The Tetrade: Brazilian banking malware goes global

Introduction Brazil is a well-known country with plenty of banking trojans developed by local crooks. The Brazilian criminal underground is home to some of the worlds busiest and most creative perpetrators of cybercrime. Like their counterparts in China and Russia, their cyberattacks have a stron...

DDoS attacks in Q2 2019

News overview The second quarter of 2019 turned out to be richer than the first in terms of high-profile DDoS attacks. True, most of the campaigns that attracted media attention appeared to be politically, rather than commercially, motivated — and that despite the fact that some security experts...

Roaming Mantis uses DNS hijacking to infect Android smartphones

In March 2018, Japanese media reported the hijacking of DNS settings on routers located in Japan, redirecting users to malicious IP addresses. The redirection led to the installation of Trojanized applications named facebook.apk and chrome.apk that contained Android Trojan-Banker. According to ou...

Every little bitcoin helps

It often happens that inventions and technologies that start out good end up turning into dangerous tools in the hands of criminals. Blockchain is no exception to this rule, especially in its most common cryptocurrency incarnation. Cryptocurrencies crop up in all kinds of spam: from traditional...

Cybercriminals target early IRS 2018 refunds now

On Monday, Jan 29th, IRS officially opened its 2018 season. Some taxpayers already filed their taxes and cybercriminals know it too. So, right after two days of the official 2018 season opening, we got phishing messages with a fake refund status Websites: The link in the email leads to a hacked...

Happy IR in the New Year!

At the end of last year Mr. Jake Williams from aka @MalwareJake asked a very important question about Lack of visibility during detecting APT intrusions in twitter. Results show us that endpoint analysis is the most important part of any research connected with APTs. Also, for sure endpoint...

Booking a Taxi for Faketoken

The Trojan-Banker.AndroidOS.Faketoken malware has been known about for already more than a year. Throughout the time of its existence, it has worked its way up from a primitive Trojan intercepting mTAN codes to an encrypter. The authors of its newer modifications continue to upgrade the malware,...

Analysis of Elpaco: a Mimic variant

Introduction In a recent incident response case, we dealt with a variant of the Mimic ransomware with some interesting customization features. The attackers were able to connect via RDP to the victim's server after a successful brute force attack and then launch the ransomware. After that, the...

Ransomware updates & 1-day exploits

Introduction In our crimeware reporting service, we analyze the latest crime-related trends we come across. Last month, we again posted a lot on ransomware, but we also covered other subjects, such as 1-day exploits. In this blogpost, we provide excerpts from these reports. For questions or more...

What does it take to become a good reverse engineer?

How much money and effort does it take to become a good reverse engineer? Do you even need to be one? There are no universally acceptable answers to these questions. Software reverse engineering RE is not a science but a skillset combined with specific knowledge and backed by a lot of experience...

The cybercrime ecosystem: attacking blogs

Executive summary The Cybercrime Ecosystem is a series of articles explaining how cybercriminals operate, what drives them, what techniques they use and how we, regular Internet users, are part of that ecosystem. The articles will also cover technical details and up-to-date research on the threat...

The return of the BOM

There's nothing new in Brazilian cybercriminals trying out new ways to stay under the radar. It's just that this time around the bad guys have started using a method that was reported in the wild years ago. Russian gangs used this technique to distribute malware capable of modifying the hosts fil...

Calisto Trojan for macOS

An interesting aspect of studying a particular piece of malware is tracing its evolution and observing how the creators gradually add new monetization or entrenchment techniques. Also of interest are developmental prototypes that have had limited distribution or not even occurred in the wild. We...

Coinvault, the court case

Today, after almost 3 years of waiting, it was finally the day of the trial. In the Netherlands, where the whole case took place, the hearings are open to the public. Meaning anyone who is interested can visit. And it was quite busy. Because besides the suspects, their lawyers, the judges and the...

Threat Predictions for Automotive in 2018

The landscape in 2017 Modern cars are no longer just electro-mechanical vehicles. With each generation, they become more connected and incorporate more intelligent technologies to make them smarter, more efficient, comfortable and safe. The connected-car market is growing at a five-year compound...

Miners on the Rise

Miners are a class of malware whose popularity has grown substantially this year. The actual process of cryptocurrency mining is perfectly legal, though there are groups of people who hoodwink unwitting users into installing mining software on their computers, or exploiting software vulnerabiliti...

Lumma Stealer – Tracking distribution channels

Introduction The evolution of Malware-as-a-Service MaaS has significantly lowered the barriers to entry for cybercriminals, with information stealers becoming one of the most commercially successful categories in this underground economy. Among these threats, Lumma Stealer has emerged as a...

CosmicStrand: the discovery of a sophisticated UEFI firmware rootkit

Introduction Rootkits are malware implants which burrow themselves in the deepest corners of the operating system. Although on paper they may seem attractive to attackers, creating them poses significant technical challenges and the slightest programming error has the potential to completely cras...

Mobile malware evolution 2021

These statistics are based on detection verdicts of Kaspersky products received from users who consented to providing statistical data. Figures of the year In 2021, Kaspersky mobile products and technologies detected: 3,464,756 malicious installation packages 97,661 new mobile banking Trojans...

Threat landscape for industrial automation systems. Statistics for H2 2020

Figures Indicator | H1 2020 | H2 2020 | 2020 ---|---|---|--- Global percentage of attacked ICS computers | 32.6% | 33.42% | 38.55% Percentage of attacked ICS computers by region Northern Europe | 10.1% | 11.5% | 12.3% Western Europe | 15.1% | 14.8% | 17.6% Australia | 16.3% | 17.0% | 18.9% United...

Lazarus covets COVID-19-related intelligence

As the COVID-19 crisis grinds on, some threat actors are trying to speed up vaccine development by any means available. We have found evidence that actors, such as the Lazarus group, are going after intelligence that could help these efforts by attacking entities related to COVID-19 research. Whi...

BasBanke: Trend-setting Brazilian banking Trojan

BasBanke is a new Android malware family targeting Brazilian users. It is a banking Trojan built to steal financial data such as credentials and credit/debit card numbers, but not limited to this functionality. The propagation of this threat began during the 2018 Brazilian elections, registering...

OctLurk and SilkLurk: newly identified tailored backdoors in cyber-espionage campaign in Central Asia

Introduction We have been tracking two new backdoors, OctLurk and SilkLurk , observed in attacks against government organizations primarily in Central Asia since January 2025. Identified victims are located in Afghanistan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, and the Syrian Arab...

APT trends report Q2 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...

SAS, sweet SAS

As you may already know from our social network posts, we have rescheduled the SAS 2020 conference for November 18-21 due to the COVID-19 pandemic and to ensure your safety. Though we still think that Barcelona is a great place to meet and it will not be a "real" SAS if we cannot hug, shake hands...

Holy water: ongoing targeted water-holing attack in Asia

On December 4, 2019, we discovered watering hole websites that were compromised to selectively trigger a drive-by download attack with fake Adobe Flash update warnings. This campaign has been active since at least May 2019, and targets an Asian religious and ethnic group. The threat actor's...

Masha and these Bears

Sofacy, also known as APT28, Fancy Bear, and Tsar Team, is a prolific, well resourced, and persistent adversary. They are sometimes portrayed as wild and reckless, but as seen under our visibility, the group can be pragmatic, measured, and agile. Our previous post on their 2017 activity stepped...

Financial Cyberthreats in 2017

In 2017, we saw a number of changes to the world of financial threats and new actors emerging. As we have previously noted, fraud attacks in financial services have become increasingly account-centric. User data is a key enabler for large-scale fraud attacks, and frequent data breaches - among...

IoT hack: how to break a smart home… again

There can never be too many IoT gadgets – that's what people usually think when buying yet another connected device with advanced functionality. From our perspective, we also think there can't be too many IoT investigations. So, we have continued our experiments into checking and uncovering how...

Disappearing bytes: Reverse engineering the MS Office RTF parser

Microsoft Office was a prime target for attacks in 2017. As well as the large number of vulnerabilities discovered and proof-of-concept exploits published, malware authors felt it necessary to prevent detection of 'one-day' and 'old-day' exploits by antivirus software. It also became clear that...

IT threat evolution in Q3 2024. Non-mobile statistics

IT threat evolution in Q3 2024 IT threat evolution in Q3 2024. Non-mobile statistics IT threat evolution in Q3 2024. Mobile statistics The statistics presented here are based on detection verdicts by Kaspersky products and services received from users who consented to providing statistical data...

What’s in your notepad? Infected text editors target Chinese users

"Malvertising" is a popular way of attracting victims to malicious sites: an advertisement block is placed at the top of the search results, increasing the likelihood of users clicking the link. Sites at the top of search results also tend to be more trusted by users. A year ago, our experts...

Network tunneling with… QEMU?

Cyberattackers tend to give preference to legitimate tools when taking various attack steps, as these help them evade detection systems while keeping malware development costs down to a minimum. Network scanning, capturing a process memory dump, exfiltrating data, running files remotely, and even...

QR codes in email phishing

QR codes are everywhere: you can see them on posters and leaflets, ATM screens, price tags and merchandise, historical buildings and monuments. People use them to share information, promote various online resources, pay for their goodies, and pass verification. And yet you dont see lots of QR cod...

Lazarus Trojanized DeFi app for delivering malware

For the Lazarus threat actor, financial gain is one of the prime motivations, with a particular emphasis on the cryptocurrency business. As the price of cryptocurrency surges, and the popularity of non-fungible token NFT and decentralized finance DeFi businesses continues to swell, the Lazarus...

Managed Detection and Response in Q4 2020

Download full report PDF As cyberattacks become more sophisticated, and security solutions require more resources to analyze the huge amount of data gathered every day, many organizations feel the need for advanced security services that can deal with this growing complexity in real time, 24/7...

Explicit content and cyberthreats: 2019 report

'Stay at home' is the new motto for 2020 and it has entailed many changes to our daily lives, most importantly, in terms of our digital content consumption. With users opting to entertain themselves online, malicious activity has grown. Over the past two years we have reviewed how adult content h...

Story of the year 2019: Cities under ransomware siege

Ransomware has been targeting the private sector for years now. Overall awareness of the need for security measures is growing, and cybercriminals are increasing the precision of their targeting to locate victims with security breaches in their defense systems. Looking back at the past three year...

Trusted relationship attacks: trust, but verify

IT outsourcing market continues to demonstrate strong growth globally – such services are becoming increasingly popular. But along with the advantages, such as saved time and resources, delegating non-core tasks creates new challenges in terms of information security. By providing third-party...

Coyote: A multi-stage banking Trojan abusing the Squirrel installer

The developers of banking Trojan malware are constantly looking for inventive ways to distribute theirs implants and infect victims. In a recent investigation, we encountered a new malware that specifically targets users of more than 60 banking institutions, mainly from Brazil. What caught our...

Windows CLFS and five exploits used by ransomware operators (Exploit #1 – CVE-2022-24521)

This is the second part of our study about the Common Log File System CLFS and five vulnerabilities in this Windows OS component that have been used in ransomware attacks throughout the year. Please read the previous part first if you havent already. You can skip to the other parts using this tab...

Stealer for PIX payment system, new Lumar stealer and Rhysida ransomware

Introduction As a cybersecurity company, Kaspersky is constantly dealing with known and brand-new malware samples. As part of our crimeware reporting service, we provide our customers with technical reports on the evolution of existing crimeware families, as well as newly emerging ones. In this...

New ransomware trends in 2023

Ransomware keeps making headlines. In a quest for profits, attackers target all types of organizations, from healthcare and educational institutions to service providers and industrial enterprises, affecting almost every aspect of our lives. In 2022, Kaspersky solutions detected over 74.2M...

Good old malware for the new Apple Silicon platform

Introduction A short while ago, Apple released Mac computers with the new chip called Apple M1. The unexpected release was a milestone in the Apple hardware industry. However, as technology evolves, we also observe a growing interest in the newly released platform from malware adversaries. This...

DDoS attacks in Q2 2020

News overview Not just one but two new DDoS amplification methods were discovered last quarter. In mid-May, Israeli researchers reported a new DNS server vulnerability that lurks in the DNS delegation process. The vulnerability exploitation scheme was dubbed "NXNSAttack". The hacker sends to a...

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...

Happy New Fear! Gift-wrapped spam and phishing

Pre-holiday spam Easy money In the run-up to Christmas and New Year, scam е-mails mentioning easy pickings, lottery winnings, and other cash surprises are especially popular. All the more so given how simple it is to adapt existing schemes simply by mentioning the holiday in the subject line. For...

Cyberthreats to financial institutions 2019: overview and predictions

Kaspersky Security Bulletin: Threat Predictions for 2019 Threat predictions for industrial security in 2019 Cryptocurrency threat predictions for 2019 Introduction – key events in 2018 The past year has been extremely eventful in terms of the digital threats faced by financial institutions:...

2018 Fraud World Cup

There are only two weeks to go before the start of the massive soccer event — FIFA World Cup. This championship has already attracted the attention of millions worldwide, including a fair few cybercriminals. Long before kick-off, email accounts began bulging with soccer-related spam, and scammers...

Android commercial spyware

There's certainly no shortage of commercial spying apps for Android, with most positioned as parental control tools. In reality, however, these apps barely differ from spyware, with the exception perhaps of the installation method. There's no need to even resort to Tor Browser or other darknet...