Beginning in March of 2024, Zscaler ThreatLabz observed a threat actor weaponizing a cluster of domains masquerading as legitimate IP scanner software sites to distribute a previously unseen backdoor. The threat actor registered multiple look-alike domains using a typosquatting technique and leveraged GoogleAds to push these domains to the top of search engine results targeting specific search keywords, thereby luring victims to visit these sites.
The newly discovered backdoor uses several techniques such as multiple stages of DLL sideloading, abusing the DNS protocol for communicating with the command-and-control (C2) server, and evading memory forensics security solutions. We named this backdoor “MadMxShell” for its use of DNS MX queries for C2 communication and its very short interval between C2 requests.
he National Research Center for Applied Cybersecurity ATHENE has uncovered a critical flaw in the design of DNSSEC, the Security Extensions of DNS (Domain Name System). DNS is one of the fundamental building blocks of the Internet. The design flaw has devastating consequences for essentially all DNSSEC-validating DNS implementations and public DNS providers, such as Google and Cloudflare. The ATHENE team, led by Prof. Dr. Haya Schulmann from Goethe University Frankfurt, developed “KeyTrap”, a new class of attacks: with just a single DNS packet hackers could stall all widely used DNS implementations and public DNS providers. Exploitation of this attack would have severe consequences for any application using the Internet including unavailability of technologies such as web-browsing, e-mail, and instant messaging. With KeyTrap, an attacker could completely disable large parts of the worldwide Internet. The researchers worked with all relevant vendors and major public DNS providers over several months, resulting in a number of vendor-specific patches, the last ones published on Tuesday, February 13. It is highly recommended for all providers of DNS services to apply these patches immediately to mitigate this critical vulnerability.
AhnLab Security Emergency response Center (ASEC) has confirmed instances where DNS TXT records were being utilized during the execution process of malware.
This is considered meaningful from various perspectives, including analysis and detection as this method has not been widely utilized as a means of executing malware.
A potentially precedent-setting legal case involving Sony Music and Quad9 may endanger internet freedom of speech and allow unchecked content censorship.
User tracking technologies are ubiquitous on the web. In recent times web browsers try to fight abuses. This led to an arms race where new tracking and anti-tracking measures are being developed. The use of one of such evasion techniques, the CNAME cloaking technique is recently quickly gaining popularity. Our evidence indicates that the use of the CNAME scheme threatens web security and privacy systematically and in general