Orcus RAT Author Charged in Malware Scheme

In July 2016, KrebsOnSecurity published a story identifying a Toronto man as the author of the Orcus RAT, a software product that’s been marketed on underground forums and used in countless malware attacks since its creation in 2015. This week, Canadian authorities criminally charged him with...

Cybercrooks Target U.S. Veterans with Fake Hiring Website

Researchers are warning that a fake website – purporting to help U.S. military veterans search for jobs — actually links to installers that download malware onto victims’ systems. The website spoofs a legitimate website for U.S. military veterans offered by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce...

Introducing Slackor, a Remote Access Tool Using Slack as a C2 Channel

As a penetration tester at Coalfire Labs, I frequently use exploitation frameworks such as Metasploit or PowerShell Empire to perform post-exploitation actions on compromised endpoints. While anti-virus AV bypass and detection avoidance is often trivial in all but the most mature environments,...

RatVermin Spyware Targets Ukraine Gov Agencies

Researchers have uncovered an ongoing spear-phishing campaign, targeting the Ukraine government and military with emails aiming to distribute the RatVermin malware, which carries out various info-gathering activities. Researchers said that an infrastructure analysis of the attack indicates that t...

FBI Mapping 'Joanap Malware' Victims to Disrupt the North Korean Botnet

The United States Department of Justice DoJ announced Wednesday its effort to "map and further disrupt" a botnet tied to North Korea that has infected numerous Microsoft Windows computers across the globe over the last decade. Dubbed Joanap , the botnet is believed to be part of "Hidden Cobra"—an...

Threat Roundup for August 24-31

Today, as we do every week, Talos is giving you a glimpse into the most prevalent threats we’ve observed this week — covering the dates between Aug. 24 and 31. As with previous roundups, this post isn’t meant to be an in-depth analysis. Instead, we will summarize the threats we’ve observed by...

‘LuminosityLink RAT’ Author Pleads Guilty

A 21-year-old Kentucky man has pleaded guilty to authoring and distributing a popular hacking tool called "LuminosityLink," a malware strain that security experts say was used by thousands of customers to gain unauthorized access to tens of thousands of computers across 78 countries worldwide. Th...

GravityRAT - The Two-Year Evolution Of An APT Targeting India

This blog post is authored by Warren Mercer and Paul Rascagneres. Update: 4/30 Since the publication of the blog post, one of the anti-VM capability was commented a lot on Twitter: the detection of Virtual Machines by checking the temperature of the system. We decided to add more details and...

Fake Software Update Abuses NetSupport Remote Access Tool

Over the last few months, FireEye has tracked an in-the-wild campaign that leverages compromised sites to spread fake updates. In some cases, the payload was the NetSupport Manager remote access tool RAT. NetSupport Manager is a commercially available RAT that can be used legitimately by system...

The state of Mac malware

Mac users are often told that they don't need antivirus software, because there are no Mac viruses. However, this is not true at all, as Macs actually are affected by malware, and have been for most of their existence. Even the first well-known virus—Elk Cloner—affected Apple computers rather tha...

CALDERA - Automated Adversary Emulation System

CALDERA is an automated adversary emulation system that performs post-compromise adversarial behavior within enterprise networks. It generates plans during operation using a planning system and a pre-configured adversary model based on the Adversarial Tactics, Techniques & Common Knowledge ATT&CK...

Threat Round Up for Oct 6 - Oct 13

Today, Talos is publishing a glimpse into the most prevalent threats we've observed between October 6 and October 13. As with previous round-ups, this post isn't meant to be an in-depth analysis. Instead, this post will summarize the threats we've observed by highlighting key behavior...

Creator of NanoCore RAT Pleads Guilty to Aiding CyberCriminals

A programmer who was arrested in March this year—not because he hacked someone, but because he created and distributed a remote access software that helped cyber criminals—has finally pleaded guilty. Taylor Huddleston, 26, of Hot Springs, Arkansas, pleaded guilty on Tuesday to federal charges of...

WikiLeaks Reveals CIA Teams Up With Tech to Collect Ideas For Malware Development

As part of its ongoing Vault 7 leaks, the whistleblower organisation WikiLeaks today revealed about a CIA contractor responsible for analysing advanced malware and hacking techniques being used in the wild by cyber criminals. According to the documents leaked by WikiLeaks, Raytheon Blackbird...

Malicious Pokémon Go Features Backdoor, RAT

Researchers are warning would-be Pokémon Trainers that a malicious, backdoored version of the massively popular game Pokémon Go could be making the rounds soon. An APK Android application package file of the game has been rigged with a remote access tool RAT called Droidjack that if installed,...

Creator of Blackshades Malware Jailed 4 Years in New York

A Swedish man who was the mastermind behind the $40 BlackShades Remote Access Tool RAT that infected over half a million systems around the world was sentenced to almost five years in a U.S. prison on Tuesday. Alex Yücel, 25, owned and operated an organization called "BlackShades" that sold a...

Researchers: PlugX More Prominent Than Ever

Existing in some form since 2008, the popular remote access tool PlugX has as notorious a history as any malware, but according to researchers the tool saw a spike of popularity in 2014 and is the go-to malware for many adversary groups. Many attacks, especially those occurring during the latter...

SandroRAT — Android Malware that Disguises itself as "Kaspersky Mobile Security" App

Researchers have warned users of Android devices to avoid app downloads from particularly unauthorized sources, since a new and sophisticated piece of malware is targeting Android users through phishing emails. The malware, dubbed SandroRAT, is currently being used by cybercriminals to target...

Cross Platform Trojan builder distributed on underground forums

A Cross platform back door 'Frutas' remote access tool RAT is available for download on many forums from January 2013. This Trojan builder is completely written in Java. Recently, Symantec experts analyse that Frutas RAT allows attackers to create a connect-back client JAR file to run on a...

Cross Platform Trojan builder distributed on underground forums

A Cross platform back door 'Frutas' remote access tool RAT is available for download on many forums from January 2013. This Trojan builder is completely written in Java. Recently, Symantec experts analyse that Frutas RAT allows attackers to create a connect-back client JAR file to run on a...