According to researchers, Iran-backed hackers spent eight months inside the systems of a Middle East government, stealing emails and files. Symantec attributed the campaign to a group it calls Crambus, but is also known as APT34, OilRig, or MuddyWater. The intrusion lasted from February to September, and although the researchers did not name the targeted country, Crambus had previously been observed in Saudi Arabia, Israel, the United Arab Emirates, Iraq, Jordan, Lebanon, Kuwait, Qatar, Albania, the US, and Turkey.

ExelaStealer, a new information stealer, has joined the field of off-the-shelf malware designed to steal sensitive data from compromised Windows systems. James Slaughter, a researcher at Fortinet FortiGuard Labs, noted that ExelaStealer is a primarily open-source infostealer that offers paid customizations. It is written in Python and supports JavaScript. The infostealer is equipped to steal passwords, Discord tokens, credit cards, cookies, keystrokes, clipboard content, and more. This article continues to discuss findings regarding the ExelaStealer infostealer.

The analysis of over 1.8 million pages identified as admin portals found that 40,000 of them used "admin" as its password, making it the most common credential used by Information Technology (IT) administrators. Between January and September of 2023, a team of researchers with Outpost24 analyzed passwords and discovered an increased dependence on default passwords. This article continues to discuss the top passwords discovered by the analysis. 

The BlackCat/ALPHV ransomware operation is now applying a new tool named Munchkin, which uses Virtual Machines (VMs) to stealthily launch encryptors on network devices. Munchkin allows BlackCat to execute on remote systems or encrypt Server Message Block (SMB) or Common Internet File (CIFS) network shares. Adding Munchkin to BlackCat's extensive and sophisticated arsenal makes the Ransomware-as-a-Service (RaaS) more appealing to cybercriminals seeking to work with the ransomware.

A new study called the "Hoxhunt Challenge" has unveiled alarming trends in employee susceptibility to phishing attacks, emphasizing the critical role of engagement in reducing human risk.  The study was conducted in 38 organizations across nine industries and 125 countries and revealed that 22% of phishing attacks in the first weeks of October 2023 used QR codes to deliver malicious payloads.  The challenge categorized employee responses into three groups: success, miss, and click/scan.

Security researchers at WithSecure believe that Vietnam-based cybercriminals are behind attacks using DarkGate malware, which have targeted organizations in the UK, US, and India since 2018.  The researchers have tracked these attacks to an active cluster of cybercriminals using the Ducktail infostealer, which has been used in recent campaigns targeting Meta business accounts.  The researchers noted that the DarkGate and Ducktail campaigns have been linked based on observed non-technical indicators.  These include lure files, themes, targeting, and delivery methods.

Researchers at Indiana University are working on a project to protect the open-source software used by institutions worldwide to collaborate and share study findings. According to Sagar Samtani, an assistant professor of operations and decision technologies and a Weimer Faculty Fellow at the Indiana University Kelley School of Business, who is co-principal investigator on the project, federally funded scientific cyberinfrastructure has sped up innovative scientific discoveries.

According to research backed by Microsoft, OpenAI's GPT-4 Large Language Model (LLM) might be more trustworthy than GPT-3.5, but also more vulnerable to jailbreaking and bias. The paper by a team of researchers from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, Stanford University, University of California, Berkeley, the Center for AI Safety, and Microsoft Research gave GPT-4 a higher score for trustworthiness than its predecessor.

According to a Riskonnect survey of 300 professionals on the top internal threats to businesses in 2023, most risk and compliance professionals believe that employee use of generative Artificial Intelligence (AI) poses a threat to business, and less than 10 percent of companies are prepared to mitigate internal threats associated with the emerging technology. However, the top four risks identified by survey respondents did not include AI. These included talent shortages and layoffs, the risk of a recession, ransomware and security breaches, and state-sponsored cyberattacks.

According to Okta's 2023 State of Zero Trust report, the percentage of organizations implementing a zero trust initiative has nearly tripled in the past three years, from 24 percent in 2021 to 61 percent in 2023. Companies with between 5,000 and 9,999 employees are likelier than those with 500 to 999 employees to have implemented zero trust. The report is based on a survey of 860 information security decision-makers from the US, Canada, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Ireland, Norway, Japan, Australia, and other countries.