Threat Advisory: Opportunistic cyber criminals take advantage of Ukraine invasion

By Edmund Brumaghin, with contributions from Jonathan Byrne, Perceo Lemos and Vasileios Koutsoumpogeras. Executive Summary Since the beginning of the war in Ukraine, we have observed threat actors using email lures with themes related to the conflict, including humanitarian assistance and...

New Wave of Cyber Attacks Target Palestine with Political Bait and Malware

Cybersecurity researchers have turned the spotlight on a new wave of offensive cyberattacks targeting Palestinian activists and entities starting around October 2021 using politically-themed phishing emails and decoy documents. The intrusions are part of what Cisco Talos calls a longstanding...

North Korean Hackers Return with Stealthier Variant of KONNI RAT Malware

A cyberespionage group with ties to North Korea has resurfaced with a stealthier variant of its remote access trojan called Konni to attack political institutions located in Russia and South Korea. "The authors are constantly making code improvements," Malwarebytes researcher Roberto Santos said...

North Korean Hackers Start New Year with Attacks on Russian Foreign Ministry

A North Korean cyberespionage group named Konni has been linked to a series of targeted attacks aimed at the Russian Federation's Ministry of Foreign Affairs MID with New Year lures to compromise Windows systems with malware. "This activity cluster demonstrates the patient and persistent nature o...

Dridex affiliate dresses up as Scrooge

Threat actors are hoping to catch a few more victims before they leave work for the Christmas holidays. The recent malicious spam campaigns malspam we and others have observed appear to have been created by someone who wants to play Scrooge and add onto peoples already heightened state of anxiety...

SideCopy APT: Connecting lures to victims, payloads to infrastructure

This blog post was authored by Hossein Jazi and the Threat Intelligence Team. Last week, Facebook announced that back in August it had taken action against a Pakistani APT group known as SideCopy. Facebook describes how the threat actors used romantic lures to compromise targets in Afghanistan. I...

TangleBot Malware Reaches Deep into Android Device Functions

An Android malware called TangleBot has weaved its way onto the cyber-scene: One that researchers said can perform a bouquet of malicious actions, including stealing personal info and controlling apps and device functions. According to Cloudmark researchers, the newly discovered mobile malware is...

Porn Problem: Adult Ads Persist on US Gov’t, Military Sites

U.S. military and government website subdomains have a sticky problem: They’re “quite vulnerable” to blackhat SEO tactics that result in persistent redirects to spammy Viagra ads and porn videos. An example is one that showed up on a dot.mil subdomain on the Minnesota National Guard site you can...

BEC Scammers Seek Native English Speakers on Underground

Looking for work? Speak fluent English? Capable of convincingly portraying a professional – as in, somebody a highly ranked corporate leader would talk to? If you lack scruples and disregard those pesky things called “laws,” it could be your lucky day: Cybercrooks are putting up help-wanted ads,...

New variant of Konni malware used in campaign targetting Russia

This blog post was authored by Hossein Jazi In late July 2021, we identified an ongoing spear phishing campaign pushing Konni Rat to target Russia. Konni was first observed in the wild in 2014 and has been potentially linked to the North Korean APT group named APT37. We discovered two documents...

BazaCall: Phony call centers lead to exfiltration and ransomware

Our continued investigation into BazaCall campaigns, those that use fraudulent call centers that trick unsuspecting users into downloading the BazaLoader malware, shows that this threat is more dangerous than what’s been discussed publicly in other security blogs and covered by the media. Apart...

BazaCall: Phony call centers lead to exfiltration and ransomware

Our continued investigation into BazaCall campaigns, those that use fraudulent call centers that trick unsuspecting users into downloading the BazaLoader malware, shows that this threat is more dangerous than what’s been discussed publicly in other security blogs and covered by the media. Apart...

BEC Losses Top $1.8B as Tactics Evolve

Business email compromise BEC attacks ramped up significantly in 2020, with more than $1.8 billion stolen from organizations with these types of attacks last year alone — and things are getting worse. BEC attacks are carried out by cybercriminals either impersonating someone inside an organizatio...

Lewd Phishing Lures Aimed at Business Explode

Attackers have amped up their use of X-rated phishing lures in business email compromise BEC attacks. A new report found a stunning 974-percent spike in social-engineering scams involving suggestive materials, usually aimed at male-sounding names within a company. The Threat Intelligence team wit...

Pakistan-Linked Hackers Added New Windows Malware to Its Arsenal

Cybercriminals with suspected ties to Pakistan continue to rely on social engineering as a crucial component of its operations as part of an evolving espionage campaign against Indian targets, according to new research. The attacks have been linked to a group called Transparent Tribe, also known ...

Phishing Attacks Spawn Three New Malware Strains

Two waves of global financial phishing attacks that swamped at least 50 organizations in December have delivered three new malware families, according to a report from FireEye’s Mandiant cybersecurity team. On Tuesday, the team said that they’ve dubbed the hitherto-unseen malware strains...

Phishers Delivering Increasingly Convincing Lures

Innovative twists on banking scams and corporate-account hunters wielding increasingly clever lures, including those with COVID-19 vaccine promises, are likely to dominate the spam and phishing landscape throughout Q2 2021, according to researchers. And although no new wild trends have emerged,...

The UNC2529 Triple Double: A Trifecta Phishing Campaign

In December 2020, Mandiant observed a widespread, global phishing campaign targeting numerous organizations across an array of industries. Mandiant tracks this threat actor as UNC2529. Based on the considerable infrastructure employed, tailored phishing lures and the professionally coded...

Aurora campaign: Attacking Azerbaijan using multiple RATs

This post was authored by Hossein Jazi As tensions between Azerbaijan and Armenia continue, we are still seeing a number of cyber attacks taking advantage of this situation. On March 5th 2021, we reported an actor that used steganography to drop a new .Net Remote Administration Trojan. Since that...

Hackers Targeting professionals With 'more_eggs' Malware via LinkedIn Job Offers

A new spear-phishing campaign is targeting professionals on LinkedIn with weaponized job offers in an attempt to infect targets with a sophisticated backdoor trojan called "moreeggs." To increase the odds of success, the phishing lures take advantage of malicious ZIP archive files that have the...