Details of the Cloud Hopper Attacks

Reuters has a long article on the Chinese government APT attack called Cloud Hopper. It was much bigger than originally reported. The hacking campaign, known as "Cloud Hopper," was the subject of a U.S. indictment in December that accused two Chinese nationals of identity theft and fraud...

Cell Networks Hacked by (Probable) Nation-State Attackers

A sophisticated attacker has successfuly infiltrated cell providers to collect information on specific users: The hackers have systematically broken in to more than 10 cell networks around the world to date over the past seven years to obtain massive amounts of call records -- including times and...

A week in security (June 10 – 16)

Last week on Malwarebytes Labs, we revealed to readers the mindset of security pros as to why they lack confidence in their ability to prevent their organizations getting breached. We also reported on Maine Governor Janet Mills implementing the state’s own privacy protections, how Apple can bette...

Platinum is back

In June 2018, we came across an unusual set of samples spreading throughout South and Southeast Asian countries targeting diplomatic, government and military entities. The campaign, which may have started as far back as 2012, featured a multi-stage approach and was dubbed EasternRoppels. The acto...

Zebrocy: A Russian APT Specializing in Victim Profiling, Access

Zebrocy, the Russian speaking threat group that shares similarities and overlaps with both the Sofacy and BlackEnergy APTs, is once again roaming the wide plain of government, foreign-affairs and military targets. Researchers have spotted the group using a new first-stage malware dropper in recen...

Zebrocy’s Multilanguage Malware Salad

Zebrocy is Russian speaking APT that presents a strange set of stripes. To keep things simple, there are three things to know about Zebrocy Zebrocy is an active sub-group of victim profiling and access specialists Zebrocy maintains a lineage back through 2013, sharing malware artefacts and...

Hackers Infect 50,000 MS-SQL and PHPMyAdmin Servers with Rootkit Malware

Cyber Security researchers at Guardicore Labs today published a detailed report on a widespread cryptojacking campaign attacking Windows MS-SQL and PHPMyAdmin servers worldwide. Dubbed Nansh0u, the malicious campaign is reportedly being carried out by an APT-style Chinese hacking group who has...

50k Servers Infected with Cryptomining Malware in Nansh0u Campaign

Up to 50,000 servers were infected over the past four months as part of a high-profile cryptojacking campaign, believed to orchestrated by Chinese-language adversaries. Researchers with Guardicore Labs, who disclosed the campaign Wednesday, said that the Nansh0u​ campaign named due to a text file...

ThreatList: Top 8 Threat Actors Targeting Canada in 2019

Banking and financial services in Canada are being targeted in geo-specific attacks looking to spread varying forms of malware, according to researchers tracking thousands of malicious email campaigns between January 2019 to May 2019. In particular, campaigns are typically launched by...

CVE-2019-0708 vulnerability impact analysis and the use of a variety of rules to detect method-vulnerability warning-the black bar safety net

Recently, with the CVE-2019-0708 vulnerability of the publication, most of the security community will be the loopholes as the highest priority to addressing the vulnerability. Mentioned bug fixes, it is difficult not to associate this front WannaCry and NotPetya disastrous consequences. And...

IT threat evolution Q1 2019

Targeted attacks and malware campaigns Go Zebrocy Zebrocy was first observed being used as a Sofacy backdoor in 2015. However, the collection of cases where this tool has been used mean that we consider it a subset of activity in its own right. On the basis of this threat actor's past behaviour, ...

ScarCruft APT Adds Bluetooth Harvester to its Malware Bag of Tricks

The ScarCruft Korean-speaking APT is changing up its espionage tactics to include an unusual piece of malware devoted to harvesting Bluetooth information – while also showing some overlap with the DarkHotel APT. An analysis of ScarCruft’s binary infection procedure by Kaspersky Lab shows that in ...

ScarCruft continues to evolve, introduces Bluetooth harvester

Executive summary After publishing our initial series of blogposts back in 2016, we have continued to track the ScarCruft threat actor. ScarCruft is a Korean-speaking and allegedly state-sponsored threat actor that usually targets organizations and companies with links to the Korean peninsula. Th...

Researchers in the Dark on Powerful LightNeuron Malware for Years

LightNeuron, a backdoor specifically designed to target Microsoft Exchange mail servers, has flown under the radar since at least 2014, despite being the malware linchpin at the center of several targeted campaigns. A fresh analysis of the recently uncovered code shows that it’s the first publicl...

Flerken - Obfuscated Command Detection Tool

Command line obfuscation has been proved to be a non-negligible factor in fileless malware or malicious actors that are "living off the land". To bypass signature-based detection, dedicated obfuscation techniques are shown to be used by red-team penetrations and even APT activities. Meanwhile,...

APT trends report Q1 2019

For just under two years, the Global Research and Analysis Team GReAT at Kaspersky Lab has been publishing quarterly summaries of advanced persistent threat APT activity. The summaries are based on our threat intelligence research and provide a representative snapshot of what we have published an...

APT Package Manager Persistence Exploit

This Metasploit module creates a pre-invoke hook for APT in apt.conf.d. The hook name syntax is numeric followed by text. This module requires Metasploit: https://metasploit.com/download Current source: https://github.com/rapid7/metasploit-framework class MetasploitModule 'APT Package Manager...

MuddyWater APT Hones an Arsenal of Custom Tools

An array of customized attack tools are helping the MuddyWater advanced persistent threat APT group to successfully exfiltrate data from its governmental and telco targets in the Middle East; an analysis of this toolset reveals a moderately sophisticated threat actor at work – with the potential ...

I know what you did last summer, MuddyWater blending in the crowd

Introduction MuddyWater is an APT with a focus on governmental and telco targets in the Middle East Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Jordan, Turkey and Lebanon and also a few other countries in nearby regions Azerbaijan, Pakistan and Afghanistan. MuddyWater first surfaced in 2017 and has been active...

APT Package Manager Persistence

This module requires Metasploit: https://metasploit.com/download Current source: https://github.com/rapid7/metasploit-framework class MetasploitModule 'APT Package Manager Persistence', 'Description' = %q This module will run a payload when the package manager is used. No handler is ran...