In an effort to evade detection, cybercriminals are increasingly turning to “residential proxy” services that cover their tracks by making it look like everyday online activity.
For years, gray-market services known as “bulletproof” hosts have been a key tool for cybercriminals looking to anonymously maintain web infrastructure with no questions asked. But as global law enforcement scrambles to crack down on digital threats, they have developed strategies for getting customer information from these hosts and have increasingly targeted the people behind the services with indictments. At the cybercrime-focused conference Sleuthcon in in Arlington, Virginia, today, researcher Thibault Seret outlined how this shift has pushed both bulletproof hosting companies and criminal customers toward an alternative approach.
Rather than relying on web hosts to find ways of operating outside law enforcement's reach, some service providers have turned to offering purpose-built VPNs and other proxy services as a way of rotating and masking customer IP addresses and offering infrastructure that either intentionally doesn't log traffic or mixes traffic from many sources together. And while the technology isn't new, Seret and other researchers emphasized to WIRED that the transition to using proxies among cybercrminals over the last couple of years is significant.
Millions of Americans have downloaded apps that secretly route their internet traffic through Chinese companies, according to an investigation by the Tech Transparency Project (TTP), including several that were recently owned by a sanctioned firm with links to China’s military.
TTP’s investigation found that one in five of the top 100 free virtual private networks in the U.S. App Store during 2024 were surreptitiously owned by Chinese companies, which are obliged to hand over their users’ browsing data to the Chinese government under the country’s national security laws. Several of the apps traced back to Qihoo 360, a firm declared by the Defense Department to be a “Chinese Military Company." Qihoo did not respond to questions about its app-related holdings.
Silent Push reveals Astrill VPN is still being heavily used by NK Lazarus Group threat actors to hide their IP addresses during attacks
"Recently, various intelligence and threat analysis teams have identified a concerning trend: North Korean state actors are infiltrating companies and organizations around the world in an attempt to facilitate the clandestine transfer of funds to support North Korea’s state apparatus. Specifically, these actors have favored the use of Astrill VPN to obscure their digital footprints while applying for remote positions."
"While it’s been several months since these articles were published, we continue to see reports from our customers of fraudulent re mote worker campaigns originating from Astrill VPN IP addresses."
Security research that presents a method to automatically validate credentials against Fortinet VPN servers by uncovering an exploit that attackers can use to compromise countless organizations.
Who doesn't love abusing buggy appliances, really?
Microsoft has officially deprecated the Point-to-Point Tunneling Protocol (PPTP) and Layer 2 Tunneling Protocol (L2TP) in future versions of Windows Server, recommending admins switch to different protocols that offer increased security.
#Deprecated #L2TP #Microsoft #PPTP #Server #VPN #Windows
The mysterious Quad7 botnet has evolved its tactics to compromise several brands of Wi-Fi routers and VPN appliances. It’s armed with new backdoors, multiple vulnerabilities, some of which were previously unknown, and new staging servers and clusters, according to a report by Sekoia, a cybersecurity firm.
Unit 42 discusses WikiLoader malware spoofing GlobalProtect VPN, detailing evasion techniques, malicious URLs, and mitigation strategies. Unit 42 discusses WikiLoader malware spoofing GlobalProtect VPN, detailing evasion techniques, malicious URLs, and mitigation strategies.
Apple has caved to pressure from Russian authorities and removed a number of the best iPhone VPN apps from the App Store in the country.
Over the past few months, we have observed increased interest of malicious groups in leveraging remote-access VPN environments as an entry point and
We discovered a fundamental design problem in VPNs and we're calling it TunnelVision. This problem lets someone see what you're doing online, even if you think you're safely using a VPN.
The Shadowserver Foundation identifies thousands of Ivanti VPN instances likely impacted by a recent remote code execution flaw.
A secret program called "Project Ghostbusters" saw Facebook devise a way to intercept and decrypt the encrypted network traffic of Snapchat users to study their behavior.
Summary Chaining of three vulnerabilities allows unauthenticated attackers to execute arbitrary command with root privileges on Zyxel VPN firewall (VPN50, VPN100, VPN300, VPN500, VPN1000). Due to recent attack surface changes in Zyxel, the chain described below broke and become unusable – we have decided to disclose this even though it is no longer exploitable. Credit … SSD Advisory – Zyxel VPN Series Pre-auth Remote Command Execution Read More »
Volexity regularly prioritizes memory forensics when responding to incidents. This strategy improves investigative capabilities in many ways across Windows, Linux, and macOS. This blog post highlights some specific ways memory forensics played a key role in determining how two zero-day vulnerabilities were being chained together to achieve unauthenticated remote code execution in Ivanti Connect Secure VPN devices.
Volexity has uncovered active in-the-wild exploitation of two vulnerabilities allowing unauthenticated remote code execution in Ivanti Connect Secure VPN appliances. An official security advisory and knowledge base article have been released by Ivanti that includes mitigation that should be applied immediately. However, a mitigation does not remedy a past or ongoing compromise. Systems should simultaneously be thoroughly analyzed per details in this post to look for signs of a breach.
Learn how Bishop Fox built a POC exploit for the pre-authentication remote code injection vulnerability in the Fortinet SSL VPN published by Lexfo.
