SAS CTF and the many ways to persist a kernel shellcode on Windows 7

On May 18, 2024, Kaspersky's Global Research & Analysis Team GReAT, with the help of its partners, held the qualifying stage of the SAS CTF, an international competition of cybersecurity experts held as part of the Security Analyst Summit conference. More than 800 teams from all over the world to...

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 ...

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...

CosmicStrand: the discovery of a sophisticated UEFI firmware rootkit

Introduction Rootkits are malware implants which burrow themselves in the deepest corners of the operating system. Although on paper they may seem attractive to attackers, creating them poses significant technical challenges and the slightest programming error has the potential to completely cras...

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...

Detecting unknown threats: a honeypot how-to

Catching threats is tricky business, especially in todays threat landscape. To tackle this problem, for many years сybersecurity researchers have been using honeypots – a well-known deception technique in the industry. Dan Demeter, Senior Security Researcher with Kasperskys Global Research and...

IT threat evolution Q2 2020. Mobile statistics

IT threat evolution Q2 2020. Review IT threat evolution Q2 2020. PC statistics These statistics are based on detection verdicts of Kaspersky products received from users who consented to provide statistical data. Quarterly figures According to Kaspersky Security Network, the second quarter saw:...

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...

Cryptocurrency threat predictions for 2019

Kaspersky Security Bulletin: Threat Predictions for 2019 Threat predictions for industrial security in 2019 Cyberthreats to financial institutions 2019: overview and predictions Introduction – key events in 2018 2018 saw cryptocurrency become an established part of many people's lives, and a more...

The rise of mobile banker Asacub

We encountered the Trojan-Banker.AndroidOS.Asacub family for the first time in 2015, when the first versions of the malware were detected, analyzed, and found to be more adept at spying than stealing funds. The Trojan has evolved since then, aided by a large-scale distribution campaign by its...

Dark Tequila Añejo

Dark Tequila is a complex malicious campaign targeting Mexican users, with the primary purpose of stealing financial information, as well as login credentials to popular websites that range from code versioning repositories to public file storage accounts and domain registrars. A multi-stage...

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...

Financial cyberthreats in 2023

Money is what always attracts cybercriminals. A significant share of scam, phishing and malware attacks is about money. With trillions of dollars of digital payments made every year, it is no wonder that attackers target electronic wallets, online shopping accounts and other financial assets,...

The State of Stalkerware in 2023–2024

The State of Stalkerware in 2023 PDF The annual Kaspersky State of Stalkerware report aims to contribute to awareness and a better understanding of how people around the world are impacted by digital stalking. Stalkerware is commercially available software that can be discreetly installed on...

HrServ – Previously unknown web shell used in APT attack

Introduction In the course of our routine investigation, we discovered a DLL file, identified as hrserv.dll, which is a previously unknown web shell exhibiting sophisticated features such as custom encoding methods for client communication and in-memory execution. Our analysis of the sample led t...

How to catch a wild triangle

In the beginning of 2023, thanks to our Kaspersky Unified Monitoring and Analysis Platform KUMA SIEM system, we noticed suspicious network activity that turned out to be an ongoing attack targeting the iPhones and iPads of our colleagues. The moment we understood that there was a clear pattern in...

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...

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...

Text-based fraud: from 419 scams to vishing

E-mail scammers typically combine social engineering with technical skills to bypass spam filters and persuade the recipient to reply. But there is a specific class of attacks that is technically stuck somewhere in the late 90s/early 00s, in the era of CRT monitors and sluggish internet: we are...

BloodyStealer and gaming assets for sale

Earlier this year, we covered the threats related to gaming, and looked at the changes from 2020 and the first half of 2021 in mobile and PC games as well as various phishing schemes that capitalize on video games. Many of the threats faced by gamers are associated with loss of personal data, and...

Web skimming with Google Analytics

Web skimming is a common class of attacks generally aimed at online shoppers. The principle is quite simple: malicious code is injected into the compromised site, which collects and sends user-entered data to a cybercriminal resource. If the attack is successful, the cybercriminals gain access to...

Microcin is here

In February 2020, we observed a Trojan injected into the system process memory on a particular host. The target turned out to be a diplomatic entity. What initially attracted our attention was the enterprise-grade API-like application programming interface programming style. Such an approach is n...

A study of car sharing apps

The growing popularity of car sharing services has led some experts to predict an end to private car ownership in big cities. The statistics appear to back up this claim: for example, in 2017 Moscow saw the car sharing fleet, the number of active users and the number of trips they made almost...

Head Mare and Twelve join forces to attack Russian entities

Introduction In September 2024, a series of attacks targeted Russian companies, revealing indicators of compromise and tactics associated with two hacktivist groups: Head Mare and Twelve. Our investigation showed that Head Mare relied heavily on tools previously associated with Twelve...

Attackers exploiting a patched FortiClient EMS vulnerability in the wild

Introduction During a recent incident response, Kaspersky's GERT team identified a set of TTPs and indicators linked to an attacker that infiltrated a company's networks by targeting a Fortinet vulnerability for which a patch was already available. This vulnerability is an improper filtering of S...

IT threat evolution in Q2 2024. Non-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. Quarterly figures In Q2 2024: Kaspersky solutions blocked over 664 million attacks from various internet sources. The web antivirus...

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...

An educational robot security research

In the modern world, we are surrounded by a multitude of smart devices that simplify our daily lives: smart speakers, robotic vacuum cleaners, automatic pet feeders and even entire smart homes. Toy manufacturers are striving to keep up with these trends, releasing more and more models that can al...

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...

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...

Main phishing and scamming trends and techniques

There are two main types of online fraud aimed at stealing user data and money: phishing and scams. Phishers primarily seek to extract confidential information from victims, such as credentials or bank card details, while scammers deploy social engineering to persuade targets to transfer money on...

Luna and Black Basta — new ransomware for Windows, Linux and ESXi

Introduction In our crimeware reporting service, we analyze the latest crime-related trends we come across. If we look back at what we covered last month, we will see that ransomware surprise, surprise! definitely stands out. In this blog post, we provide several excerpts from last months reports...

Why master YARA: from routine to extreme threat hunting cases. Follow-up

On 3rd of September, we were hosting our "Experts Talk. Why master YARA: from routine to extreme threat hunting cases", in which several experts from our Global Research and Analysis Team and invited speakers shared their best practices on YARA usage. At the same time, we also presented our new...

Redirect auction

Weve already looked at links under old YouTube videos or in Wikipedia articles which at some point turned bad and began pointing to partner program pages, phishing sites, or even malware. It was as if the attackers were purposely buying up domains, but such a scenario always seemed to us too...

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...

Neutrino modification for POS-terminals

From time to time authors of effective and long-lived Trojans and viruses create new modifications and forks of them, like any other software authors. One of the brightest examples amongst them is Zeus Trojan-Spy.Win32.Zbot, based on classification of "Kaspersky Lab", which continues to spawn new...

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...

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...

Story of the Year: global IT outages and supply chain attacks

A faulty update by cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike triggered one of the largest IT outages in history, impacting approximately 8.5 million systems worldwide. This incident serves as a stark reminder of the critical risks posed by global IT disruptions and supply chain weaknesses. With large-scale...

How the Necro Trojan infiltrated Google Play, again

Introduction We sometimes come across modified applications when analyzing suspicious files. These are created in response to user requests for more customization options within the app or for new features that the official versions don't have. Unfortunately, it's not uncommon for popular mods to...

Cinterion EHS5 3G UMTS/HSPA Module Research

Modems play an important role in enabling connectivity for a wide range of devices. This includes not only traditional mobile devices and household appliances, but also telecommunication systems in vehicles, ATMs and Automated Process Control Systems APCS. When integrating the modem, many product...

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...

Satacom delivers browser extension that steals cryptocurrency

Satacom downloader, also known as LegionLoader, is a renowned malware family that emerged in 2019. It is known to use the technique of querying DNS servers to obtain the base64-encoded URL in order to receive the next stage of another malware family currently distributed by Satacom. The Satacom...

Uncommon infection methods—part 2

Introduction Although ransomware is still a hot topic on which we will keep on publishing, we also investigate and publish about other threats. Recently we explored the topic of infection methods, including malvertising and malicious downloads. In this blog post, we provide excerpts from the rece...

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...

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...

Prilex: the pricey prickle credit card complex

Prilex is a Brazilian threat actor that has evolved out of ATM-focused malware into modular point-of-sale malware. The group was behind one of the largest attacks on ATMs in the country, infecting and jackpotting more than 1,000 machines, while also cloning in excess of 28,000 credit cards that...

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...

IT threat evolution in Q1 2022. Mobile statistics

IT threat evolution in Q1 2022 IT threat evolution in Q1 2022. Non-mobile statistics IT threat evolution in Q1 2022. Mobile statistics These statistics are based on detection verdicts of Kaspersky products received from users who consented to providing statistical data. Quarterly figures Accordin...

Threat landscape for industrial automation systems in H1 2021

The H1 2021 ICS threat report at a glance Percentage of ICS computers attacked 1. During the first half of 2021 H1 2021, the percentage of attacked ICS computers was 8%, which was 0.4 percentage points p.p. higher than that for H2 2020. Percentage of ICS computers on which malicious objects were...