cybercrime/malcode – Lifeboat News: The Blog https://lifeboat.com/blog Safeguarding Humanity Sun, 30 Mar 2025 23:06:23 +0000 en-US hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=6.7.2 494,000 Americans Affected As Massive Data Breach Exposes Names, Financial Records, Medical Data, Social Security Numbers and More: Report https://lifeboat.com/blog/2025/03/494000-americans-affected-as-massive-data-breach-exposes-names-financial-records-medical-data-social-security-numbers-and-more-report https://lifeboat.com/blog/2025/03/494000-americans-affected-as-massive-data-breach-exposes-names-financial-records-medical-data-social-security-numbers-and-more-report#respond Sun, 30 Mar 2025 23:06:23 +0000 https://lifeboat.com/blog/2025/03/494000-americans-affected-as-massive-data-breach-exposes-names-financial-records-medical-data-social-security-numbers-and-more-report

A cybersecurity incident affecting nearly half a million people has exposed personal, financial and medical information.

The mobility and assistive solutions provider Numotion says 494,000 customers are affected by a data breach witnessed between September 2nd, 2024, and November 18th, 2024, reports Security Week.

Numotion says an unknown entity managed to access the email accounts of the firm’s employees without authorization several times.

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Cracking the code of private AI: The role of entropy in secure language models https://lifeboat.com/blog/2025/03/cracking-the-code-of-private-ai-the-role-of-entropy-in-secure-language-models https://lifeboat.com/blog/2025/03/cracking-the-code-of-private-ai-the-role-of-entropy-in-secure-language-models#respond Sun, 30 Mar 2025 18:20:40 +0000 https://lifeboat.com/blog/2025/03/cracking-the-code-of-private-ai-the-role-of-entropy-in-secure-language-models

Large Language Models (LLMs) have rapidly become an integral part of our digital landscape, powering everything from chatbots to code generators. However, as these AI systems increasingly rely on proprietary, cloud-hosted models, concerns over user privacy and data security have escalated. How can we harness the power of AI without exposing sensitive data?

A recent study, “Entropy-Guided Attention for Private LLMs,” by Nandan Kumar Jha, a Ph.D. candidate at the NYU Center for Cybersecurity (CCS), and Brandon Reagen, Assistant Professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering and a member of CCS, introduces a novel approach to making AI more secure.

The paper was presented at the AAAI Workshop on Privacy-Preserving Artificial Intelligence (PPAI 25) in early March and is available on the arXiv preprint server.

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Giving verification more logic and more scale: New method enhances processor security against side-channel attacks https://lifeboat.com/blog/2025/03/giving-verification-more-logic-and-more-scale-new-method-enhances-processor-security-against-side-channel-attacks https://lifeboat.com/blog/2025/03/giving-verification-more-logic-and-more-scale-new-method-enhances-processor-security-against-side-channel-attacks#respond Sun, 30 Mar 2025 18:19:47 +0000 https://lifeboat.com/blog/2025/03/giving-verification-more-logic-and-more-scale-new-method-enhances-processor-security-against-side-channel-attacks

More than seven years ago, cybersecurity researchers were thoroughly rattled by the discovery of Meltdown and Spectre, two major security vulnerabilities uncovered in the microprocessors found in virtually every computer on the planet.

Perhaps the scariest thing about these vulnerabilities is that they didn’t stem from typical software bugs or physical CPU problems, but from the actual processor architecture. These attacks changed our understanding of what can be trusted in a system, forcing to fundamentally reexamine where they put resources.

These attacks emerged from an optimization technique called “speculative execution” that essentially gives the processor the ability to execute multiple instructions while it waits for memory, before discarding the instructions that aren’t needed.

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New Morphing Meerkat Phishing Kit Mimics 114 Brands Using Victims’ DNS Email Records https://lifeboat.com/blog/2025/03/new-morphing-meerkat-phishing-kit-mimics-114-brands-using-victims-dns-email-records https://lifeboat.com/blog/2025/03/new-morphing-meerkat-phishing-kit-mimics-114-brands-using-victims-dns-email-records#respond Fri, 28 Mar 2025 06:15:36 +0000 https://lifeboat.com/blog/2025/03/new-morphing-meerkat-phishing-kit-mimics-114-brands-using-victims-dns-email-records

Cybersecurity researchers have shed light on a new phishing-as-a-service (PhaaS) platform that leverages the Domain Name System (DNS) mail exchange (MX) records to serve fake login pages that impersonate about 114 brands.

DNS intelligence firm Infoblox is tracking the actor behind the PhaaS, the phishing kit, and the related activity under the moniker Morphing Meerkat.

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Hackers Repurpose RansomHub’s EDRKillShifter in Medusa, BianLian, and Play Attacks https://lifeboat.com/blog/2025/03/hackers-repurpose-ransomhubs-edrkillshifter-in-medusa-bianlian-and-play-attacks https://lifeboat.com/blog/2025/03/hackers-repurpose-ransomhubs-edrkillshifter-in-medusa-bianlian-and-play-attacks#respond Fri, 28 Mar 2025 06:15:23 +0000 https://lifeboat.com/blog/2025/03/hackers-repurpose-ransomhubs-edrkillshifter-in-medusa-bianlian-and-play-attacks

RansomHub’s EDRKillShifter used in 2024 ransomware by Medusa, BianLian, and Play, revealing cross-gang tool sharing.

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APT36 Spoofs India Post Website to Infect Windows and Android Users with Malware https://lifeboat.com/blog/2025/03/apt36-spoofs-india-post-website-to-infect-windows-and-android-users-with-malware https://lifeboat.com/blog/2025/03/apt36-spoofs-india-post-website-to-infect-windows-and-android-users-with-malware#respond Fri, 28 Mar 2025 06:15:12 +0000 https://lifeboat.com/blog/2025/03/apt36-spoofs-india-post-website-to-infect-windows-and-android-users-with-malware

APT36 spoofed India Post using malware-laced PDFs and Android apps to harvest sensitive data.

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Top 3 MS Office Exploits Hackers Use in 2025 — Stay Alert! https://lifeboat.com/blog/2025/03/top-3-ms-office-exploits-hackers-use-in-2025-stay-alert https://lifeboat.com/blog/2025/03/top-3-ms-office-exploits-hackers-use-in-2025-stay-alert#respond Fri, 28 Mar 2025 06:14:46 +0000 https://lifeboat.com/blog/2025/03/top-3-ms-office-exploits-hackers-use-in-2025-stay-alert

Phishing Office files and CVE-2017–11882 exploits still active in 2025, exposing unpatched systems to malware.

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Hijacked Microsoft Stream classic domain “spams” SharePoint sites https://lifeboat.com/blog/2025/03/hijacked-microsoft-stream-classic-domain-spams-sharepoint-sites https://lifeboat.com/blog/2025/03/hijacked-microsoft-stream-classic-domain-spams-sharepoint-sites#respond Fri, 28 Mar 2025 06:14:34 +0000 https://lifeboat.com/blog/2025/03/hijacked-microsoft-stream-classic-domain-spams-sharepoint-sites

The legacy domain for Microsoft Stream was hijacked to show a fake Amazon site promoting a Thailand casino, causing all SharePoint sites with old embedded videos to display it as spam.

Microsoft Stream is an enterprise video streaming service that allows organizations to upload and share videos in Microsoft 365 apps, such as Teams and SharePoint.

Video content hosted on Microsoft Stream was accessed or embedded through a portal at microsoftstream.com.

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EncryptHub Exploits Windows Zero-Day to Deploy Rhadamanthys and StealC Malware https://lifeboat.com/blog/2025/03/encrypthub-exploits-windows-zero-day-to-deploy-rhadamanthys-and-stealc-malware https://lifeboat.com/blog/2025/03/encrypthub-exploits-windows-zero-day-to-deploy-rhadamanthys-and-stealc-malware#respond Thu, 27 Mar 2025 07:18:47 +0000 https://lifeboat.com/blog/2025/03/encrypthub-exploits-windows-zero-day-to-deploy-rhadamanthys-and-stealc-malware

The threat actor known as EncryptHub exploited a recently-patched security vulnerability in Microsoft Windows as a zero-day to deliver a wide range of malware families, including backdoors and information stealers such as Rhadamanthys and StealC.

“In this attack, the threat actor manipulates.msc files and the Multilingual User Interface Path (MUIPath) to download and execute malicious payload, maintain persistence and steal sensitive data from infected systems,” Trend Micro researcher Aliakbar Zahravi said in an analysis.

The vulnerability in question is CVE-2025–26633 (CVSS score: 7.0), described by Microsoft as an improper neutralization vulnerability in Microsoft Management Console (MMC) that could allow an attacker to bypass a security feature locally. It was fixed by the company earlier this month as part of its Patch Tuesday update.

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RedCurl Shifts from Espionage to Ransomware with First-Ever QWCrypt Deployment https://lifeboat.com/blog/2025/03/redcurl-shifts-from-espionage-to-ransomware-with-first-ever-qwcrypt-deployment https://lifeboat.com/blog/2025/03/redcurl-shifts-from-espionage-to-ransomware-with-first-ever-qwcrypt-deployment#respond Thu, 27 Mar 2025 07:18:19 +0000 https://lifeboat.com/blog/2025/03/redcurl-shifts-from-espionage-to-ransomware-with-first-ever-qwcrypt-deployment

RedCurl deployed QWCrypt ransomware via fake CVs and ISO lures, disabling entire virtual infrastructures.

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