Threat in your browser: what dangers innocent-looking extensions hold for users

Whether you want to block ads, keep a to-do list or check your spelling, browser extensions allow you to do all of the above and more, improving convenience, productivity and efficiency for free, which is why they are so popular. Chrome, Safari, Mozilla — these and many other major Web browsers —...

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...

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...

5G technology predictions 2020

Kaspersky Security Bulletin 2019. Advanced threat predictions for 2020 Cybersecurity of connected healthcare 2020: Overview and predictions Corporate security prediction 2020 Cyberthreats to financial institutions 2020: Overview and predictions It is estimated that data will reach 175 zettabytes...

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...

What are botnets downloading?

Spam mailshots with links to malware and bots downloading other malware are just a couple of botnet deployment scenarios. The choice of infectious payload is limited only by the imagination of the botnet operator or customer. It might be a ransomware, a banker, a miner, a backdoor, the list goes...

Threat Predictions for Cryptocurrencies in 2018

The landscape in 2017 Today, cryptocurrency is no longer only for computer geeks and IT pros. It's starting to affect people's daily life more than they realize. At the same time, it is fast becoming an attractive target for cybercriminals. Some cyberthreats have been inherited from e-payments,...

Threat Predictions for Financial Services and Fraud in 2018

The landscape in 2017 In 2017 we've seen fraud attacks in financial services become increasingly account-centric. Customer data is a key enabler for large-scale fraud attacks and the frequency of data breaches among other successful attack types has provided cybercriminals with valuable sources o...

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...

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...

Head Mare: adventures of a unicorn in Russia and Belarus

Head Mare is a hacktivist group that first made itself known in 2023 on the social network X formerly Twitter1. In their public posts, the attackers reveal information about some of their victims, including organization names, internal documents stolen during attacks, and screenshots of desktops...

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...

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...

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...

Consumer cyberthreats: predictions for 2024

In our previous summary of consumer predictions, we delved into tactics that we expected scammers and cybercriminals to use in 2023. As anticipated, they capitalized on major events and cultural crazes, using tricks that ranged from fake Barbie doll deals to exploiting the buzz around long-awaite...

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 ...

BlueNoroff introduces new methods bypassing MoTW

BlueNoroff group is a financially motivated threat actor eager to profit from its cyberattack capabilities. We have published technical details of how this notorious group steals cryptocurrency before. We continue to track the groups activities and this October we observed the adoption of new...

ICS threat predictions for 2021

We present our vision of what challenges industrial cybersecurity will soon be or already is facing, and what to expect from cybercriminals in 2021. Random infections 1. Infections will tend to be less random or have non-random follow-ups, as cybercriminals have spent the past several years...

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...

Roaming Mantis, part V

Kaspersky has continued to track the Roaming Mantis campaign. The group's attack methods have improved and new targets continuously added in order to steal more funds. The attackers' focus has also shifted to techniques that avoid tracking and research: whitelist for distribution, analysis...

Cybersecurity of connected healthcare 2020: Overview and predictions

Kaspersky Security Bulletin 2019. Advanced threat predictions for 2020 5G technology predictions 2020 Corporate security prediction 2020 Cyberthreats to financial institutions 2020: Overview and predictions More than two years after the infamous Wannacry ransomware crippled medical facilities and...

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,...

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...

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 – ...

How cybercrime is impacting SMBs in 2023

According to the United Nations, small and medium-sized businesses SMBs constitute 90 percent of all companies and contribute 60 to 70 percent of all jobs in the world. They generate 50 percent of global gross domestic product and form the backbone of most countries economies. Hit hardest by the...

DeathStalker targets legal entities with new Janicab variant

Just to clarify, the above subheading isnt a normal quote, but a message that Janicab malware attempted to decode in its newest use of YouTube dead-drop resolvers DDRs. While hunting for less common Deathstalker intrusions that use the Janicab malware family, we identified a new Janicab variant...

The state of cryptojacking in the first three quarters of 2022

Cryptocurrency prices were dropping from the end of 2021 and throughout the first half of 2022. Although finance experts and retail investors estimate crypto to have a solid chance of recovery in the long term, at the time of writing this report the prices remain low. However, cybercriminals are...

VileRAT: DeathStalker’s continuous strike at foreign and cryptocurrency exchanges

In late August 2020, we published an overview of DeathStalkers profile and malicious activities, including their Janicab, Evilnum and PowerSing campaigns PowerPepper was later documented in 2020. Notably, we exposed why we believe the threat actor may fit a group of mercenaries, offering...

DDoS attacks in Q2 2022

News overview Politically-motivated cyberattacks dominated the DDoS landscape in the second quarter of 2022 just as they did in the previous reporting period. ALtahrea Team, a group targeting NATO and its partners, attacked public transportation websites in Israel and the United Kingdom. Israel s...

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 Bad Luck BlackCat

In early December 2021, a new ransomware actor started advertising its services on a Russian underground forum. They presented themselves as ALPHV, a new generation Ransomware-as-a-Service RaaS group. Shortly afterwards, they dialed up their activity, infecting numerous corporate victims around t...

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...

How we hacked our colleague’s smart home

In this article, we publish the results of our study of the Fibaro Home Center smart home. We identified vulnerabilities in Fibaro Home Center 2 and Fibaro Home Center Lite version 4.540, as well as vulnerabilities in the online API. An offer you cannot refuse The backbone of any technology compa...

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...

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...

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...

Minas – on the way to complexity

Sometimes when investigating an infection and focusing on a targeted attack, we come across something we were not expecting. The case described below is one such occurrence. In June 2022, we found a suspicious shellcode running in the memory of a system process. We decided to dig deeper and...

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...

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...

IT threat evolution Q1 2022

IT threat evolution in Q1 2022 IT threat evolution in Q1 2022. Non-mobile statistics IT threat evolution in Q1 2022. Mobile statistics Targeted attacks MoonBounce: the dark side of UEFI firmware Late last year, we became aware of a UEFI firmware-level compromise through logs from our firmware...

Kaspersky Security Bulletin 2020. 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 have given their consent to it being sent to KSN. Millions of Kaspersky users around the globe...

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...

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...

Copy-paste heist or clipboard-injector attacks on cryptousers

It is often the case that something new is just a reincarnation of something old. We have come across a series of clipboard injection attacks on cryptocurrency users, which emerged starting from September 2022. Although we have written about a similar malware attack in 2017 in one of our blogpost...

Reassessing cyberwarfare. Lessons learned in 2022

At this point, it has become cliché to say that nothing in 2022 turned out the way we expected. We left the COVID-19 crisis behind hoping for a long-awaited return to normality and were immediately plunged into the chaos and uncertainty of a twentieth-century-style military conflict that posed...

Self-spreading stealer attacks gamers via YouTube

UPD: A notice on Googles response to the issue was added. An unusual malicious bundle a collection of malicious programs distributed in the form of a single installation file, self-extracting archive or other file with installer-type functionality recently caught our eye. Its main payload is the...

Telehealth: a new frontier in medicine—and security

Telehealth today doesnt just involve chatting with a doctor via a video-conferencing application. Its become an entire collection of rapidly developing technologies and products that includes specialized applications, wearable devices, implantable sensors, and cloud databases, many of which have...

Healthcare security in 2021

The pandemic has turned 2020 into a year of medicine and information technology. The remarkable surge in the criticality level of medical infrastructure, coupled with feasible across-the-board digitalization, led to many of our last years predictions coming true much sooner than expected. As we...

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...

Kaspersky Security Bulletin 2018. Story of the year: miners

Kaspersky Security Bulletin 2018. Statistics Kaspersky Security Bulletin 2018. Top security stories Kaspersky Security Bulletin 2018. Threat Predictions for 2019 Cryptocurrency miners that infect the computers of unsuspecting users essentially operate according to the same business model as...