Driver of destruction: How a legitimate driver is being used to take down AV processes

Introduction In a recent incident response case in Brazil, we spotted intriguing new antivirus AV killer software that has been circulating in the wild since at least October 2024. This malicious artifact abuses the ThrottleStop.sys driver, delivered together with the malware, to terminate numero...

Lazarus Group Exploits Zero-Day Vulnerability to Hack South Korean Financial Entity

The North Korea-linked Lazarus Group has been observed weaponizing flaws in an undisclosed software to breach a financial business entity in South Korea twice within a span of a year. While the first attack in May 2022 entailed the use of a vulnerable version of a certificate software that's wide...

Driver-Based Attacks: Past and Present

"People that write Ring 0 code and write it badly are a danger to society." - Mickey Shkatov There is no security boundary between an administrator and the Windows kernel, according to the Microsoft Security Servicing Criteria for Windows. In our analysis of CVE-2021-21551, a write-what-where...