SecurityWeek reports that organizations have been warned by the U.K.'s National Cyber Security Centre regarding separate spear-phishing campaigns by Russian state-sponsored advanced persistent threat group Seaborgium, also known as Blue Callisto, Callisto, and Coldriver, and Iranian state-sponsored hacking operation TA453, also known as APT35, Charming Kitten, and Phosphorus, targeted at government organizations, think tanks, activists, journalists, and politicians.
Both Seaborgium and TA453 commence their campaigns with the use of open source intelligence for reconnaissance on their targets, with fraudulent email accounts, websites, and invitations leveraged to obtain trust from victims and lure them to phishing pages that harvest their email credentials, according to the NCSC. Aside from establishing forwarding rules in email accounts they have compromised, both groups have also exploited contact lists for future intrusions.
"Although spear-phishing is an established technique used by many actors, Seaborgium and TA453 continue to use it successfully and evolve the technique to maintain their success," said the NCSC.
Included in the exposed dataset labeled "PDL" were individuals' full names, email addresses, phone numbers, location data, professional summaries, and skills, as well as education and employment histories.
Attackers could leverage the issue — which impacts Nexus 3000, 7000, and 9000 series switches with vulnerable NX-OS versions with DHCPv6 activated and are in standalone NX-OS mode — to facilitate continuous crashes of the dhcp_snoop process and a denial-of-service condition.
Higher rewards of up to $250,000 will be given by Google for the discovery of memory corruption flaws in the Chrome browser shown to achieve remote code execution using a non-sandboxed process as part of a more robust vulnerability reward program.