GravityRAT: The spy returns

In 2018, researchers at Cisco Talos published a post on the spyware GravityRAT, used to target the Indian armed forces. The Indian Computer Emergency Response Team CERT-IN first discovered the Trojan in 2017. Its creators are believed to be Pakistani hacker groups. According to our information, t...

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...

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...

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...

Threat landscape for industrial automation systems, Q1 2024

Global statistics Statistics across all threats In the first quarter of 2024, the percentage of ICS computers on which malicious objects were blocked decreased by 0.3 pp from the previous quarter to 24.4%. Compared to the first quarter of 2023, the percentage decreased by 1.3 pp. Percentage of IC...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

Threat Landscape for Industrial Automation Systems in H1 2018

For many years, Kaspersky Lab experts have been uncovering and researching cyberthreats that target a variety of information systems – those of commercial and government organizations, banks, telecoms operators, industrial enterprises, and individual users. In this report, Kaspersky Lab Industria...

Loki Bot: On a hunt for corporate passwords

Starting from early July, we have seen malicious spam activity that has targeted corporate mailboxes. The messages discovered so far contain an attachment with an .iso extension that Kaspersky Lab solutions detect as Loki Bot. The malware's key objective is to steal passwords from browsers,...

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...

Approach to mainframe penetration testing on z/OS. Deep dive into RACF

In our previous article we dissected penetration testing techniques for IBM z/OS mainframes protected by the Resource Access Control Facility RACF security package. In this second part of our research, we delve deeper into RACF by examining its decision-making logic, database structure, and the...

Stealers, stealers and more stealers

Introduction Stealers are a prominent threat in the malware landscape. Over the past year we published our research into several stealers see here, here and here, and for now, the trend seems to persist. In the past months, we wrote several private reports on stealers as we discovered Acrid a new...

FakeSG campaign, Akira ransomware and AMOS macOS stealer

Introduction The crimeware landscape is diverse. Cybercriminals try to capitalize on their victims in every possible way by distributing various types of malware designed for different platforms. In recent months, we have written private reports on a wide range of topics, such as new cross-platfo...

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...

Triada Trojan in WhatsApp mod

WhatsApp users sometimes feel the official app is lacking a useful feature of one sort or another, be it animated themes, self-destructing messages which automatically delete themselves, the option of hiding certain conversations from the main list, automatic translation of messages, or the optio...

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...

GhostContainer backdoor: malware compromising Exchange servers of high-value organizations in Asia

In a recent incident response IR case, we discovered highly customized malware targeting Exchange infrastructure within government environments. Analysis of detection logs and clues within the sample suggests that the Exchange server was likely compromised via a known N-day vulnerability. Our...

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...

No need to RSVP: a closer look at the Tria stealer campaign

Introduction Since mid-2024, we've observed a malicious Android campaign leveraging wedding invitations as a lure to social-engineer victims into installing a malicious Android app APK, which we have named "Tria Stealer" after unique strings found in campaign samples. The primary targets of the...

Analysis of Cyber Anarchy Squad attacks targeting Russian and Belarusian organizations

About C.A.S C.A.S Cyber Anarchy Squad is a hacktivist group that has been attacking organizations in Russia and Belarus since 2022. Besides data theft, its goal is to inflict maximum damage, including reputational. To this end, the group's attacks exploit vulnerabilities in publicly available...

Mandrake spyware sneaks onto Google Play again, flying under the radar for two years

Introduction In May 2020, Bitdefender released a white paper containing a detailed analysis of Mandrake, a sophisticated Android cyber-espionage platform, which had been active in the wild for at least four years. In April 2024, we discovered a suspicious sample that appeared to be a new version ...

State of ransomware in 2024

Ransomware attacks continue to be one of the biggest contemporary cybersecurity threats, affecting organizations and individuals alike on a global scale. From high-profile breaches in healthcare and industrial sectors – compromising huge volumes of sensitive data or halting production entirely – ...

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...

A bowl full of security problems: Examining the vulnerabilities of smart pet feeders

Introduction In todays interconnected world, more and more devices are being connected to the internet, including everyday household items like pet feeders that are becoming smart by virtue of this simple fact. However, as these devices become more sophisticated, they also become more vulnerable ...

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...

Evaluation of cyber activities and the threat landscape in Ukraine

Introduction When the war in Ukraine broke out, many analysts were surprised to discover that what was simultaneously happening in the cyber domain did not match their predictions1. Since the beginning of the fighting, new cyberattacks taking place in Ukraine have been identified every week, whic...

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...

Transparent Tribe: Evolution analysis,part 1

Background and key findings Transparent Tribe, also known as PROJECTM and MYTHIC LEOPARD, is a highly prolific group whose activities can be traced as far back as 2013. Proofpoint published a very good article about them in 2016, and since that day, we have kept an eye on the group. We have...

Lazarus on the hunt for big game

We may only be six months in, but theres little doubt that 2020 will go down in history as a rather unpleasant year. In the field of cybersecurity, the collective hurt mostly crystallized around the increasing prevalence of targeted ransomware attacks. By investigating a number of these incidents...

Do cybercriminals play cyber games during quarantine?

Thanks to the coronavirus pandemic, the role of the Internet in our lives has undergone changes, including irreversible ones. Some of these changes are definitely for the better, some are not very good, but almost all of them in some way affect digital security issues. We decided to take a closer...

Remotely controlled EV home chargers – the threats and vulnerabilities

We are now seeing signs of a possible shift in the field of personal transport. Recent events such as the 'dieselgate' scandal undermine customer and government confidence in combustion engines and their environmental safety. At the same time there has been a big step forward in the development o...

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,...

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,...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

What’s wrong with automotive mobile apps?

Introduction The recent story about the 19-year-old hacker who took control of several dozen Tesla cars has become something of a sensation. We already know that there was an issue with a third-party app that enabled access to data from Teslas. This made it possible for the security researcher to...

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...

Black Friday alert

Banking Trojans traditionally target users of online financial services; looking for financial data to steal or building botnets out of hacked devices for future attacks. However, over time, several of these banking Trojans have enhanced their functionality, launching new variants and extending...