Who tracked internet users in 2021–2022

Every time you go online, someone is watching over you. The services you use, the websites you visit, the apps on your phone, smart TVs, gaming consoles, and any networked devices collect data on you with the help of trackers installed on web pages or in software. The websites and services send...

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...

Cyberthreats on lockdown

Every year, our anti-malware research team releases a series of reports on various cyberthreats: financial malware, web attacks, exploits, etc. As we monitor the increase, or decrease, in the number of certain threats, we do not usually associate these changes with concurrent world events – unles...

A MitM extension for Chrome

Browser extensions make our lives easier: they hide obtrusive advertising, translate text, help us choose in online stores, etc. There are also less desirable extensions, including those that bombard us with advertising or collect information about our activities. These pale into insignificance,...

Pocket cryptofarms

In recent months, the topic of cryptocurrency has been a permanent news fixture — the value of digital money has been see-sawing spectacularly. Such pyrotechnics could hardly have escaped the attention of scammers, which is why cryptocurrency fluctuations have gone hand in hand with all kinds of...

Zero-day vulnerability in Telegram

In October 2017, we learned of a vulnerability in Telegram Messenger's Windows client that was being exploited in the wild. It involves the use of a classic right-to-left override attack when a user sends files over the messenger service. Right-to-left override in a nutshell The special nonprinti...

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...

Argamal: Malware hidden in hentai games

In April 2026, we discovered a new malware campaign targeting players of "hentai" games. Once launched, the infected games install a previously unknown malicious implant on the user's machine. After a few days, the implant downloads and executes a Trojan, resulting in full system compromise and...

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...

SideWinder targets the maritime and nuclear sectors with an updated toolset

Last year, we published an article about SideWinder, a highly prolific APT group whose primary targets have been military and government entities in Pakistan, Sri Lanka, China, and Nepal. In it, we described activities that had mostly happened in the first half of the year. We tried to draw...

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 cascade of compromise: unveiling Lazarus’ new campaign

Earlier this year, a software vendor was compromised by the Lazarus malware delivered through unpatched legitimate software. Whats remarkable is that these software vulnerabilities were not new, and despite warnings and patches from the vendor, many of the vendors systems continued to use the...

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...

IoC detection experiments with ChatGPT

ChatGPT is a groundbreaking chatbot powered by the neural network-based language model text-davinci-003 and trained on a large dataset of text from the Internet. It is capable of generating human-like text in a wide range of styles and formats. ChatGPT can be fine-tuned for specific tasks, such a...

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...

Two more malicious Python packages in the PyPI

On August 8, CheckPoint published a report on ten malicious Python packages in the Python Package Index PyPI, the most popular Python repository among software developers. The malicious packages were intended to steal developers personal data and credentials. Following this research, we used our...

Trickbot module descriptions

Trickbot aka TrickLoader or Trickster, is a successor of the Dyre banking Trojan that was active from 2014 to 2016 and performed man-in-the-browser attacks in order to steal banking credentials. Trickbot was first discovered in October 2016. Just like Dyre, its main functionality was initially th...

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...

5G security and privacy for smart cities

The 5G telecommunications revolution is imminent. It is the next generation of cellular network, making use of the existing 4G LTE in addition to opening up the millimeter wave band. 5G will be able to welcome more network-connected devices and increase speeds considerably for users. It will serv...

Black Friday Alert 2019: Net Shopping Bag of Threats

Every year, Kaspersky releases an annual Black Friday alert to highlight how fraudsters may capitalize on increased levels of online shopping at this time of year when many brands are offering their customers appealing discounts. In the rush to get a big discount or, even more panic-inducing, a...

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...

ToddyCat: your hidden email assistant. Part 2

Introduction We continue to share details on the malicious techniques and toolsets used by the ToddyCat APT group. In the first part of this report, we examined the group's attacks aimed at stealing data from browsers, as well as from local and cloud email services. The methods used in that...

Cracked software beats gold: new macOS backdoor stealing cryptowallets

A month ago, we discovered some cracked apps circulating on pirating websites and infected with a Trojan proxy. The malicious actors repackaged pre-cracked applications as PKG files with an embedded Trojan proxy and a post-install script initiating the infection. We recently caught sight of a new...

ChatGPT at work: how chatbots help employees, but threaten business

Workhorse Only a few months ago, ChatGPT and other chatbots based on large language models LLMs were still a novelty. Users enjoyed using them to compose poems and lyrics in the style of famous artists which left Nick Cave, for example, decidedly unimpressed, researchers debated blowing up data...

Mobile subscription Trojans and their little tricks

Billing fraud is one of the most common sources of income for cybercriminals. There are currently a number of known mobile Trojans specializing in secretly subscribing users to paid services. They usually pay for legitimate services in a users name and scammers take a cut from the money billed...

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...

WIRTE’s campaign in the Middle East ‘living off the land’ since at least 2019

Overview This February, during our hunting efforts for threat actors using VBS/VBA implants, we came across MS Excel droppers that use hidden spreadsheets and VBA macros to drop their first stage implant. The implant itself is a VBS script with functionality to collect system information and...

Lookalike domains and how to outfox them

Our colleagues already delved into how cybercriminals attack companies through compromised email addresses of employees, and how to protect against such attacks using SPF, DKIM and DMARC technologies. But despite the obvious pluses of these solutions, there is a way to bypass them that we want to...

SAS@Home is back this fall

The world during the pandemic prepares many surprises for us. Most of them are certainly unpleasant: health risks, inability to travel or meet old friends. One of these unpleasant surprises awaited us in the early spring, when the organizing team of the beloved SAS conference were forced to...

MuddyWater expands operations

Summary MuddyWater is a relatively new APT that surfaced in 2017. It has focused mainly on governmental targets in Iraq and Saudi Arabia, according to past telemetry. However, the group behind MuddyWater has been known to target other countries in the Middle East, Europe and the US. We recently...

Security assessment of corporate information systems in 2017

Each year, Kaspersky Lab's Security Services department carries out dozens of cybersecurity assessment projects for companies worldwide. In this publication, we present a general summary and statistics for the cybersecurity assessments we have conducted of corporate information systems throughout...

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...

Ransomware and malicious crypto miners in 2016-2018

Ransomware is not an unfamiliar threat. For the last few years it has been affecting the world of cybersecurity, infecting and blocking access to various devices or files and requiring users to pay a ransom usually in Bitcoins or another widely used e-currency, if they want to regain access to...

Connected Medicine and Its Diagnosis

Medical data is slowly but surely migrating from paper mediums to the digital infrastructure of medical institutions. Today, the data is "scattered" across databases, portals, medical equipment, etc. In some cases, the security of the network infrastructure of such organizations is neglected, and...

HelloNet campaign: new malicious modules launched through the ViPNet update system

UPD 16.07.2026: Added rules to protect companies using our Kaspersky SIEM system, and listed events for developing custom detection rules or conducting threat hunting. UPD 16.07.2026: Added detection of the malicious activity using Kaspersky Managed Detection and Response. UPD 16.07.2026: Added...

Zanubis in motion: Tracing the active evolution of the Android banking malware

Introduction Zanubis is a banking Trojan for Android that emerged in mid-2022. Since its inception, it has targeted banks and financial entities in Peru, before expanding its objectives to virtual cards and crypto wallets. The main infection vector of Zanubis is impersonating legitimate Peruvian...

Exploits and vulnerabilities in Q4 2024

Q4 2024 saw fewer published exploits for Windows and Linux compared to the first three quarters. Although the number of registered vulnerabilities continued to rise, the total number of Proof of Concept PoC instances decreased compared to 2023. Among notable techniques in Q4, attackers leveraged...

BellaCPP: Discovering a new BellaCiao variant written in C++

Introduction BellaCiao is a .NET-based malware family that adds a unique twist to an intrusion, combining the stealthy persistence of a webshell with the power to establish covert tunnels. It surfaced for the first time in late April 2023 and has since been publicly attributed to the APT actor...

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...

Assessing the Y, and How, of the XZ Utils incident

High-end APT groups perform highly interesting social engineering campaigns in order to penetrate well-protected targets. For example, carefully constructed forum responses on precision targeted accounts and follow-up "out-of-band" interactions regarding underground rail system simulator software...

Dissecting TriangleDB, a Triangulation spyware implant

Over the years, there have been multiple cases when iOS devices were infected with targeted spyware such as Pegasus, Predator, Reign and others. Often, the process of infecting a device involves launching a chain of different exploits, e.g. for escaping the iMessage sandbox while processing a...

Managed Detection and Response in 2022

Kaspersky Managed Detection and Response MDR is a service for 24/7 monitoring and response to detected incidents based on technologies and expertise of Kaspersky Security Operations Center SOC team. MDR allows detecting threats at any stage of the attack – both before anything is compromised and...

Education predictions 2021

Changes in the education system have been brewing for a long time, with digitalization as the main direction of this transformation. The breakthrough came this year as about 1.5 billion students were unable to attend school due to the COVID-19 pandemic. As a result, educational systems all over t...

The return of Fantomas, or how we deciphered Cryakl

In early February this year, Belgian police seized the C&C servers of the infamous Cryakl cryptor. Soon afterwards, they handed over the private keys to our experts, who used them to update the free RakhniDecryptor tool for recovering files encrypted by the malware. The ransomware, which for year...

Operation Parliament, who is doing what?

Summary Kaspersky Lab has been tracking a series of attacks utilizing unknown malware since early 2017. The attacks appear to be geopolitically motivated and target high profile organizations. The objective of the attacks is clearly espionage – they involve gaining access to top legislative,...

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...

DuneQuixote campaign targets Middle Eastern entities with “CR4T” malware

Introduction In February 2024, we discovered a new malware campaign targeting government entities in the Middle East. We dubbed it "DuneQuixote"; and our investigation uncovered over 30 DuneQuixote dropper samples actively employed in the campaign. These droppers, which exist in two versions –...

The dark side of Black Friday: decoding cyberthreats around the year’s biggest shopping season

As the annual Black Friday approaches, the digital landscape experiences an unprecedented surge in e-commerce and online shopping activity. Major sales aside, e-commerce is still a huge market. In 2022, global e-commerce retail revenue was estimated to reach $5.7 trillion worldwide, marking nearl...

The outstanding stealth of Operation Triangulation

Introduction In our previous blogpost on Triangulation, we discussed the details of TriangleDB, the main implant used in this campaign, its C2 protocol and the commands it can receive. We mentioned, among other things, that it is able to execute additional modules. We also mentioned that this...

Prilex modification now targeting contactless credit card transactions

Prilex is a singular threat actor that has evolved from ATM-focused malware into unique modular PoS malware—actually, the most advanced PoS threat we have seen so far, as described in a previous article. Forget about those old memory scrapers seen in PoS attacks. Prilex goes beyond these, and it...