Fake Stories in Real News Sites

Fireeye is reporting that a hacking group called Ghostwriter broke into the content management systems of Eastern European news sites to plant fake stories. From a Wired story: The propagandists have created and disseminated disinformation since at least March 2017, with a focus on undermining NA...

Critical Vulnerability in Citrix Application Delivery Controller, Gateway, and SD-WAN WANOP

Summary Note: As of January 24, 2020, Citrix has released all expected updates in response to CVE-2019-19781.1 On January 19, 2020, Citrix released firmware updates for Citrix Application Delivery Controller ADC and Citrix Gateway versions 11.1 and 12.0. On January 22, 2020, Citrix released...

Analyzing Dark Crystal RAT, a C# Backdoor

The FireEye Mandiant Threat Intelligence Team helps protect our customers by tracking cyber attackers and the malware they use. The FLARE Team helps augment our threat intelligence by reverse engineering malware samples. Recently, FLARE worked on a new C variant of Dark Crystal RAT DCRat that the...

A Dozen Nation-Backed APTs Tap COVID-19 to Cover Spy Attacks

Cybercriminals have seized on the novel coronavirus as a theme in their attacks, and it turns out that the most sophisticated players on that scene are no exception. According to Google’s Threat Analysis Group TAG, more than a dozen nation-state-backed APTs are using the COVID-19 pandemic as a...

Social Engineering Based on Stimulus Bill and COVID-19 Financial Compensation Schemes Expected to Grow in Coming Weeks

Given the community interest and media coverage surrounding the economic stimulus bill currently being considered by the United States House of Representatives, we anticipate attackers will increasingly leverage lures tailored to the new stimulus bill and related recovery efforts such as stimulus...

This Is Not a Test: APT41 Initiates Global Intrusion Campaign Using Multiple Exploits

Beginning this year, FireEye observed Chinese actor APT41 carry out one of the broadest campaigns by a Chinese cyber espionage actor we have observed in recent years. Between January 20 and March 11, FireEye observed APT41 attempt to exploit vulnerabilities in Citrix NetScaler/ADC, Cisco routers,...

CVE-2019-7244

An issue was discovered in kerneld.sys in AIDA64 before 5.99. The vulnerable driver exposes a wrmsr instruction via IOCTL 0x80112084 and does not properly filter the Model Specific Register MSR. Allowing arbitrary MSR writes can lead to Ring-0 code execution and escalation of privileges. Recent...

Managed Defense: The Analytical Mindset

When it comes to cyber security managed services or otherwise, you’re ultimately reliant on analyst expertise to keep your environment safe. Products and intelligence are necessary pieces of the security puzzle to generate detection signal and whittle down the alert chaff, but in the end, an...

U.S. Finance Sector Hit with Targeted Backdoor Campaign

The financial services sector in the U.S. found itself under a barrage of cyberattacks last month, all bent on delivering a powerful backdoor called Minebridge. The attack chain employed a known method called “VBA Stomping” to avoid detection. According to researchers at FireEye, the campaigns,...

Abusing DLL Misconfigurations — Using Threat Intelligence to Weaponize R&D

DLL Abuse Techniques Overview Dynamic-link library DLL side-loading occurs when Windows Side-by-Side WinSxS manifests are not explicit about the characteristics of DLLs being loaded by a program. In layman’s terms, DLL side-loading can allow an attacker to trick a program into loading a malicious...

Nice Try: 501 (Ransomware) Not Implemented

An Ever-Evolving Threat Since January 10, 2020, FireEye has tracked extensive global exploitation of CVE-2019-19781, which continues to impact Citrix ADC and Gateway instances that are unpatched or do not have mitigations applied. We previously reported on attackers’ swift attempts to exploit thi...

Citrix Accelerates Patch Rollout For Critical RCE Flaw

Citrix has quickened its rollout of patches for a critical vulnerability CVE-2019-19781 in the Citrix Application Delivery Controller ADC and Citrix Gateway products, on the heels of recent proof-of-concept exploits and skyrocketing exploitation attempts. Several versions of the products still...

Exploit for Path Traversal in Citrix Application_Delivery_Controller_Firmware

PoC exploit for CVE-2019-19781, a remote code execution vulnerab...

The FireEye Approach to Operational Technology Security

Today FireEye launches the Cyber Physical Threat Intelligence subscription, which provides cyber security professionals with unmatched context, data and actionable analysis on threats and risk to cyber physical systems. In light of this release, we thought it would be helpful to explain FireEye’s...

Breaking the Rules: A Tough Outlook for Home Page Attacks (CVE-2017-11774)

Attackers have a dirty little secret that is being used to conduct big intrusions. We’ll explain how they're "unpatching" an exploit and then provide new Outlook hardening guidance that is not available elsewhere. Specifically, this blog post covers field-tested automated registry processing for...

Attention is All They Need: Combatting Social Media Information Operations With Neural Language Models

Information operations have flourished on social media in part because they can be conducted cheaply, are relatively low risk, have immediate global reach, and can exploit the type of viral amplification incentivized by platforms. Using networks of coordinated accounts, social media-driven...

MESSAGETAP: Who’s Reading Your Text Messages?

FireEye Mandiant recently discovered a new malware family used by APT41 a Chinese APT group that is designed to monitor and save SMS traffic from specific phone numbers, IMSI numbers and keywords for subsequent theft. Named MESSAGETAP, the tool was deployed by APT41 in a telecommunications networ...

15 Years Later, Metasploit Still Manages to be a Menace

The popular penetration testing and hacking framework Metasploit may be getting long in the tooth, but it hasn’t lost its bite in the hands of bad actors. According to researchers, hackers are still using the tool and a highly effective technique called Shikata Ga Nai Japanese for “nothing can be...

Definitive Dossier of Devilish Debug Details – Part Deux: A Didactic Deep Dive into Data Driven Deductions

In Part One of this blog series, Steve Miller outlined what PDB paths are, how they appear in malware, how we use them to detect malicious files, and how we sometimes use them to make associations about groups and actors. As Steve continued his research into PDB paths, we became interested in...

LOWKEY: Hunting for the Missing Volume Serial ID

In August 2019, FireEye released the “Double Dragon” report on our newest graduated threat group: APT41. A China-nexus dual espionage and financially-focused group, APT41 targets industries such as gaming, healthcare, high-tech, higher education, telecommunications, and travel services. This blog...