Researchers disclose critical zero-day vulnerability in Oracle Solaris that was exploited in the wild by an uncategorized threat actor. Background On November 2, researchers at FireEye published a blog post detailing findings from a Mandiant incident response investigation that led to the discovery of an uncharacterized (UNC) group they refer to as UNC1945. As part of this investigation, they discovered that UNC1945 was leveraging a critical Oracle Solaris zero-day vulnerability to install a backdoor as…

By: Heiko, Senior Security Engineer, Germany © By Christian Beier I never could have imagined that what started as a national duty to volunteer in Germany would spark an innate passion of giving back to those in need during a time of crisis. For many years, German men were required to spend 15 months in the military after graduating from school or volunteer for community service for an equal amount of time over eight years….

Executive Summary It is rare to be provided an inside view on how major cyber espionage campaigns are conducted within the digital realm. The only transparency afforded is a limited view of victims, a malware sample, and perhaps the IP addresses of historical command and control (C2) infrastructure. The Operation North Star campaign we detailed earlier this year provided just this. This campaign used social media sites, spearphishing and weaponized documents to target employees working…

McAfee’s Advanced Threat Research (ATR) today released research that uncovers previously undiscovered information on how Operation North Star evaluated its prospective victims and launched attacks on organizations in Australia, India, Israel and Russia, including defense contractors based in India and Russia. McAfee’s initial research into Operation North Star revealed a campaign that used social media sites, spearphishing and weaponized documents to target employees working for organizations in the defense sector. This early analysis focused on…