In this blog, we explore the modus operandi of threat actors utilizing QR code attacks, by examining recent and widespread quishing campaigns detected by Trellix.
Qualcomm has disclosed details about three high-severity security vulnerabilities that were exploited in limited, targeted attacks in October 2023.
In this vulnerability disclosure report, we discuss details of 5Ghoul – a family of implementation-level 5G vulnerabilities. Such a family of vulnerabilities are present in the firmware implementation of 5G mobile network modems from major chipset vendors i.e., Qualcomm and MediaTek. Consequently, many 5G-capable commercial products such as smartphones, Customer-premises Equipment (CPE) routers and USB modems are potentially impacted due to the employment of vulnerable 5G modems in such products. In total, we have found 12 new vulnerabilities (14 total), out of which 10 affect 5G modems from Qualcomm and MediaTek. More importantly, three of these ten vulnerabilities are confirmed to have high severity. We also wrote a scraper to send crafted queries to https://www.kimovil.com/en/ and to have an estimate on the number of smartphone models affected due to these vulnerabilities. We found over 710 smartphone models that are currently in the market to be affected. We emphasize that the actual number of affected models might be more, as firmware code is often shared across different modem versions. In this disclosure report, we also demonstrate the exploitation of 5Ghoul vulnerabilities to drop and freeze 5G connection on smartphones and CPE routers. We also show downgrade attacks across multiple smartphones that result in downgrading the 5G connection to 4G.
In three campaigns over the past 20 months, Russian APT Fighting Ursa has targeted over 30 organizations of likely strategic intelligence value using CVE-2023-23397.
Microsoft Threat Intelligence continues to track and disrupt malicious activity attributed to a Russian state-sponsored actor we track as Star Blizzard, who has improved their detection evasion capabilities since 2022 while remaining focused on email credential theft against targets.
The Russia-based actor Star Blizzard (formerly known as SEABORGIUM, also known as Callisto Group/TA446/COLDRIVER/TAG-53/BlueCharlie) continues to successfully use spear-phishing attacks against targeted organizations and individuals in the UK, and other geographical areas of interest, for information-gathering activity.
The UK National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC), the US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), the US Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), the US National Security Agency (NSA), the US Cyber National Mission Force (CNMF), the Australian Signals Directorate’s Australian Cyber Security Centre (ASD’s ACSC), the Canadian Centre for Cyber Security (CCCS), and the New Zealand National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC-NZ) assess that Star Blizzard is almost certainly subordinate to the Russian Federal Security Service (FSB) Centre 18.
