Driver of destruction: How a legitimate driver is being used to take down AV processes

Introduction In a recent incident response case in Brazil, we spotted intriguing new antivirus AV killer software that has been circulating in the wild since at least October 2024. This malicious artifact abuses the ThrottleStop.sys driver, delivered together with the malware, to terminate numero...

Outlaw cybergang attacking targets worldwide

Introduction In a recent incident response case in Brazil, we dealt with a relatively simple, yet very effective threat focused on Linux environments. Outlaw also known as "Dota" is a Perl-based crypto mining botnet that typically takes advantage of weak or default SSH credentials for its...

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...

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...

Memory corruption vulnerabilities in Suricata and FreeRDP

As a cybersecurity company, before we release our products, we perform penetration tests on them to make sure they are secure. Recently, new versions of KasperskyOS-based products were released, namely Kaspersky Thin Client KTC and Kaspersky IoT Secure Gateway KISG. As part of the pre-release...

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...

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...

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...

Malvertising through search engines

In recent months, we observed an increase in the number of malicious campaigns that use Google Advertising as a means of distributing and delivering malware. At least two different stealers, Rhadamanthys and RedLine, were abusing the search engine promotion plan in order to deliver malicious...

Good game, well played: an overview of gaming-related cyberthreats in 2022

The gaming industry went into full gear during the pandemic, as many people took up online gaming as their new hobby to escape the socially-distanced reality. Since then, the industry has never stopped growing. According to the analytical agency Newzoo, in 2022, the global gaming market will exce...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

Kaspersky Security Bulletin. Overall statistics for 2017

All the statistics used in this report were obtained using Kaspersky Security Network KSN, a distributed antivirus network that works with various anti-malware protection components. The data was collected from KSN users who agreed to provide it. Millions of Kaspersky Lab product users from 213...

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...

GoSerpent: a persistent threat evolves with sophisticated data collection and exfiltration

Introduction In February 2026, we discovered a set of malicious activities that had been ongoing since late 2025. These activities involved a RAT module written in Go with proxy capabilities, which served as the main stage of the attack. The attack targeted government and diplomatic entities in...

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...

Not quite an Easter egg: a new family of Trojan subscribers on Google Play

Every once in a while, someone will come across malicious apps on Google Play that seem harmless at first. Some of the trickiest of these are subscription Trojans, which often go unnoticed until the user finds they have been charged for services they never intended to buy. This kind of malware...

Selecting the right MSSP: Guidelines for making an objective decision

Managed Security Service Providers MSSPs have become an increasingly popular choice for organizations nowadays following the trend to outsource security services. Meanwhile, with the growing number of MSSPs in the market, it can be difficult for organizations to determine which provider will fit ...

Threat landscape for industrial automation systems. H1 2020 highlights

Overall downward trend for percentages of attacked computers globally Beginning in H2 2019 we have observed a tendency for decreases in the percentages of attacked computers, both in the ICS and in the corporate and personal environments. In H1 2020 the percentage of ICS computers on which...

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...

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...

Threat Predictions for Industrial Security in 2018

The landscape in 2017 2017 was one of the most intense in terms of incidents affecting the information security of industrial systems. Security researchers discovered and reported hundreds of new vulnerabilities, warned of new threat vectors in ICS and technological processes, provided data on...

The Festive Complexities of SIGINT-Capable Threat Actors

To read the full paper and learn more about this, refer to "Walking in Your Enemy's Shadow: When Fourth-Party Collection Becomes Attribution Hell" Attribution is complicated under the best of circumstances. Sparse attributory indicators and the possibility of overt manipulation have proven enough...

The SOC Files: ScreenConnect masked as freeware. An inside look at a large-scale campaign

UPD 03.07.2026: added a package of rules and recommendations that help detect the described malicious activity for companies using our Kaspersky SIEM system. Introduction To access compromised systems, threat actors frequently abuse legitimate remote monitoring tools. At first glance, these...

Analysis of the Crypt Ghouls group: continuing the investigation into a series of attacks on Russia

Last December, we discovered a new group targeting Russian businesses and government agencies with ransomware. Further investigation into this group's activity suggests a connection to other groups currently targeting Russia. We have seen overlaps not only in indicators of compromise and tools, b...

QBot banker delivered through business correspondence

In early April, we detected a significant increase in attacks that use banking Trojans of the QBot family aka QakBot, QuackBot, and Pinkslipbot. The malware would be delivered through e-mail letters written in different languages — variations of them were coming in English, German, Italian, and...

Overview of Google Play threats sold on the dark web

In 2022, Kaspersky security solutions detected 1,661,743 malware or unwanted software installers, targeting mobile users. Although the most common way of distributing such installers is through third-party websites and dubious app stores, their authors every now and then manage to upload them to...

Bad magic: new APT found in the area of Russo-Ukrainian conflict

Since the start of the Russo-Ukrainian conflict, Kaspersky researchers and the international community at large have identified a significant number of cyberattacks executed in a political and geopolitical context. We previously published an overview of cyber activities and the threat landscape...

The state of stalkerware in 2022

The state of stalkerware in 2022 PDF Main findings of 2022 The State of Stalkerware is an annual report by Kaspersky which contributes to a better understanding of how many people in the world are affected by digital stalking. Stalkerware is a commercially available software that can be discretel...

Server-side attacks, C&C in public clouds and other MDR cases we observed

Introduction This report describes several interesting incidents observed by the Kaspersky Managed Detection and Response MDR team. The goal of the report is to inform our customers about techniques used by attackers. We hope that learning about the attacks that took place in the wild helps you t...

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...

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...

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...

Using legitimate tools to hide malicious code

The authors of malware use various techniques to circumvent defensive mechanisms and conceal harmful activity. One of them is the practice of hiding malicious code in the context of a trusted process. Typically, malware that uses concealment techniques injects its code into a system process, e.g...

CloudWizard APT: the bad magic story goes on

In March 2023, we uncovered a previously unknown APT campaign in the region of the Russo-Ukrainian conflict that involved the use of PowerMagic and CommonMagic implants. However, at the time it was not clear which threat actor was behind the attack. Since the release of our report about...

Not just an infostealer: Gopuram backdoor deployed through 3CX supply chain attack

On March 29, Crowdstrike published a report about a supply chain attack conducted via 3CXDesktopApp, a popular VoIP program. Since then, the security community has started analyzing the attack and sharing their findings. The following has been discovered so far: The infection is spread via...

Developing an incident response playbook

An incident response playbook is a predefined set of actions to address a specific security incident such as malware infection, violation of security policies, DDoS attack, etc. Its main goal is to enable a large enterprise security team to respond to cyberattacks in a timely and effective manner...

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...

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...

DarkVishnya: Banks attacked through direct connection to local network

While novice attackers, imitating the protagonists of the U.S. drama Mr. Robot, leave USB flash drives lying around parking lots in the hope that an employee from the target company picks one up and plugs it in at the workplace, more experienced cybercriminals prefer not to rely on chance. In...

Kaspersky Security Bulletin 2018. Statistics

Kaspersky Security Bulletin 2018. Top security stories Kaspersky Security Bulletin 2018. Story of the year: miners Kaspersky Security Bulletin 2018. Threat Predictions for 2019 All the statistics used in this report were obtained using Kaspersky Security Network KSN, a distributed antivirus netwo...

Modern OSs for embedded systems

At Kaspersky Lab we analyze the technologies available on cybersecurity market and this time we decided to look at what OS developers are offering for embedded systems or, in other words, the internet of things. Our primary interest is how and to what degree these OSs can solve...

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...

JanelaRAT: a financial threat targeting users in Latin America

Background JanelaRAT is a malware family that takes its name from the Portuguese word "janela" which means "window". JanelaRAT looks for financial and cryptocurrency data from specific banks and financial institutions in the Latin America region. JanelaRAT is a modified variant of BX RAT that has...

IronHusky updates the forgotten MysterySnail RAT to target Russia and Mongolia

Day after day, threat actors create new malware to use in cyberattacks. Each of these new implants is developed in its own way, and as a result gets its own destiny – while the use of some malware families is reported for decades, information about others disappears after days, months or several...