27, 2023, a “The Sandbox” employee was compromised, resulting in sending malspam which introduced them to “PureLand”. It leads to a RedLine Stealer and an unknown stealer for macOS. A…

A U.S. and Greek national who worked on Meta’s security and trust team while based in Greece was placed under a yearlong wiretap by the Greek national intelligence service and hacked with a powerful cyberespionage tool, according to documents obtained by The New York Times and officials with knowledge of the case.

Cyble reflects on the identification of a forum administrator and two cybercriminals and how it impacts the wider cybercrime ecosystem.

Besides the Samsung Exynos modem issue, Android 13 QPR2 with the March 2023 security update fixes a vulnerability with the Pixel’s Markup screenshot tool.

Dubbed “aCropalypse,” Simon Aarons identified and reported this vulnerability (CVE-2023-21036) to Google in early January, with the initial proof-of-concept exploit developed by David Buchanan:

Screenshots cropped using the built-in “Markup” app on Google Pixel devices may be retroactively un-cropped and un-redacted under many circumstances.

The U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) this week arrested a New York man on suspicion of running BreachForums, a popular English-language cybercrime forum where some of the world biggest hacked databases routinely first show up for sale. The forum's…

In late 2022 and early 2023, Project Zero reported eighteen 0-day vulnerabilities in Exynos Modems produced by Samsung Semiconductor. The four most severe of these eighteen vulnerabilities (CVE-2023-24033 and three other vulnerabilities that have yet to be assigned CVE-IDs) allowed for Internet-to-baseband remote code execution. Tests conducted by Project Zero confirm that those four vulnerabilities allow an attacker to remotely compromise a phone at the baseband level with no user interaction, and require only that the attacker know the victim's phone number. With limited additional research and development, we believe that skilled attackers would be able to quickly create an operational exploit to compromise affected devices silently and remotely.

You may need to turn off Wi-Fi calling and VoLTE for a bit.

Huntress is tracking CVE-2023-23397, a 0-day that impacts Microsoft Outlook and requires no user interaction to expose user credential hashes.

A suspected Chinese actor used a zero-day vulnerability in FortiOS and custom malware for espionage.