News of the Cyber World

[kyonides]

Twitter Labels NPR as ‘State-Affiliated Media’
as Elon Musk Says It ‘Seems Accurate’

National Public Radio (NPR) was listed by Twitter as a “US state-affiliated media” on Tuesday, drawing outrage from staffers at the outlet.

Twitter owner Elon Musk weighed in on the designation, writing that it “seems accurate” to call NPR “state-affiliated.” He pointed to Twitter’s Help Center, which noted that “state-affiliated media is defined as outlets where the state exercises control over editorial content through financial resources, direct or indirect political pressures, and/or control over production and distribution.”

And, according to Twitter’s guidelines, “Labels on state-affiliated accounts provide additional context about accounts that are controlled by certain official representatives of governments, state-affiliated media entities, and individuals associated with those entities.”

But staffers with NPR—which critics say exhibits a far-left-wing bias in its reporting—suggested Tuesday the outlet shouldn’t be listed as such. Climate and energy correspondent Jeff Brady dismissed the label by simply writing: “Uh, no.”

Google TAG Warns of North Korean-linked ARCHIPELAGO Cyberattacks

A North Korean government-backed threat actor has been linked to attacks targeting government and military personnel, think tanks, policy makers, academics, and researchers in South Korea and the U.S.
...
Attack chains mounted by ARCHIPELAGO involve the use of phishing emails containing malicious links that, when clicked by the recipients, redirect to fake login pages that are designed to harvest credentials.

These messages purport to be from media outlets and think tanks and seek to entice targets under the pretext of requesting for interviews or additional information about North Korea.

"ARCHIPELAGO invests time and effort to build a rapport with targets, often corresponding with them by email over several days or weeks before finally sending a malicious link or file," TAG said.

The threat actor is also known to employ the browser-in-the-browser (BitB) technique to render rogue login pages inside an actual window to steal credentials.

What's more, the phishing messages have posed as Google account security alerts to activate the infection, with the adversarial collective hosting malware payloads like BabyShark on Google Drive in the form of blank files or ISO optical disc images.

Another notable technique adopted by ARCHIPELAGO is the use of fraudulent Google Chrome extensions to harvest sensitive data, as evidenced in prior campaigns dubbed Stolen Pencil and SharpTongue.

Hackers Exploiting WordPress Plugin with Over 11M Installs

One of the most popular WordPress plugins, Elementor Pro, used by over eleven million websites, is vulnerable to a high-severity vulnerability that hackers have actively exploited.

More than 12 million sites powered by WordPress have been affected by the vulnerability, which carries a severity rating of 8.8 out of 10.

Elementor Pro is a plugin that allows users to build professional-looking websites without knowing how to code. It provides drag-and-drop functionality like:

• Theme building
  
• A template collection
  
• Custom widget support
  
• WooCommerce support
  

This critical vulnerability occurred in Elementor Pro version 3.11.6. It does, however, allow any authenticated user to update any WordPress setting that has been set on the site.

To accomplish this, an AJAX action within Elementor Pro is used that does not have the proper privilege control in place.

So, it’s strongly recommended that users must update their Elementor Pro plugin to version 3.11.7, released on March 22, 2023, in conjunction with the WooCommerce plugin running on the site.