M-Trends 2017: A View From the Front Lines

Every year Mandiant responds to a large number of cyber attacks, and 2016 was no exception. For our M-Trends 2017 report, we took a look at the incidents we investigated last year and provided a global and regional the Americas, APAC and EMEA analysis focused on attack trends, and defensive and...

AntiVirus Evasion Reconstructed – Veil 3.0

The Veil Framework is a collection of tools designed for use during offensive security testing. When the time calls for it, Mandiant’s Red Team will use the Veil-Framework to help achieve their objective. The most commonly used tool is Veil-Evasion, which can turn an arbitrary script or piece of...

Connected Cars: The Open Road for Hackers

As vehicles become both increasingly complex and better connected to the Internet, their newfound versatility may be manipulated for malicious purposes. Three of the most concerning potential threats looking ahead to the next few years are those posed by manipulating vehicle operation, ransomware...

Angler Exploit Kit Evading EMET

We recently encountered some exploits from Angler Exploit Kit EK that are completely evading Microsoft’s Enhanced Mitigation Experience Toolkit EMET. This is something we are seeing for the first time in the wild, and we only observed it affecting systems running Windows 7. Angler EK uses complex...

A Cyber Revolution: Advanced Attacks Increasing in EMEA Reflect Political Tension

Financial, geopolitical and economical changes made 2015 a very busy year for the Europe, Middle East and Africa EMEA region, particularly in the cyber realm. FireEye has been monitoring these shifting cyber trends and has identified considerable evolutions to the EMEA threat landscape when...

Rollout or Not: the Benefits and Risks of iOS Remote Hot Patching

Previously On iOS Remote Hot Patching Apple’s detailed app review process has resulted in greater security for iOS apps made available through the App Store. However, this review process can be lengthy, which negatively impacts developers who need to quickly patch a buggy or insecure app. As a...

iBackDoor: High-Risk Code Hits iOS Apps

Introduction FireEye mobile researchers recently discovered potentially “backdoored” versions of an ad library embedded in thousands of iOS apps originally published in the Apple App Store. The affected versions of this library embedded functionality in iOS apps that used the library to display...

FakeNet Genie: Improving Dynamic Malware Analysis with Cheat Codes for FakeNet-NG

As developers of the network simulation tool FakeNet-NG, reverse engineers on the FireEye FLARE team, and malware analysis instructors, we get to see how different analysts use FakeNet-NG and the challenges they face. We have learned that FakeNet-NG provides many useful features and solutions of...

SAIGON, the Mysterious Ursnif Fork

Ursnif aka Gozi/Gozi-ISFB is one of the oldest banking malware families still in active distribution. While the first major version of Ursnif was identified in 2006, several subsequent versions have been released in large part due source code leaks. FireEye reported on a previously unidentified...

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...

Finding Evil in Windows 10 Compressed Memory, Part One: Volatility and Rekall Tools

Paging all digital forensicators, incident responders, and memory manager enthusiasts! Have you ever found yourself at a client site working around the clock to extract evil from a Windows 10 image? Have you hit the wall at step zero, running into difficulties viewing a process tree, or enumerati...

HawkEye Credential Theft Malware Distributed in Recent Phishing Campaign

A wide variety of threat actors began distributing HawkEye malware through high-volume email campaigns after it became available for purchase via a public-facing website. The actors behind the phishing campaigns typically used email themes based on current events and media reports that would piqu...

Remote Symbol Resolution

Introduction The following blog discusses a couple of common techniques that malware uses to obscure its access to the Windows API. In both forms examined, analysts must calculate the API start address and resolve the symbol from the runtime process in order to determine functionality. After...

Credit Card Data and Other Information Targeted in Netflix Phishing Campaign

Introduction Through FireEye’s Email Threat Prevention ETP solution, FireEye Labs discovered a phishing campaign in the wild targeting the credit card data and other personal information of Netflix users primarily based in the United States. This campaign is interesting because of the evasion...

‘One-Stop Shop’ – Phishing Domain Targets Information from Customers of Several Indian Banks

FireEye Labs recently discovered a malicious phishing domain designed to steal a variety of information – including credentials and mobile numbers – from customers of several banks in India. Currently, we have not observed this domain being used in any campaigns. The phishing websites appear to b...

Analyzing the Malware Analysts – Inside FireEye’s FLARE Team

At the Black Hat USA 2016 conference in Las Vegas last week, I was fortunate to sit down with Michael Sikorski, Director, FireEye Labs Advanced Reverse Engineering FLARE Team. During our conversation we discussed the origin of the FLARE team, what it takes to analyze malware, Michael’s book...

Red Team Tool Roundup

In many cases Red Team tools are not written because someone feels like writing a tool, or wakes up one morning thinking, “I want to write a tool today”. Red Teamers generally identify tedious tasks in their methodology and then create tools that automate these tasks for current and future...

Pwned by Vpon

Vpon is one of many mobile ad SDKs marketed towards mainland Chinese and Taiwanese developers and app users. Recently, FireEye mobile security researchers identified a branch of Vpon ad SDK on iOS containing code that allows a malicious actor be it the app developer or the SDK creator to remotely...

Targeted Attacks against Banks in the Middle East

UPDATE Dec. 8, 2017: We now attribute this campaign to APT34, a suspected Iranian cyber espionage threat group that we believe has been active since at least 2014. Learn more about APT34 and their late 2017 targeting of a government organization in the Middle East. Introduction In the first week ...

Cerber Ransomware Partners with the Dridex Spam Distributor

Cerber ransomware incorporates the unusual feature of “speaking” its ransom message after successfully infecting a user machine and encrypting files. Cerber was first seen in the wild at the end of February 2016 and was observed being delivered mostly via exploit kits EK, notably using Magnitude...

The Dangers of Downloads: Securing Mobile Devices in 2016

In 2015, mobile malware attacks were on the rise; from 2014 to 2015 we saw an increase of 61% in the number of these attacks. Malware has a clear progression path; it starts out targeting unsuspecting users who are likely to open unknown attachments or install unknown applications. The primary...

ModPOS: Highly-Sophisticated, Stealthy Malware Targeting US POS Systems with High Likelihood of Broader Campaigns

Today, iSIGHT Partners is sharing details about a highly sophisticated criminal malware framework that has been used to target point-of-sale POS systems at US-based retailers. We believe this very hard to detect malware is likely being used in broader campaigns and are disclosing details to help...

iBackDoor: High-Risk Code Hits iOS Apps

Introduction FireEye mobile researchers recently discovered potentially “backdoored” versions of an ad library embedded in thousands of iOS apps originally published in the Apple App Store. The affected versions of this library embedded functionality in iOS apps that used the library to display...

Excelerating Analysis, Part 2 — X[LOOKUP] Gon’ Pivot To Ya

In December 2019, we published a blog post on augmenting analysis using Microsoft Excel for various data sets for incident response investigations. As we described, investigations often include custom or proprietary log formats and miscellaneous, non-traditional forensic artifacts. There are, of...

They Come in the Night: Ransomware Deployment Trends

Ransomware is a remote, digital shakedown. It is disruptive and expensive, and it affects all kinds of organizations, from cutting edge space technology firms, to the wool industry, to industrial environments. Infections have forced hospitals to turn away patients and law enforcement to drop case...

The Missing LNK — Correlating User Search LNK files

Forensic investigators use LNK shortcut files to recover metadata about recently accessed files, including files deleted after the time of access. In a recent investigation, FireEye Mandiant encountered LNK files that indicated an attacker accessed files included in Windows Explorer search result...

STOMP 2 DIS: Brilliance in the (Visual) Basics

Throughout January 2020, FireEye has continued to observe multiple targeted phishing campaigns designed to download and deploy a backdoor we track as MINEBRIDGE. The campaigns primarily targeted financial services organizations in the United States, though targeting is likely more widespread than...

CARBANAK Week Part Four: The CARBANAK Desktop Video Player

Part One, Part Two and Part Three of CARBANAK Week are behind us. In this final blog post, we dive into one of the more interesting tools that is part of the CARBANAK toolset. The CARBANAK authors wrote their own video player and we happened to come across an interesting video capture from CARBAN...

Announcing the Fourth Annual Flare-On Challenge

The fourth annual Flare-On Challenge – the FireEye Labs Advanced Reverse Engineering FLARE team’s yearly reverse engineering contest – is scheduled to kick off on Sept. 1, 2017, at 8pm ET. This is a CTF-style challenge for all active and aspiring reverse engineers, malware analysts, and security...

Writing a libemu/Unicorn Compatability Layer

In this post we are going to take a quick look at what it takes to write a libemu compatibility layer for the Unicorn engine. In the course of this work, we will also import the libemu Win32 environment to run under Unicorn. For a bit of background, libemu is a lightweight x86 emulator written in...

Still Getting Served: A Look at Recent Malvertising Campaigns Involving Exploit Kits

Malvertising occurs when an online advertising network knowingly or unknowingly serves up malicious advertisements on a website. Malvertisements are a type of “drive-by” threat that tend to result in users being infected with malware for simply visiting a website. The victims of this threat are...

Spear Phishing Techniques Used in Attacks Targeting the Mongolian Government

Introduction FireEye recently observed a sophisticated campaign targeting individuals within the Mongolian government. Targeted individuals that enabled macros in a malicious Microsoft Word document may have been infected with Poison Ivy, a popular remote access tool RAT that has been used for...

Rotten Apples: Resurgence

In June 2016, we published a blog about a phishing campaign targeting the Apple IDs and passwords of Chinese Apple users that emerged in the first quarter of 2016 referred to as the “Zycode” phishing campaign. At FireEye Labs we have an automated system designed to proactively detect newly...

Operations of a Brazilian Payment Card Fraud Group

Introduction Brazil has been designated a major hub for financially motivated eCrime threat activity. Brazilian threat actors are targeting domestic and foreign entities and individuals, with frequent targeting of U.S. assets. The country routinely places in "Top Five" lists of various global cyb...

Automatically Extracting Obfuscated Strings from Malware using the FireEye Labs Obfuscated String Solver (FLOSS)

Introduction and Motivation Have you ever run strings.exe on a malware executable and its output provided you with IP addresses, file names, registry keys, and other indicators of compromise IOCs? Great! No need to run further analysis or hire expensive experts to determine if a file is malicious...

Angler Exploit Kit Evading EMET

We recently encountered some exploits from Angler Exploit Kit EK that are completely evading Microsoft’s Enhanced Mitigation Experience Toolkit EMET. This is something we are seeing for the first time in the wild, and we only observed it affecting systems running Windows 7. Angler EK uses complex...

IRONGATE ICS Malware: Nothing to See Here...Masking Malicious Activity on SCADA Systems

In the latter half of 2015, the FireEye Labs Advanced Reverse Engineering FLARE team identified several versions of an ICS-focused malware crafted to manipulate a specific industrial process running within a simulated Siemens control system environment. We named this family of malware IRONGATE...

A Cyber Revolution: Advanced Attacks Increasing in EMEA Reflect Political Tension

Financial, geopolitical and economical changes made 2015 a very busy year for the Europe, Middle East and Africa EMEA region, particularly in the cyber realm. FireEye has been monitoring these shifting cyber trends and has identified considerable evolutions to the EMEA threat landscape when...

SlemBunk Part II: Prolonged Attack Chain and Better-Organized Campaign

Introduction Our follow-up investigation of a nasty Android banking malware we identified at the tail end of last year has not only revealed that the trojan is more persistent than we initially realized – thus making for a much more dangerous threat – but that it is also being used as part of an...

SlemBunk: An Evolving Android Trojan Family Targeting Users of Worldwide Banking Apps

FireEye mobile researchers recently identified a series of Android trojan apps that are designed to imitate the legitimate apps of 33 financial management institutions and service providers across the globe. We dub the family “SlemBunk,” and have seen it covering three major continents: North...

FLARE IDA Pro Script Series: Automating Function Argument Extraction

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Mergers and Acquisitions: When Two Companies and APT Groups Come Together

With Apple’s purchase of Beats, Pfizer’s failed bids for AstraZeneca, and financial experts pointing to a rally in the M&A market, the last month was a busy one for mergers and acquisitions. Of course, when we first see headlines of a high profile company’s plans for a merger or acquisition, we...

MIRcon 2013 – Day 1 Highlights

Happy Day 2 of MIRcon®! Yesterday, Mandiant's CEO Kevin Mandia kicked off MIRcon 2013 with a keynote on attacking the security gap, discussing the necessity of information-sharing and his experience witnessing the evolution of cybercrime. From there we moved on to thought-provoking discussions in...

A Hands-On Introduction to Mandiant's Approach to OT Red Teaming

Operational technology OT asset owners have historically considered red teaming of OT and industrial control system ICS networks to be too risky due to the potential for disruptions or adverse impact to production systems. While this mindset has remained largely unchanged for years, Mandiant's...

COOKIEJAR: Tracking Adversaries With FireEye Endpoint Security’s Logon Tracker Module

During a recent investigation at a telecommunications company led by Mandiant Managed Defense, our team was tasked with rapidly identifying systems that had been accessed by a threat actor using legitimate, but compromised domain credentials. This sometimes-challenging task was made simple becaus...

Announcing the Seventh Annual Flare-On Challenge

The Front Line Applied Research & Expertise FLARE team is honored to announce that the popular Flare-On challenge will return for a triumphant seventh year. Ongoing global events proved no match against our passion for creating challenging and fun puzzles to test and hone the skills of aspiring a...

It’s Your Money and They Want It Now — The Cycle of Adversary Pursuit

When we discover new intrusions, we ask ourselves questions that will help us understand the totality of the activity set. How common is this activity? Is there anything unique or special about this malware or campaign? What is new and what is old in terms of TTPs or infrastructure? Is this being...

M-Trends 2020: Insights From the Front Lines

Today we release M-Trends 2020, the 11th edition of our popular annual FireEye Mandiant report. This latest M-Trends contains all of the statistics, trends, case studies and hardening recommendations that readers have come to expect through the years—and more. One of the most exciting takeaways...

FIDL: FLARE’s IDA Decompiler Library

IDA Pro and the Hex Rays decompiler are a core part of any toolkit for reverse engineering and vulnerability research. In a previous blog post we discussed how the Hex-Rays API can be used to solve small, well-defined problems commonly seen as part of malware analysis. Having access to a...