Spam and phishing in 2019

Figures of the year The share of spam in mail traffic was 56.51%, which is 4.03 p.p. more than in 2018. The biggest source of spam this year was China 21.26%. 44% of spam e-mails were less than 2 KB in size. Malicious spam was detected most commonly with the Exploit.MSOffice.CVE-2017-11882 verdic...

MosaicRegressor: Lurking in the Shadows of UEFI

Part II. Technical details PDF UEFI or Unified Extensible Firmware Interface has become a prominent technology that is embedded within designated chips on modern day computer systems. Replacing the legacy BIOS, it is typically used to facilitate the machines boot sequence and load the operating...

Zero-day vulnerability in Desktop Window Manager (CVE-2021-28310) used in the wild

While analyzing the CVE-2021-1732 exploit originally discovered by the DBAPPSecurity Threat Intelligence Center and used by the BITTER APT group, we discovered another zero-day exploit we believe is linked to the same actor. We reported this new exploit to Microsoft in February and after...

Quick look at CVE-2021-1675 & CVE-2021-34527 (aka PrintNightmare)

Summary Last week Microsoft warned Windows users about vulnerabilities in the Windows Print Spooler service – CVE-2021-1675 and CVE-2021-34527 also known as PrintNightmare. Both vulnerabilities can be used by an attacker with a regular user account to take control of a vulnerable server or client...

IT threat evolution Q1 2019

Targeted attacks and malware campaigns Go Zebrocy Zebrocy was first observed being used as a Sofacy backdoor in 2015. However, the collection of cases where this tool has been used mean that we consider it a subset of activity in its own right. On the basis of this threat actor's past behaviour, ...

The King is dead. Long live the King!

In late April 2018, a new zero-day vulnerability for Internet Explorer IE was found using our sandbox; more than two years since the last in the wild example CVE-2016-0189. This particular vulnerability and subsequent exploit are interesting for many reasons. The following article will examine th...

APT trends report Q1 2022

For five years, the Global Research and Analysis Team GReAT at Kaspersky has been publishing quarterly summaries of advanced persistent threat APT activity. These summaries are based on our threat intelligence research; and they provide a representative snapshot of what we have published and...

IT threat evolution Q2 2018. Statistics

Q2 figures According to KSN: Kaspersky Lab solutions blocked 962,947,023 attacks launched from online resources located in 187 countries across the globe. 351,913,075 unique URLs were recognized as malicious by Web Anti-Virus components. Attempted infections by malware designed to steal money via...

New zero-day vulnerability CVE-2019-0859 in win32k.sys

In March 2019, our automatic Exploit Prevention EP systems detected an attempt to exploit a vulnerability in the Microsoft Windows operating system. Further analysis of this event led to us discovering a zero-day vulnerability in win32k.sys. It was the fifth consecutive exploited Local Privilege...

IT threat evolution Q1 2019. Statistics

These statistics are based on detection verdicts of Kaspersky Lab products received from users who consented to provide statistical data. Quarterly figures According to Kaspersky Security Network, Kaspersky Lab solutions blocked 843,096,461 attacks launched from online resources in 203 countries...

Spam and phishing in 2021

Figures of the year In 2021: 45.56% of e-mails were spam 24.77% of spam was sent from Russia with another 14.12% from Germany Our Mail Anti-Virus blocked 148 173 261 malicious attachments sent in e-mails The most common malware family found in attachments were Agensla Trojans Our Anti-Phishing...

Spam and phishing in Q3 2017

Quarterly highlights Blockchain and spam Cryptocurrencies have been a regular theme in the media for several years now. Financial analysts predict a great future for them, various governments are thinking about launching their own currencies, and graphics cards are swept off the shelves as soon a...

The zero-day exploits of Operation WizardOpium

Back in October 2019 we detected a classic watering-hole attack on a North Korea-related news site that exploited a chain of Google Chrome and Microsoft Windows zero-days. While we've already published blog posts briefly describing this operation available here and here, in this blog post we'd li...

IT threat evolution in Q2 2021. PC statistics

These statistics are based on detection verdicts of Kaspersky products received from users who consented to providing statistical data. Quarterly figures According to Kaspersky Security Network, in Q2 2021: Kaspersky solutions blocked 1,686,025,551 attacks from online resources across the globe...

Gaza Cybergang – updated activity in 2017:

1. Summary information The Gaza cybergang is an Arabic-language, politically-motivated cybercriminal group, operating since 2012 and actively targeting the MENA Middle East North Africa region. The Gaza cybergang's attacks have never slowed down and its typical targets include government...

Threats to users of adult websites in 2018

More graphs and statistics in full PDF version Introduction 2018 was a year that saw campaigns to decrease online pornographic content and traffic. For example, one of the most adult-content friendly platforms – Tumblr – announced it was banning erotic content even though almost a quarter of its...

CVE-2022-30190 (Follina) vulnerability in MSDT: description and counteraction

At the end of May, researchers from the naosec team reported a new zero-day vulnerability in Microsoft Support Diagnostic Tool MSDT that can be exploited using Microsoft Office documents. It allowed attackers to remotely execute code on Windows systems, while the victim could not even open the...

Zero-day exploit (CVE-2018-8453) used in targeted attacks

Yesterday, Microsoft published their security bulletin, which patches CVE-2018-8453, among others. It is a vulnerability in win32k.sys discovered by Kaspersky Lab in August. We reported this vulnerability to Microsoft on August 17, 2018. Microsoft confirmed the vulnerability and designated it...

APT trends report Q2 2021

For more than four years, the Global Research and Analysis Team GReAT at Kaspersky has been publishing quarterly summaries of advanced persistent threat APT activity. The summaries are based on our threat intelligence research and provide a representative snapshot of what we have published and...

APT review: what the world’s threat actors got up to in 2019

What were the most interesting developments in terms of APT activity during the year and what can we learn from them? This is not an easy question to answer, because researchers have only partial visibility and it´s impossible to fully understand the motivation for some attacks or the development...

GreyEnergy’s overlap with Zebrocy

In October 2018, ESET published a report describing a set of activity they called GreyEnergy, which is believed to be a successor to BlackEnergy group. BlackEnergy a.k.a. Sandworm is best known, among other things, for having been involved in attacks against Ukrainian energy facilities in 2015,...

IT threat evolution Q2 2020. PC statistics

IT threat evolution Q2 2020. Review IT threat evolution Q2 2020. Mobile statistics These statistics are based on detection verdicts of Kaspersky products received from users who consented to provide statistical data. Quarterly figures According to Kaspersky Security Network, in Q2: Kaspersky...

CVE-2021-44228 vulnerability in Apache Log4j library

Updated 2021-12-20 CVE-2021-44228 and CVE-2021-45046 summary A couple of weeks ago information security media reported the discovery of the critical vulnerability CVE-2021-44228 in the Apache Log4j library CVSS severity level 10 out of 10. The threat, also named Log4Shell or LogJam, is a Remote...

IT threat evolution Q3 2017. Statistics

Q3 figures According to KSN data, Kaspersky Lab solutions detected and repelled 277,646,376 malicious attacks from online resources located in 185 countries all over the world. 72,012,219 unique URLs were recognized as malicious by web antivirus components. Attempted infections by malware that ai...

IT threat evolution Q1 2020. Statistics

These statistics are based on detection verdicts for Kaspersky products received from users who consented to providing statistical data. Quarterly figures According to Kaspersky Security Network, Kaspersky solutions blocked 726,536,269 attacks launched from online resources in 203 countries acros...

New trends in the world of IoT threats

Cybercriminals' interest in IoT devices continues to grow: in H1 2018 we picked up three times as many malware samples attacking smart devices as in the whole of 2017. And in 2017 there were ten times more than in 2016. That doesn't bode well for the years ahead. We decided to study what attack...

APT trends report Q2 2020

For more than three years, the Global Research and Analysis Team GReAT at Kaspersky has been publishing quarterly summaries of advanced persistent threat APT activity. The summaries are based on our threat intelligence research and provide a representative snapshot of what we have published and...

Spam and phishing in Q2 2017

Spam: quarterly highlights Delivery service Trojans At the start of Q2 2017, we registered a wave of malicious mailings imitating notifications from well-known delivery services. Trojan downloaders were sent out in ZIP archives, and after being launched they downloaded other malware –...

APT Trends report Q2 2017

Introduction Since 2014, Kaspersky Lab's Global Research and Analysis Team GReAT has been providing threat intelligence reports to a wide-range of customers worldwide, leading to the delivery of a full and dedicated private reporting service. Prior to the new service offering, GReAT published...

IT threat evolution Q1 2021. Non-mobile statistics

These statistics are based on detection verdicts of Kaspersky products received from users who consented to provide statistical data. Quarterly figures According to Kaspersky Security Network, in Q1 2021: Kaspersky solutions blocked 2,023,556,082 attacks launched from online resources across the...

The BlueNoroff cryptocurrency hunt is still on

BlueNoroff is the name of an APT group coined by Kaspersky researchers while investigating the notorious attack on Bangladeshs Central Bank back in 2016. A mysterious group with links to Lazarus and an unusual financial motivation for an APT. The group seems to work more like a unit within a larg...

APT Trends report Q1 2018

In the second quarter of 2017, Kaspersky's Global Research and Analysis Team GReAT began publishing summaries of the quarter's private threat intelligence reports in an effort to make the public aware of the research we have been conducting. This report serves as the next installment, focusing on...

IT threat evolution Q2 2019

Targeted attacks and malware campaigns More about ShadowHammer In March, we published the results of our investigation into a sophisticated supply-chain attack involving the ASUS Live Update Utility, used to deliver BIOS, UEFI and software updates to ASUS laptops and desktops. The attackers added...

MATA: Multi-platform targeted malware framework

As the IT and OT environment becomes more complex, adversaries are quick to adapt their attack strategy. For example, as users work environments diversify, adversaries are busy acquiring the TTPs to infiltrate systems. Recently, we reported to our Threat Intelligence Portal customers a similar...

MysterySnail attacks with Windows zero-day

Executive Summary In late August and early September 2021, Kaspersky technologies detected attacks with the use of an elevation of privilege exploit on multiple Microsoft Windows servers. The exploit had numerous debug strings from an older, publicly known exploit for vulnerability CVE-2016-3309,...

CVE-2022-41040 and CVE-2022-41082 – zero-days in MS Exchange

Summary At the end of September, GTSC reported an attack on critical infrastructure that took place in August. During the investigation, experts found that two 0-day vulnerabilities in Microsoft Exchange Server were used in the attack. The first one, later identified as CVE-2022-41040, is a...

Exploitation of the CVE-2021-40444 vulnerability in MSHTML

Summary Last week, Microsoft reported the remote code execution vulnerability CVE-2021-40444 in the MSHTML browser engine. According to the company, this vulnerability has already been used in targeted attacks against Microsoft Office users. In attempt to exploit this vulnerability, attackers...

IT threat evolution Q3 2019

Targeted attacks and malware campaigns Mobile espionage targeting the Middle East At the end of June we reported the details of a highly targeted campaign that we dubbed 'Operation ViceLeaker' involving the spread of malicious Android samples via instant messaging. The campaign affected several...

Cycldek: Bridging the (air) gap

Key findings While investigating attacks related to a group named Cycldek post 2018, we were able to uncover various pieces of information on its activities that were not known thus far. In this blog post we aim to bridge the knowledge gap on this group and provide a more thorough insight into it...

The fourth horseman: CVE-2019-0797 vulnerability

In February 2019, our Automatic Exploit Prevention AEP systems detected an attempt to exploit a vulnerability in the Microsoft Windows operating system. Further analysis of this event led to us discovering a zero-day vulnerability in win32k.sys. We reported it to Microsoft on February 22, 2019. T...

RevengeHotels: cybercrime targeting hotel front desks worldwide

RevengeHotels is a targeted cybercrime malware campaign against hotels, hostels, hospitality and tourism companies, mainly, but not exclusively, located in Brazil. We have confirmed more than 20 hotels that are victims of the group, located in eight states in Brazil, but also in other countries...

The leap of a Cycldek-related threat actor

Introduction In the nebula of Chinese-speaking threat actors, it is quite common to see tools and methodologies being shared. One such example of this is the infamous "DLL side-loading triad": a legitimate executable, a malicious DLL to be sideloaded by it, and an encoded payload, generally dropp...

A new era in mobile banking Trojans

In mid-July 2017, we found a new modification of the well-known mobile banking malware family Svpeng – Trojan-Banker.AndroidOS.Svpeng.ae. In this modification, the cybercriminals have added new functionality: it now also works as a keylogger, stealing entered text through the use of accessibility...

Targeted attack on industrial enterprises and public institutions

In January 2022, Kaspersky ICS CERT experts detected a wave of targeted attacks on military industrial complex enterprises and public institutions in several countries. In the course of our research, we were able to identify over a dozen of attacked organizations. The attack targeted industrial...

On the trail of the XMRig miner

As protection methods improve, the developers of miners have had to enhance their own creations, often turning to non-trivial solutions. Several such solutions previously unseen by us were detected during our analysis of the open source miner XMRig. How it all began: ransominer Alongside well-kno...

Magnitude exploit kit – evolution

Exploit kits are not as widespread as they used to be. In the past, they relied on the use of already patched vulnerabilities. Newer and more secure web browsers with automatic updates simply do not allow known vulnerabilities to be exploited. It was very different back in the heyday of Adobe Fla...

Spam and phishing in Q1 2019

Quarterly highlights Valentine's Day As per tradition, phishing timed to coincide with lovey-dovey day was aimed at swindling valuable confidential information out of starry-eyed users, such as bank card details. The topics exploited by cybercriminals ranged from online flower shops to dating...

Hacking microcontroller firmware through a USB

In this article, I want to demonstrate extracting the firmware from a secure USB device running on the Cortex M0. Who hacks video game consoles? The manufacture of counterfeit and unlicensed products is widespread in the world of video game consoles. It's a multi-billion dollar industry in which...

Internet Explorer and Windows zero-day exploits used in Operation PowerFall

Executive summary In May 2020, Kaspersky technologies prevented an attack on a South Korean company by a malicious script for Internet Explorer. Closer analysis revealed that the attack used a previously unknown full chain that consisted of two zero-day exploits: a remote code execution exploit f...

APT trends report Q1 2021

For four years, the Global Research and Analysis Team GReAT at Kaspersky has been publishing quarterly summaries of advanced persistent threat APT activity. The summaries are based on our threat intelligence research and provide a representative snapshot of what we have published and discussed in...