Message board scams

Marketplace fraud is nothing new. Cybercriminals swindle money out of buyers and sellers alike. Lately, weve seen a proliferation of cybergangs operating under the Fraud-as-a-Service model and specializing in tricking users of online marketplaces, in particular, message boards. Criminals are...

APT trends report Q1 2024

For more than six 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. They provide a representative snapshot of what we have published and...

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...

What does ChatGPT know about phishing?

Can ChatGPT detect phishing links? Hearing all the buzz about the amazing applications of ChatGPT and other language models, our team could not help but ask this question. We work on applying machine learning technologies to cybersecurity tasks, specifically models that analyze websites to detect...

COVID-19: Examining the threat landscape a year later

A year ago — everything changed. In an effort to stem the tide of a rapidly spreading pandemic, the world shut down. Shops were forced to shut their doors, and whole countries were placed on stringent lockdowns. Schools were closed around the world, with more than one billion children affected, a...

The Streaming Wars: A Cybercriminal’s Perspective

Cyberthreats are not relegated to the world of big businesses and large-scale campaigns. The most frequent attacks are not APTs and massive data breaches: they are the daily encounters with malware and spam by common users. And, one of the areas where we are most vulnerable is...

Threats posed by using RATs in ICS

While conducting audits, penetration tests and incident investigations, we have often come across legitimate remote administration tools RAT for PCs installed on operational technology OT networks of industrial enterprises. In a number of incidents that we have investigated, threat actors had use...

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...

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...

When checking the URL isn’t enough: a Device Code Phishing attack via a Microsoft website

One of the most common pieces of anti-phishing advice is to double-check the website's domain name before providing your credentials. Typically, a fraudulent domain stands out to the trained eye, differing from the official URL by at least a few characters. Recently, however, we encountered a...

The Notepad++ supply chain attack — unnoticed execution chains and new IoCs

UPD 11.02.2026: added recommendations on how to use the Notepad++ supply chain attack rules package in our SIEM system. Introduction On February 2, 2026, the developers of Notepad++, a text editor popular among developers, published a statement claiming that the update infrastructure of Notepad++...

CloudSorcerer – A new APT targeting Russian government entities

In May 2024, we discovered a new advanced persistent threat APT targeting Russian government entities that we dubbed CloudSorcerer. Its a sophisticated cyberespionage tool used for stealth monitoring, data collection, and exfiltration via Microsoft Graph, Yandex Cloud, and Dropbox cloud...

Sneaky DoubleFinger loads GreetingGhoul targeting your cryptocurrency

Introduction Stealing cryptocurrencies is nothing new. For example, the Mt. Gox exchange was robbed of many bitcoins back in the beginning of 2010s. Attackers such as those behind the Coinvault ransomware were after your Bitcoin wallets, too. Since then, stealing cryptocurrencies has continued to...

Kids on the Web in 2021: Infinite creativity

For over a year weve been living in a world gripped by the COVID-19 pandemic. Not only has the pandemic affected peoples lifestyles, it has also accelerated the development and implementation of technologies that make it easier for us to complete everyday and work-related tasks. We no longer need...

Financial Cyberthreats in 2019

Methodology Financial cyberthreats are malicious programs that target users of services such as online banking, e-money, and cryptocurrency, or that attempt to gain access to financial organizations and their infrastructure. These threats are usually accompanied by spam and phishing activities,...

Shlayer Trojan attacks one in ten macOS users

For close to two years now, the Shlayer Trojan has been the most common threat on the macOS platform: in 2019, one in ten of our Mac security solutions encountered this malware at least once, and it accounts for almost 30% of all detections for this OS. The first specimens of this family fell int...

Threat Landscape for Industrial Automation Systems in H2 2018

H2 2018 in figures All statistical data used in this report was collected using the Kaspersky Security Network KSN, a distributed antivirus network. The data was received from those KSN users who gave their consent to have data anonymously transferred from their computers. We do not identify the...

Kaspersky Lab – Beyond Black Friday Threat Report, November 2017

Introduction The festive holiday shopping season, which covers Thanksgiving, Black Friday and Cyber Monday in late November as well as Christmas in December, now accounts for a significant share of annual sales for retailers, particularly in the U.S., Europe and APAC. Those selling clothing,...

New multi platform malware/adware spreading via Facebook Messenger

One good thing about having a lot of Facebook friends is that you simply act as a honey pot when your friends click on malicious things. A few days ago I got a message on Facebook from a person I very rarely speak to, and I knew that something fishy was going on. After just a few minutes analyzin...

The Magala Trojan Clicker: A Hidden Advertising Threat

One large group will slowly conquer another large group, reduce its numbers, and thus lessen its chance of further variation and improvement. … Small and broken groups and sub-groups will finally tend to disappear. Charles Darwin. 'On the Origin of Species' The golden age of Trojans and viruses h...

ToddyCat is making holes in your infrastructure

We continue covering the activities of the APT group ToddyCat. In our previous article, we described tools for collecting and exfiltrating files LoFiSe and PcExter. This time, we have investigated how attackers obtain constant access to compromised infrastructure, what information on the hosts th...

Money-making scripts attack organizations

In April of this year, the FBI published an advisory on attacks targeting government, law enforcement, and non-profit organizations. Attackers download scripts onto victims devices, delivering several types of malware all at once. The main aim is to utilize company resources for mining, steal dat...

Overview of IoT threats in 2023

IoT devices routers, cameras, NAS boxes, and smart home components multiply every year. Statista portal predicts their number will exceed 29 billion by 2030. As connected device numbers increase, so does the need for protection against various threats. The first-ever large-scale malware attacks o...

APT10: Tracking down LODEINFO 2022, part II

In the previous publication Tracking down LODEINFO 2022, part I, we mentioned that the initial infection methods vary in different attack scenarios and that the LODEINFO shellcode was regularly updated for use with each infection vector. In this article, we discuss improvements made to the LODEIN...

LofyLife: malicious npm packages steal Discord tokens and bank card data

On July 26, using the internal automated system for monitoring open-source repositories, we identified four suspicious packages in the Node Package Manager npm repository. All these packages contained highly obfuscated malicious Python and JavaScript code. We dubbed this malicious campaign...

A new secret stash for “fileless” malware

In February 2022 we observed the technique of putting the shellcode into Windows event logs for the first time "in the wild" during the malicious campaign. It allows the "fileless" last stage Trojan to be hidden from plain sight in the file system. Such attention to the event logs in the campaign...

Financial cyberthreats in 2021

The year 2021 was eventful in terms of digital threats for organizations and individuals, and financial institutions were no exception. Throughout the past year, we have seen cybercriminals continue to actively target our users with tools and techniques that emerged due to the pandemic...

Arrests of members of Tetrade seed groups Grandoreiro and Melcoz

Spains Ministry of the Interior has announced the arrest of 16 individuals connected to the Grandoreiro and Melcoz also known as Mekotio cybercrime groups. Both are originally from Brazil and form part of the Tetrade umbrella, operating for a few years now in Latin America and Western Europe...

Do cybercriminals play cyber games in quarantine? A look one year later

Last year, we decided to take a look at how the pandemic influenced the gaming industry and what new threats gamers could be facing. What we found was that, with the transition to remote work and remote learning, the number of blocked attempts to visit malicious game-related websites or follow...

Remote dating: How do the apps safeguard our data?

The pandemic and the restrictions that came with it have led to an increase in the popularity of dating apps. For example, the total number of swipes on Tinder increased by 11% last year, with the daily number of swipes surpassing the 3 billion mark for the first time as early as March 2020. This...

DDoS Attacks in Q3 2018

News Overview The third quarter 2018 turned out relatively quiet in terms of DDoS attacks. "Relatively" because there were not very many high-level multi-day DDoS onslaughts on major resources. However, the capacities employed by cybercriminals keep growing year after year, while the total number...

Attacks on industrial enterprises using RMS and TeamViewer

Main facts Kaspersky Lab ICS CERT has identified a new wave of phishing emails with malicious attachments targeting primarily companies and organizations that are, in one way or another, associated with industrial production. The phishing emails are disguised as legitimate commercial offers and a...

Jimmy Nukebot: from Neutrino with love

"You FOOL! This isn't even my final form!" In one of our previous articles, we analyzed the NeutrinoPOS banker as an example of a constantly evolving malware family. A week after publication, this Neutrino modification delivered up a new malicious program classified by Kaspersky Lab as...

IT threat evolution Q2 2024

Targeted attacks XZ backdoor: a supply chain attack in the making On March 29, a message on the Openwall oss-security mailing list announced the discovery of a backdoor in XZ, a compression utility included in many popular Linux distributions. The backdoored library is used by the OpenSSH server...

Story of the year: the impact of AI on cybersecurity

In the whirlwind of technological advancements and societal transformations, the term "AI" has undoubtedly etched itself into the forefront of global discourse. Over the past twelve months, this abbreviation has resonated across innumerable headlines, business surveys and tech reports, firmly...

A cryptor, a stealer and a banking trojan

Introduction As long as cybercriminals want to make money, theyll keep making malware, and as long as they keep making malware, well keep analyzing it, publishing reports and providing protection. Last month we covered a wide range of cybercrime topics. For example, we published a private report ...

The State of Stalkerware in 2021

The state of stalkerware in 2021 PDF Main findings of 2021 Every year Kaspersky analyzes the use of stalkerware around the world to better understand the threat it poses. We partner with stakeholders across public and private sectors to raise awareness and find solutions to best tackle this...

Threats in the Netherlands

Introduction On October 4, 2018, the MIVD held a press conference about an intercepted cyberattack on the OPWC in the Netherlands, allegedly by the advanced threat actor Sofacy also known as APT28 or Fancy Bear, among others. According to the MIVD, four suspects were caught red handed trying to...

LuckyMouse signs malicious NDISProxy driver with certificate of Chinese IT company

What happened? Since March 2018 we have discovered several infections where a previously unknown Trojan was injected into the lsass.exe system process memory. These implants were injected by the digitally signed 32- and 64-bit network filtering driver NDISProxy. Interestingly, this driver is sign...

Threat landscape for industrial automation systems in Q4 2025

Statistics across all threats The percentage of ICS computers on which malicious objects were blocked has been decreasing since the beginning of 2024. In Q4 2025, it was 19.7%. Over the past three years, the percentage has decreased by 1.36 times, and by 1.25 times since Q4 2023. Percentage of IC...

Cloud Atlas seen using a new tool in its attacks

Introduction Known since 2014, Cloud Atlas targets Eastern Europe and Central Asia. We're shedding light on a previously undocumented toolset, which the group used heavily in 2024. Victims get infected via phishing emails containing a malicious document that exploits a vulnerability in the formul...

LianSpy: new Android spyware targeting Russian users

In March 2024, we discovered a campaign targeting individuals in Russia with previously unseen Android spyware we dubbed LianSpy. Our analysis indicates that the malware has been active since July 2021. This threat is equipped to capture screencasts, exfiltrate user files, and harvest call logs a...

XZ backdoor: Hook analysis

Part 1: XZ backdoor story – Initial analysis Part 2: Assessing the Y, and How, of the XZ Utils incident social engineering Part 3: XZ backdoor. Hook analysis In our first article on the XZ backdoor, we analyzed its code from initial infection to the function hooking it performs. As we mentioned...

Kaspersky Security Bulletin 2022. Statistics

All statistics in this report are from the global cloud service Kaspersky Security Network KSN, which receives information from components in our security solutions. The data was obtained from users who had given their consent to it being sent to KSN. Millions of Kaspersky users around the globe...

APT10: Tracking down LODEINFO 2022, part I

Kaspersky has been tracking activities involving the LODEINFO malware family since 2019, looking for new modifications and thoroughly investigating any attacks utilizing those new variants. LODEINFO is sophisticated fileless malware first named in a blogpost from JPCERT/CC in February 2020. The...

Kaspersky Security Bulletin 2021. Statistics

All statistics in this report are from the global cloud service Kaspersky Security Network KSN, which receives information from components in our security solutions. The data was obtained from users who had given their consent to it being sent to KSN. Millions of Kaspersky users around the globe...

Life of Maze ransomware

In the past year, Maze ransomware has become one of the most notorious malware families threatening businesses and large organizations. Dozens of organizations have fallen victim to this vile malware, including LG, Southwire, and the City of Pensacola. The history of this ransomware began in the...

OilRig’s Poison Frog – old samples, same trick

After we wrote our private report on the OilRig leak, we decided to scan our archives with our YARA rule, to hunt for new and older samples. Aside from finding some new samples, we believe we also succeeded in finding some of the first Poison Frog samples. Poison Frog We're not quite sure whether...

Ransomware: two pieces of good news

"All your files have been encrypted." How many times has this suddenly popped up on your screen? We hope never, because it's one of the most common indicators that you've lost access to your files. And if there are no publicly available decryptors or you don't have any backup copies, you're in...

The Rotexy mobile Trojan – banker and ransomware

On the back of a surge in Trojan activity, we decided to carry out an in-depth analysis and track the evolution of some other popular malware families besides Asacub. One of the most interesting and active specimens to date was a mobile Trojan from the Rotexy family. In a three-month period from...