Android Malware Exploits a Microsoft-Related Security Blind Spot to Avoid Detection

Microsoft’s .NET MAUI lets developers build cross-platform apps in C#, but its use of binary blob files poses new risks by bypassing Android’s DEX-based security checks.

Security | TechRepublic – ​Read More

Hoff’s Rule: People First

Dark Reading Confidential Episode 5: Christofer Hoff, chief secure technology officer at LastPass, shares the human side of the story of how he led his team through a major cyber incident and built from the ground up a security team and security culture.

darkreading – ​Read More

SignalGate Is Driving the Most US Downloads of Signal Ever

Scandal surrounding the Trump administration’s Signal group chat has led to a landmark week for the encrypted messaging app’s adoption—its “largest US growth moment by a massive margin.”

Security Latest – ​Read More

OpenAI Bug Bounty Program Increases Top Reward to $100,000

OpenAI Bug Bounty program boosts max reward to $100,000, expanding scope and offering new incentives to enhance AI security and reliability.

Hackread – Latest Cybersecurity, Tech, AI, Crypto & Hacking News – ​Read More

Splunk Patches Dozens of Vulnerabilities

Splunk patches high-severity remote code execution and information disclosure flaws in Splunk Enterprise and Secure Gateway App.

The post Splunk Patches Dozens of Vulnerabilities appeared first on SecurityWeek.

SecurityWeek – ​Read More

Money Laundering 101, and why Joe is worried

Money Laundering 101, and why Joe is worried

Welcome to this week’s edition of the Threat Source newsletter. 

Howdy friends! One of things I learned early on in cyber security is that crime does, in fact, pay. It can pay very well, actually. If it didn’t, we wouldn’t have ransomware cartels raking in obscene amounts of money year after year. Ransomware victims pay ransoms with cryptocurrency — typically Bitcoin. A criminal who has their ill-gotten BTC gains then needs to introduce it into a banking system that lets them spend that crypto currency with no questions asked.  

You might be unsurprised to learn that that isn’t as easy as it sounds, but it’s also not a new problem. In the 1980s, South American drug cartels had a similar issue. They were making obscene amounts of money and had massive piles of cash. However, one cannot show up and start dropping massive amounts of money buying very expensive things without drawing legal attention. Plus, it turns out, cash was the preferred way to bribe corrupt officials. As a result, they found legal and banking loopholes, and less than reputable financial practices in the U.S and in other countries to inject ill-gotten money into a legitimate banking system where they could access the funds.  

This is called money laundering, and it is at the heart of every successful organized crime organization. Money Laundering 101 is done in three basic steps: Placement, Layering, and Integration.  

  1. Placement: You need to get your money into the financial system(s). 
  2. Layering: You need to move the money around so it’s harder to trace and to link it to the crime.  
  3. Integration: Now that the connection to the crime is obfuscated, you can spend that money. You can invest it, buy expensive cars, or whatever. That money is now in someone else’s pocket. I used to joke that Ferrari dealerships don’t exactly accept cryptocurrency, but it turns out that joke is now on me. More and more businesses now accept cryptocurrency as a direct means of payment it seems.  

We often think of the crime of ransomware attacks at the point of impact and victimization, but rarely do we think of the reverse — the money that is paid out that flows back into the cartel and its affiliates. Cryptocurrency is fantastic for money laundering. It lags far behind regulatory standards, is largely anonymous, and can be “mixed” and directed to decentralized exchanges where Know Your Customer (KYC) and Anti-Money Laundering (AML) controls are not applied.  

So why am I bringing this up? Well, law enforcement attacking money laundering infrastructure really works. If you can impact how criminals launder their money, you put the brakes on the crime itself happening. After all, what good are the spoils of crime If you can’t do anything with it? 

My fear is that regulatory climates have shifted, which will allow laundering to more easily happen. Time will tell if I’m right, and I don’t want to be.

The one big thing 

I’m a huge fanboy for clever evasion tactics. Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) evasion tactics in spam emails is just a wicked cool trick. Game knows game, and I have to say, this is super smart. Spam filters play a constant cat and mouse game against adversaries. It goes to show that the threat actors are always innovating neat tricks to exploit victims. 

Why do I care? 

Spam emails account for a massive threat footprint, especially in enterprise email security. Any attack that sneaks malicious spam emails through a spam filter is worth paying attention to. 

So now what? 

Knowing is half the battle. Time to look at your email defenses and shore them up. Consider an email proxy service or something similar to help augment your email threat defense.

Top security headlines of the week 

Airport outages: Malaysia PM says country rejected $10 million ransom demand (The Record

Satellites! I am an absolute sucker for space hacking. ENISA released a great guide on securing commercial space assets. (ENISA)  

One-click phishing attacks: Google hastily patched a Chrome zero-day vulnerability exploited by an APT. (Dark Reading

Can’t get enough Talos? 

  • Patch Tuesday was a doozy this time. Check out our blog post here
  • Also, keep your eyes peeled: Talos’ 2024 Year in Review will be available for download on Monday, Mar. 31. 

Upcoming events where you can find Talos 

  • RSA (April 28 – May 1, 2025) San Francisco, CA 
  • PIVOTcon (May 7 – 9) Malaga, Spain 
  • CTA TIPS 2025 (May 14 – 15, 2025) Arlington, VA 
  • Cisco Live U.S. (June 8 – 12, 2022) San Diego, CA

Most prevalent malware files from Talos telemetry over the past week  

SHA 256:7b3ec2365a64d9a9b2452c22e82e6d6ce2bb6dbc06c6720951c9570a5cd46fe5 
MD5: ff1b6bb151cf9f671c929a4cbdb64d86  
VirusTotal : https://www.virustotal.com/gui/file/7b3ec2365a64d9a9b2452c22e82e6d6ce2bb6dbc06c6720951c9570a5cd46fe5  
Typical Filename: endpoint.query 
Claimed Product: Endpoint-Collector 
Detection Name: W32.File.MalParent     

SHA 256: 47ecaab5cd6b26fe18d9759a9392bce81ba379817c53a3a468fe9060a076f8ca   
MD5: 71fea034b422e4a17ebb06022532fdde   
VirusTotal: https://www.virustotal.com/gui/file/47ecaab5cd6b26fe18d9759a9392bce81ba379817c53a3a468fe9060a076f8ca  
Typical Filename: VID001.exe  
Claimed Product: N/A    
Detection Name: Coinminer:MBT.26mw.in14.Talos  

SHA 256: a31f222fc283227f5e7988d1ad9c0aecd66d58bb7b4d8518ae23e110308dbf91 
MD5: 7bdbd180c081fa63ca94f9c22c457376   
VirusTotal: https://www.virustotal.com/gui/file/a31f222fc283227f5e7988d1ad9c0aecd66d58bb7b4d8518ae23e110308dbf91/details%C2%A0  
Typical Filename: c0dwjdi6a.dll   
Claimed Product: N/A    
Detection Name: Trojan.GenericKD.33515991   

SHA 256:9f1f11a708d393e0a4109ae189bc64f1f3e312653dcf317a2bd406f18ffcc507  
MD5: 2915b3f8b703eb744fc54c81f4a9c67f  
VirusTotal: https://www.virustotal.com/gui/file/9f1f11a708d393e0a4109ae189bc64f1f3e312653dcf317a2bd406f18ffcc507  
Typical Filename: VID001.exe  
Detection Name: Simple_Custom_Detection 

Cisco Talos Blog – ​Read More

RedCurl Uses New QWCrypt Ransomware in Hypervisor Attacks

Discover the novel QWCrypt ransomware used by RedCurl in targeted hypervisor attacks. This article details their tactics, including…

Hackread – Latest Cybersecurity, Tech, AI, Crypto & Hacking News – ​Read More

DoJ Recovers $5M Lost in BEC Fraud Against Workers’ Union

The union received a spoofed email that led to the loss of $6.4 million, much of it transferred to other accounts or to a cryptocurrency exchange.

darkreading – ​Read More

Anthropic scientists expose how AI actually ‘thinks’ — and discover it secretly plans ahead and sometimes lies


Anthropic has developed a new method for peering inside large language models like Claude, revealing for the first time how these AI systems process information and make decisions. The research, published today in two papers (available here and here), shows these models are more sophisticated than previously understood — they plan ahead when writin…Read More

Security News | VentureBeat – ​Read More

AI technologies in Kaspersky SIEM | Kaspersky official blog

It’s a rare company these days that doesn’t boast about using artificial intelligence (AI). And often no explanation is forthcoming as to why AI is needed or, more importantly, how it’s implemented — just the mere presence of AI, it seems, is enough to make a product more valuable, innovative and high-tech. Kaspersky advocates a different approach: we don’t just say “we use AI”, but explain exactly how we deploy machine learning (ML) and AI technologies in our solutions. It’d take too long to list all our AI technologies in a single post given that we have an entire expertise center — Kaspersky AI Technology Research — that deals with all aspects of AI. So my sole focus here will be on those technologies that make life easier for SIEM analysts working with the Kaspersky Unified Monitoring and Analysis Platform.

SIEM AI Asset Risk Scoring

In traditional systems, one of the most resource-intensive tasks of the SIEM analyst is prioritizing alerts — especially if the system has just been installed and works out of the box with default correlation rules not yet fine-tuned to the infrastructure of a specific company. Big data analytics and AI systems can help here. Armed with SIEM AI Asset Risk Scoring, monitoring and response teams can prioritize alerts and prevent potential damage. The module assesses asset risks by analyzing historical data and prioritizing incoming alerts, allowing to speed up triage and generate hypotheses that can be used for proactive searches.

SIEM AI Asset Risk Scoring

Based on information about activated correlation rule chains, SIEM AI Asset Risk Scoring lets you build patterns of normal activity on endpoints. Then, by comparing daily activity with these patterns, the module identifies anomalies (for example, sudden traffic spikes or multiple service requests) that may signal a real incident and prompt the analyst to take a deeper look into these alerts. This way, the problem is detected early, before any damage is done.

AI-Powered OSINT IoCs

Analysts working with the Kaspersky Unified Monitoring and Analysis Platform also have the option to use additional contextual information from open sources through the Kaspersky Threat Intelligence Portal. After the latest update, the portal now provides access to threat intelligence collected using a generative AI model.

It works as follows: let’s say you’ve found a suspicious file during a threat hunt. You can take this file’s hash and look it up on the site, and if someone else has already encountered it during an incident investigation and published something about it, the technology will instantly show you indicators of compromise (IoC) and key facts about the threat. Without such an automation system, it can take the analyst many hours to find and review this information — especially if there are lots of materials and they’re written in different languages. Our system, built on an internal LLM model, can automate this process: it analyzes all reports and mentions of the threat whatever the language, extracts the essence, and presents a summary: the nature of the threat, the date it was detected first, cybercriminal groups associated with it, industries most often targeted using the file, and so on. This saves the analyst an enormous amount of time on searching and researching.

What’s more, the analyst has access to other Kaspersky Threat Intelligence data, including information generated using AI technologies and big data analytics. Our threat intelligence databases are continuously updated with the results of manual APT research, live data from the darknet, information from the Kaspersky Security Network, and regular analysis of new malware. All of these technologies help users minimize the potential damage from cyber-incidents and reduce the Mean Time to Respond (MTTR) and the Mean Time to Detect (MTTD).

 

We continue to improve the usability and performance of our SIEM system, with a focus on deploying AI to free information security employees from even more routine tasks. Follow updates of the Kaspersky Unified Monitoring and Analysis Platform on the official product page.

Kaspersky official blog – ​Read More