Lazarus

Security Week 2644: Active Exploitation of PHP2Shell Vulnerabilities Confirmed

PHP developers released patches for two critical vulnerabilities collectively known as PHP2Shell on October 20, affecting PHP 8.2 through 8.5 as well as older branches. The flaws allow unauthenticated remote code execution on affected servers, which power approximately 70 percent of websites. Despite expectations of immediate exploitation, confirmed attacks with working exploits only began on October 25. CrowdStrike noted technical difficulties in weaponizing the issues in real-world environments. Only one-fifth of top Russian websites had applied the fixes by October 25. Additional incidents included compromised eMudhra certificates, a critical GitLab flaw, and a 16-year-old Broadcom router vulnerability.

Bybit Restricts Transfers to Sanctioned Entities Including Lazarus Group and CryptoPro

Cryptocurrency exchange Bybit has notified users that transfers to or from entities on its Restricted Counterparties list are prohibited, regardless of amount or whether conducted directly or through intermediaries. The list includes the North Korean state-sponsored Lazarus group and Russian cryptographic software developer CryptoPro due to their presence on sanctions lists from the United States, European Union, and United Kingdom. Bybit will automatically reject outgoing transfers to listed counterparties and may freeze incoming funds from them or related addresses, with potential account suspension or closure for users involved. The exchange emphasizes that blockchain transparency allows tracing of funds without user confessions and reserves the right to block transactions even with counterparties not yet explicitly listed. These measures are embedded in Bybit's terms of service to ensure compliance with international sanctions regimes.

Deepfakes Turn Job Interviews into Cyberattack Vectors Targeting IT Candidates and Recruiters

Deepfake technology and malicious test assignments are increasingly used during IT hiring processes to conduct industrial espionage or deploy malware. Attackers impersonate recruiters or candidates, sending infected GitHub repositories or npm packages that install backdoors stealing credentials and enabling remote access. Groups such as Lazarus and the dedicated Contagious Interview collective have run campaigns against chemical and IT firms, while individual cases like the Smello Python developer incident show how prepare scripts in package.json can trigger hidden payloads. Gartner predicts that by 2028 one in four job applicants could be fake, creating risks beyond bad hires including data theft and financial loss. Defenses include isolated virtual machines for test tasks, profile verification by companies like Socure, and interview techniques such as the GOTCHA movement challenges or corneal reflection probes developed by universities. Major firms including Cisco, McKinsey, and Google are returning to in-person interviews as a reliable countermeasure. The rapid evolution of deepfake quality tracked by Unit 42 means layered verification combining technical, procedural, and human checks is now essential.

Lazarus Group Exploits Windows Kernel Zero-Day CVE-2026-68820 to Deploy FudModule Rootkit

The North Korean Lazarus APT group has been actively exploiting a zero-day vulnerability in the Windows kernel to escalate privileges to SYSTEM level and install the FudModule rootkit. The flaw, tracked as CVE-2026-68820, resides in the afd.sys driver responsible for network functions and socket management. Microsoft released a patch for the issue on August 11. The attacks form part of the ongoing Operation Dream Job campaign, which uses fake job offers to target professionals in defense, aerospace, and aviation sectors. Victims in Brazil, Europe, and India are tricked into opening malicious PDF viewers or prepared files that deliver the MISTPEN downloader. Once initial access is obtained, the zero-day exploit elevates privileges, allowing FudModule to tamper with Windows telemetry and weaken EDR solutions as well as Smart App Control.

YARA Style Guide: Comprehensive Best Practices for Naming, Structuring and Maintaining Detection Rules

The article presents a detailed translation and adaptation of Florian Roth's YARA Style Guide, aimed at bringing consistency to large collections of YARA rules used by security teams. It explains how to construct informative rule names that include threat category, context, operating system, architecture, technology, packers and creation date, using prefixes such as MAL, HKTL, WEBSHELL, EXPL, VULN, SUSP and PUA. The guide recommends specific metadata fields including description, author, date, reference, score and hash, along with a three-tier string categorization system using $x*, $s* and $a* prefixes for high-specificity, group and preliminary strings. It also covers false-positive filters marked with $fp*, proper indentation, readable hex and string formatting, and a recommended order of conditions that begins with header checks and ends with false-positive filters. The publication highlights the benefits of this structured approach for long-term maintainability and faster triage during mass detections. Additional references point to the separate YARA-Performance-Guidelines project for deeper optimization techniques.