From Phishing to Malware: AI Becomes Russia's New Cyber Weapon in War on Ukraine

Russian hackers' adoption of artificial intelligence AI in cyber attacks against Ukraine has reached a new level in the first half of 2025 H1 2025, the country's State Service for Special Communications and Information Protection SSSCIP said. "Hackers now employ it not only to generate phishing...

Rare Werewolf APT Uses Legitimate Software in Attacks on Hundreds of Russian Enterprises

The threat actor known as Rare Werewolf formerly Rare Wolf has been linked to a series of cyber attacks targeting Russia and the Commonwealth of Independent States CIS countries. "A distinctive feature of this threat is that the attackers favor using legitimate third-party software over developin...

MintsLoader Drops GhostWeaver via Phishing, ClickFix — Uses DGA, TLS for Stealth Attacks

The malware loader known as MintsLoader has been used to deliver a PowerShell-based remote access trojan called GhostWeaver. "MintsLoader operates through a multi-stage infection chain involving obfuscated JavaScript and PowerShell scripts," Recorded Future's Insikt Group said in a report shared...

Updated MATA attacks industrial companies in Eastern Europe

In early September 2022, we discovered several new malware samples belonging to the MATA cluster. As we were collecting and analyzing the relevant telemetry data, we realized the campaign had been launched in mid-August 2022 and targeted over a dozen corporations in Eastern Europe from the oil an...

WildPressure targets the macOS platform

New findings Our previous story regarding WildPressure was dedicated to their campaign against industrial-related targets in the Middle East. By keeping track of their malware in spring 2021, we were able to find a newer version. It contains the C++ Milum Trojan, a corresponding VBScript variant...

WildPressure targets industrial-related entities in the Middle East

In August 2019, Kaspersky discovered a malicious campaign distributing a fully fledged C++ Trojan that we call Milum. All the victims we registered were organizations from the Middle East. At least some of them are related to industrial sector. Our Kaspersky Threat Attribution Engine KTAE doesn't...

Ransomware Against the Machine: How Adversaries are Learning to Disrupt Industrial Production by Targeting IT and OT

Since at least 2017, there has been a significant increase in public disclosures of ransomware incidents impacting industrial production and critical infrastructure organizations. Well-known ransomware families like WannaCry, LockerGoga, MegaCortex, Ryuk, Maze, and now SNAKEHOSE a.k.a. Snake /...

ZeroCleare: New Iranian Data Wiper Malware Targeting Energy Sector

Cybersecurity researchers have uncovered a new, previously undiscovered destructive data-wiping malware that is being used by state-sponsored hackers in the wild to target energy and industrial organizations in the Middle East. Dubbed ZeroCleare , the data wiper malware has been linked to not one...

Malware targeting industrial plants: a threat to physical security

We live in a world where more and more manufacturing processes are controlled by computers that send instructions to robots. This might sound like a safe and efficient way of work, as it rules out human error, but what happens when a threat actor decides to target production servers? Consider the...

How Radio Frequency Technology is Putting the Industrial Sector at Risk

Each industry has its own unique security risks. The banking and health care sectors, for example, deal with some considerably sensitive financial and client data, and therefore must put robust protections in place to ensure its safety. The industrial sector, however, is a bit different. For many...

Protecting Critical Infrastructure: Input Data

Kaspersky Lab is always working to develop new technologies for protecting critical computer systems from cybercriminals. In July, I had the opportunity to represent Kaspersky at a symposium sponsored by the National Institute of Standards and Technology NIST, focused on the national Cybersecurit...