The North Korea-linked **ScarCruft** group has been attributed to a previously undocumented backdoor called **Dolphin** that the threat actor has used against targets located in its southern counterpart.

"The backdoor \[...\] has a wide range of spying capabilities, including monitoring drives and portable devices and exfiltrating files of interest, keylogging and taking screenshots, and stealing credentials from browsers," ESET researcher Filip Jurčacko said in a new report published today.

Dolphin is said to be selectively deployed, with the malware using cloud services like Google Drive for data exfiltration as well as command-and-control.

The Slovak cybersecurity company said it found the implant deployed as a final-stage payload as part of a watering hole attack in early 2021 directed against a South Korean digital newspaper.

The campaign, first uncovered by Kaspersky and Volexity last year, entailed the weaponization of two Internet Explorer flaws (CVE-2020-1380 and CVE-2021-26411) to drop a backdoor named BLUELIGHT.

ScarCruft, also called APT37, InkySquid, Reaper, and Ricochet Chollima, is a geo-political motivated APT group that has a track record of attacking government entities, diplomats, and news organizations associated with North Korean affairs. It's been known to be active since at least 2012.

Earlier this April, cybersecurity firm Stairwell disclosed details of a spear-phishing attack targeting journalists covering the country with the ultimate goal of deploying a malware dubbed GOLDBACKDOOR that shares tactical overlaps with BLUELIGHT.

The latest findings from ESET shed light on a second, more sophisticated backdoor delivered to a small pool of victims via BLUELIGHT, indicative of a highly-targeted espionage operation.

This, in turn, is achieved by executing an installer shellcode that activates a loader comprising a Python and shellcode component, the latter of which runs another shellcode loader to drop the backdoor.

"While the BLUELIGHT backdoor performs basic reconnaissance and evaluation of the compromised machine after exploitation, Dolphin is more sophisticated and manually deployed only against selected victims," Jurčacko explained.

What makes Dolphin a lot more potent than BLUELIGHT is its ability to search removable devices and connected smartphones, and exfiltrate files of interest, such as media, documents, emails, and certificates.

The backdoor, since its original discovery in April 2021, is said to have undergone three successive iterations that come with its own set of feature improvements and grant it more detection evasion capabilities.

"Dolphin is another addition to ScarCruft's extensive arsenal of backdoors abusing cloud storage services," Jurčacko said. "One unusual capability found in prior versions of the backdoor is the ability to modify the settings of victims' Google and Gmail accounts to lower their security, presumably in order to maintain account access for the threat actors."

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North Korea Hackers Using New "Dolphin" Backdoor to Spy on South Korean Targets

The North Korea-linked ScarCruft group has been attributed to a previously undocumented backdoor called Dolphin that the threat actor has used against targets located in its southern counterpart.
"The backdoor [...] has a wide range of spying capabilities, including monitoring drives and portable devices and exfiltrating files of interest, keylogging and taking screenshots, and stealing

The North Korea-linked **ScarCruft** group has been attributed to a previously undocumented backdoor called **Dolphin** that the threat actor has used against targets located in its southern counterpart.

"The backdoor \[...\] has a wide range of spying capabilities, including monitoring drives and portable devices and exfiltrating files of interest, keylogging and taking screenshots, and stealing credentials from browsers," ESET researcher Filip Jurčacko said in a new report published today.

Dolphin is said to be selectively deployed, with the malware using cloud services like Google Drive for data exfiltration as well as command-and-control.

The Slovak cybersecurity company said it found the implant deployed as a final-stage payload as part of a watering hole attack in early 2021 directed against a South Korean digital newspaper.

The campaign, first uncovered by Kaspersky and Volexity last year, entailed the weaponization of two Internet Explorer flaws (CVE-2020-1380 and CVE-2021-26411) to drop a backdoor named BLUELIGHT.

ScarCruft, also called APT37, InkySquid, Reaper, and Ricochet Chollima, is a geo-political motivated APT group that has a track record of attacking government entities, diplomats, and news organizations associated with North Korean affairs. It's been known to be active since at least 2012.

Earlier this April, cybersecurity firm Stairwell disclosed details of a spear-phishing attack targeting journalists covering the country with the ultimate goal of deploying a malware dubbed GOLDBACKDOOR that shares overlaps with another ScarCruft backdoor named BLUELIGHT.

The latest findings from ESET shed light on a second, more sophisticated backdoor delivered to a small pool of victims via BLUELIGHT, indicative of a highly-targeted espionage operation.

This, in turn, is achieved by executing an installer shellcode that activates a loader comprising a Python and shellcode component, the latter of which runs another shellcode loader to drop the backdoor.

"While the BLUELIGHT backdoor performs basic reconnaissance and evaluation of the compromised machine after exploitation, Dolphin is more sophisticated and manually deployed only against selected victims," Jurčacko explained.

What makes Dolphin a lot more potent than BLUELIGHT is its ability to search removable devices and exfiltrate files of interest, such as media, documents, emails, and certificates.

The backdoor, since its original discovery in April 2021, is said to have undergone three successive iterations that come with its own set of feature improvements and grant it more detection evasion capabilities.

"Dolphin is another addition to ScarCruft's extensive arsenal of backdoors abusing cloud storage services," Jurčacko said. "One unusual capability found in prior versions of the backdoor is the ability to modify the settings of victims' Google and Gmail accounts to lower their security, presumably in order to maintain account access for the threat actors."

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New findings from cybersecurity firm JFrog show that malware targeting the npm ecosystem can evade security checks by taking advantage of an "unexpected behavior" in the npm command line interface (CLI) tool.
npm CLI's install and audit commands have built-in capabilities to check a package and all of its dependencies for known vulnerabilities, effectively acting as a warning mechanism for

New findings from cybersecurity firm JFrog show that malware targeting the npm ecosystem can evade security checks by taking advantage of an "unexpected behavior" in the npm command line interface (CLI) tool.

npm CLI's install and audit commands have built-in capabilities to check a package and all of its dependencies for known vulnerabilities, effectively acting as a warning mechanism for developers by highlighting the flaws.

But as JFrog established, the security advisories are not displayed when the packages follow certain version formats, creating a scenario where critical flaws could be introduced into their systems either directly or via the package's dependencies.

Specifically, the problem arises only when the installed package version contains a hyphen (e.g., 1.2.3-a), which is included to denote a pre-release version of an npm module.

While the project maintainers treat the discrepancy between regular npm package versions and pre-release versions as an intended functionality, this also makes it ripe for abuse by attackers looking to poison the open source ecosystem.

"Threat actors could exploit this behavior by intentionally planting vulnerable or malicious code in their innocent-looking packages which will be included by other developers due to valuable functionality or as a mistake due to infection techniques such as typosquatting or dependency confusion," Or Peles said.

In other words, an adversary could publish a seemingly benign package that's in the pre-release version format, which could then be potentially picked up by other developers and not be alerted to the fact that the package is malicious despite evidence to the contrary.

The development once again reiterates how the software supply chain is built as a chain of trust between various parties, and how a compromise of one link can affect all downstream applications that consume the rogue third-party dependency.

To counter such threats, it's recommended that developers avoid installing npm packages with a pre-release version, unless the source is known to be completely reliable.

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Researchers Find a Way Malicious NPM Libraries Can Evade Vulnerability Detection

New findings from cybersecurity firm JFrog show that malware targeting the npm ecosystem can evade security checks by taking advantage of an "unexpected behavior" in the npm command line interface (CLI) tool.

npm CLI's install and audit commands have built-in capabilities to check a package and all of its dependencies for known vulnerabilities, effectively acting as a warning mechanism for developers by highlighting the flaws.

But as JFrog established, the security advisories are not displayed when the packages follow certain version formats, creating a scenario where critical flaws could be introduced into their systems either directly or via the package's dependencies.

Specifically, the problem arises only when the installed package version contains a hyphen (e.g., 1.2.3-a), which is included to denote a pre-release version of an npm module.

While the project maintainers treat the discrepancy between regular npm package versions and pre-release versions as an intended functionality, this also makes it ripe for abuse by attackers looking to poison the open source ecosystem.

"Threat actors could exploit this behavior by intentionally planting vulnerable or malicious code in their innocent-looking packages which will be included by other developers due to valuable functionality or as a mistake due to infection techniques such as typosquatting or dependency confusion," Or Peles said.

In other words, an adversary could publish a seemingly benign package that's in the pre-release version format, which could then be potentially picked up by other developers and not be alerted to the fact that the package is malicious despite evidence to the contrary.

The development once again reiterates how the software supply chain is built as a chain of trust relationships between various parties, and how a compromise of one link can affect all downstream applications that consume the rogue third-party dependency.

To counter such threats, it's recommended that developers avoid installing npm packages with a pre-release version, unless the source is known to be completely reliable.

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A malicious Android SMS application found on the Google Play Store has been found to stealthily harvest text messages with the goal of creating accounts on a wide range of platforms like Facebook, Google, and WhatsApp.
The app, named Symoo (com.vanjan.sms), had over 100,000 downloads and functioned as a relay for transmitting messages to a server, which advertises an account creation service.

A malicious Android SMS application found on the Google Play Store has been found to stealthily harvest text messages with the goal of creating accounts on a wide range of platforms like Facebook, Google, and WhatsApp.

The app, named Symoo (com.vanjan.sms), had over 100,000 downloads and functioned as a relay for transmitting messages to a server, which advertises an account creation service.

This is achieved by using the phone numbers associated with the infected devices as a means to gather the one-time password that's typically sent to verify the user when setting up new accounts.

"The malware asks the phone number of the user in the first screen," security researcher Maxime Ingrao, who discovered the malware, said, while also requesting for SMS permissions.

"Then it pretends to load the application but remains all the time on this page, it is to hide the interface of the received SMS and that the user does not see the SMS of subscriptions to the various services."

Some of the major services illegally signed up using the phone numbers include Amazon, Discord, Facebook, Google, Instagram, KakaoTalk, Microsoft, Nike, Telegram, TikTok, Tinder, Viber, and WhatsApp, among others.

Additionally, the data collected by the malware is exfiltrated to a domain named "goomy\[.\]fun," which was previously used in another malicious application called Virtual Number (com.programmatics.virtualnumber) that has since been removed from the Play store.

The app's developer, Walven, has also been linked to another Android app known as ActivationPW - Virtual numbers (com.programmatics.activation) that claims to offer "virtual numbers to receive SMS verification" from more than 200 countries for less than 50 cents.

According to Ingrao, Symoo and ActivationPW represent the two ends of the fraudulent scheme, wherein the phone numbers of the hacked devices that have the former installed are employed to help users buy accounts through the latter.

Google told The Hacker News that the two apps have been removed from the Play Store and that the developer has been banned.

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This Malicious App Abused Hacked Devices to Create Fake Accounts on Multiple Platforms

A malicious Android SMS application discovered on the Google Play Store has been found to stealthily harvest text messages with the goal of creating accounts on a wide range of platforms like Facebook, Google, and WhatsApp.

The app, named Symoo (com.vanjan.sms), had over 100,000 downloads and functioned as a relay for transmitting messages to a server, which advertises an account creation service.

This is achieved by using the phone numbers associated with the infected devices as a means to gather the one-time password that's typically sent to verify the user when setting up new accounts.

"The malware asks the phone number of the user in the first screen," security researcher Maxime Ingrao, who discovered the malware, said, while also requesting for SMS permissions.

"Then it pretends to load the application but remains all the time on this page, it is to hide the interface of the received SMS and that the user does not see the SMS of subscriptions to the various services."

Some of the major services illegally signed up using the phone numbers include Amazon, Discord, Facebook, Google, Instagram, KakaoTalk, Microsoft, Nike, Telegram, TikTok, Tinder, Viber, and WhatsApp, among others.

Additionally, the data collected by the malware is exfiltrated to a domain named "goomy\[.\]fun," which was previously used in another malicious application called Virtual Number (com.programmatics.virtualnumber) that has since been taken down from the Play Store.

The app's developer, Walven, has also been linked to another Android app known as ActivationPW - Virtual numbers (com.programmatics.activation) that claims to offer "virtual numbers to receive SMS verification" from more than 200 countries for less than 50 cents.

According to Ingrao, Symoo and ActivationPW represent the two ends of the fraudulent scheme, wherein the phone numbers of the hacked devices that have the former installed are employed to help users buy accounts through the latter.

Google told The Hacker News that the two apps have been removed from the Play Store and that the developer has been banned.

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The French data protection watchdog on Tuesday fined electricity provider Électricité de France €600,000 for violating the European Union General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) requirements.
The Commission nationale de l'informatique et des libertés (CNIL) said the electric utility breached European regulation by storing the passwords for over 25,800 accounts by hashing them using the MD5

The French data protection watchdog on Tuesday fined electricity provider **Électricité de France** €600,000 for violating the European Union General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) requirements.

The Commission nationale de l'informatique et des libertés (CNIL) said the electric utility breached European regulation by storing the passwords for over 25,800 accounts by hashing them using the MD5 algorithm as recently as July 2022.

It's worth noting that MD5, a message digest algorithm, is considered cryptographically broken as of December 2008 owing to the risk of collision attacks.

Furthermore, the authority noted that the passwords associated with 2,414,254 customer accounts had only been hashed and not salted, exposing the account holders to potential cyber threats.

The probe also pointed fingers at EDF for failing to comply with GDPR data retention policies and for providing "inaccurate information on the origin of the data collected."

"The amount of the fine was decided considering the breaches observed and the cooperation by the company and all the measures it has taken during the proceedings to reach compliance with all alleged breaches," the CNIL said.

The fines arrived less than two weeks after CNIL fined Discord €800,000 for its failure to respect data retention periods for inactive accounts and enforce a strong password policy.

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French Electricity Provider Fined for Storing Users’ Passwords with Weak MD5 Algorithm

The French data protection watchdog on Tuesday fined electricity provider **Électricité de France (EDF)** €600,000 for violating the European Union General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) requirements.

The Commission nationale de l'informatique et des libertés (CNIL) said the electric utility breached European regulation by storing the passwords for over 25,800 accounts by hashing them using the MD5 algorithm as recently as July 2022.

It's worth noting that MD5, a message digest algorithm, is considered cryptographically broken as of December 2008 owing to the risk of collision attacks.

Furthermore, the authority noted that the passwords associated with 2,414,254 customer accounts had only been hashed and not salted, exposing the account holders to potential cyber threats.

The probe also pointed fingers at EDF for failing to comply with GDPR data retention policies and for providing "inaccurate information on the origin of the data collected."

"The amount of the fine was decided considering the breaches observed and the cooperation by the company and all the measures it has taken during the proceedings to reach compliance with all alleged breaches," the CNIL said.

The fines arrive less than two weeks after CNIL fined Discord €800,000 for its failure to respect data retention periods for inactive accounts and enforce a strong password policy.

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The Australian government has passed a bill that markedly increases the penalty for companies suffering from serious or repeated data breaches.
To that end, the maximum fines have been bumped up from the current AU$2.22 million to AU$50 million, 30% of an entity's adjusted turnover in the relevant period, or three times the value of any benefit obtained through the misuse of information,

The Australian government has passed a bill that markedly increases the penalty for companies suffering from serious or repeated data breaches.

To that end, the maximum fines have been bumped up from the current AU$2.22 million to AU$50 million, 30% of an entity's adjusted turnover in the relevant period, or three times the value of any benefit obtained through the misuse of information, whichever is greater.

The turnover period is the time duration from when the contravention occurred to the end of the month when the incident is officially addressed.

"Significant privacy breaches in recent months have shown existing safeguards are outdated and inadequate," Attorney-General Mark Dreyfus said in a statement. "These reforms make clear to companies that the penalty for a major data breach can no longer be regarded as the cost of doing business."

The legislation, called the Privacy Legislation Amendment (Enforcement and Other Measures) Bill 2022, also bestows more powers to the Australian Information Commissioner to address security breaches.

The "new information sharing powers will facilitate engagement with domestic regulators and our international counterparts to help us perform our regulatory role efficiently and effectively," Australian Information Commissioner and Privacy Commissioner Angelene Falk said.

The bill, which has been tabled as part of wider reforms to the Privacy Act 1988, now awaits Royal Assent to be formally signed into law.

The development comes in the wake of recent major breaches at Optus and Medibank that have resulted in the leak of personal information associated with 2.1 million and 9.7 million customers, respectively.

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Australia Passes Bill to Fine Companies up to $50 Million for Data Breaches

The Australian government has passed a bill that markedly increases the penalty for companies suffering from serious or repeated data breaches.

To that end, the maximum fines have been bumped up from the current AU$2.22 million to AU$50 million, 30% of an entity's adjusted turnover in the relevant period, or three times the value of any benefit obtained through the misuse of information, whichever is greater.

The turnover period is the time duration from when the contravention occurred to the end of the month when the incident is officially addressed.

"Significant privacy breaches in recent months have shown existing safeguards are outdated and inadequate," Attorney-General Mark Dreyfus said in a statement. "These reforms make clear to companies that the penalty for a major data breach can no longer be regarded as the cost of doing business."

The legislation, called the Privacy Legislation Amendment (Enforcement and Other Measures) Bill 2022, also bestows more powers to the Australian Information Commissioner to address security breaches.

The "new information sharing powers will facilitate engagement with domestic regulators and our international counterparts to help us perform our regulatory role efficiently and effectively," Australian Information Commissioner and Privacy Commissioner Angelene Falk said.

The bill, which has been tabled as part of wider reforms to the Privacy Act 1988, now awaits Royal Assent to be formally signed into law.

The development comes in the wake of recent major breaches at Optus and Medibank that have resulted in the leak of personal information associated with 2.1 million and 9.7 million customers, respectively.

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Source

The Hacker News