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...

Mahalo FIN7: Responding to the Criminal Operators’ New Tools and Techniques

During several recent incident response engagements, FireEye Mandiant investigators uncovered new tools in FIN7’s malware arsenal and kept pace as the global criminal operators attempted new evasion techniques. In this blog, we reveal two of FIN7’s new tools that we have called BOOSTWRITE and...

IDA, I Think It’s Time You And I Had a Talk: Controlling IDA Pro With Voice Control Software

Introduction This blog post is the next episode in the FireEye Labs Advanced Reverse Engineering FLARE team Script Series. Today, we are sharing something quite unusual. It is not a tool or a virtual machine distribution, nor is it a plugin or script for a popular reverse engineering tool or...

Head Fake: Tackling Disruptive Ransomware Attacks

Within the past several months, FireEye has observed financially-motivated threat actors employ tactics that focus on disrupting business processes by deploying ransomware in mass throughout a victim’s environment. Understanding that normal business processes are critical to organizational succes...

The FireEye OT-CSIO: An Ontology to Understand, Cross-Compare, and Assess Operational Technology Cyber Security Incidents

The FireEye Operational Technology Cyber Security Incident Ontology OT-CSIO While the number of threats to operational technology OT have significantly increased since the discovery of Stuxnet – driven by factors such as the growing convergence with information technology IT networks and the...

Cybercriminals Adding Sophistication to BEC Threats

Cybercriminals are boosting their game and employing new tactics to move up the chain of command with more sophisticated business email compromise BEC threats that pose a greater threat to organizations, according to a new report. Advanced BEC attacks–including impersonation attacks and CEO...

Open Sourcing StringSifter

Malware analysts routinely use the Strings program during static analysis in order to inspect a binary's printable characters. However, identifying relevant strings by hand is time consuming and prone to human error. Larger binaries produce upwards of thousands of strings that can quickly evoke...

Ransomware Protection Strategies

The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency CISA has observed an increase in ransomware attacks across the Nation. Helping organizations protect themselves from ransomware is a chief priority for CISA. Organizations are encouraged to review the following resources to help prevent,...