Android malware, Android malware and more Android malware

Introduction Malware for mobile devices is something we come across very often. In 2023, our technologies blocked 33.8 million malware, adware, and riskware attacks on mobile devices. One of 2023s most resonant attacks was Operation Triangulation, targeting iOS, but that was rather a unique case...

Understanding Malware-as-a-Service

Money is the root of all evil, including cybercrime. Thus, it was inevitable that malware creators would one day begin not only to distribute malicious programs themselves, but also to sell them to less technically proficient attackers, thereby lowering the threshold for entering the cybercrimina...

Web beacons on websites and in e-mail

There is a vast number of trackers, which gather information about users activities online. For all intents and purposes, we have grown accustomed to online service providers, marketing agencies, and analytical companies tracking our every mouse click, our social posts, browser and streaming...

A look at the 2020–2022 ATM/PoS malware landscape

During the pandemic, lockdowns forced people to stay at home and do their shopping online, which was mirrored in point-of-sale PoS and ATM malware activity, as certain regions saw malicious transactions drop significantly. Now, as we predicted in last years forecast, many are returning to their...

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...

Your new friend, KLara

While doing threat research, teams need a lot of tools and systems to aid their hunting efforts – from systems storing Passive DNS data and automated malware classification to systems allowing researchers to pattern-match a large volume of data in a relatively short period of time. These tools ar...

Mirage Kitten targets Middle East and Africa region with new malware

Introduction Mirage Kitten – also known as UNC1549, Smoke Sandstorm, and Nimbus Manticore – is an advanced persistent threat APT group focused on cyber-espionage operations against aerospace, aviation, defense, and telecommunications sectors across the Middle East and Africa, using highly targete...

Missed incidents, persistent threats, and response gaps: Insights from compromise assessment projects

The following analysis presents the key findings from Kaspersky Compromise Assessment engagements performed in 2025. A compromise assessment is an independent, expert-driven service that examines whether a target network has been compromised. The service combines threat intelligence analysis...

Divide and conquer: how the new Keenadu backdoor exposed links between major Android botnets

In April 2025, we reported on a then-new iteration of the Triada backdoor that had compromised the firmware of counterfeit Android devices sold across major marketplaces. The malware was deployed to the system partitions and hooked into Zygote – the parent process for all Android apps – to infect...

Cobalt Strike Beacon delivered via GitHub and social media

Introduction In the latter half of 2024, the Russian IT industry, alongside a number of entities in other countries, experienced a notable cyberattack. The attackers employed a range of malicious techniques to trick security systems and remain undetected. To bypass detection, they delivered...

Arcane stealer: We want all your data

At the end of 2024, we discovered a new stealer distributed via YouTube videos promoting game cheats. What's intriguing about this malware is how much it collects. It grabs account information from VPN and gaming clients, and all kinds of network utilities like ngrok, Playit, Cyberduck, FileZilla...

Email crypto phishing scams: stealing from hot and cold crypto wallets

The higher the global popularity of cryptocurrencies and the more new ways of storing them, the wider the arsenal of tools used by malicious actors who are after digital money. Scammers tailor the complexity of technology they use and the thoroughness of their efforts to imitate legitimate websit...

Understanding metrics to measure SOC effectiveness

The security operations center SOC plays a critical role in protecting an organizations assets and reputation by identifying, analyzing, and responding to cyberthreats in a timely and effective manner. Additionally, SOCs also help to improve overall security posture by providing add-on services...

Indicators of compromise (IOCs): how we collect and use them

It would hardly be an exaggeration to say that the phrase "indicators of compromise" or IOCs can be found in every report published on the Securelist. Usually after the phrase there are MD5 hashes1, IP addresses and other technical data that should help information security specialists to counter...

WinDealer dealing on the side

Introduction LuoYu is a lesser-known threat actor that has been active since 2008. It primarily goes after targets located in China, such as foreign diplomatic organizations established in the country, members of the academic community, or companies from the defense, logistics and...

QakBot technical analysis

Main description QakBot, also known as QBot, QuackBot and Pinkslipbot, is a banking Trojan that has existed for over a decade. It was found in the wild in 2007 and since then it has been continually maintained and developed. In recent years, QakBot has become one of the leading banking Trojans...

Containers on fire: from container escapes to supply chain attacks

Introduction Modern infrastructures universally rely on containerization to deploy applications, scale services, and build cloud platforms. The use of Docker, Kubernetes, and similar technologies has become the corporate standard for efficient automation. However, as containers grow in popularity...

IT threat evolution in Q1 2026. Mobile statistics

IT threat evolution in Q1 2026. Mobile statistics IT threat evolution in Q1 2026. Non-mobile statistics In the third quarter of 2025, we updated the methodology for calculating statistical indicators based on the Kaspersky Security Network. These changes affected all sections of the report except...

A journey into forgotten Null Session and MS-RPC interfaces, part 2

In the first part of our research, I demonstrated how we revived the concept of no authentication null session after many years. This involved enumerating domain information, such as users, without authentication. I walked you through the entire process, starting with the difference between no-au...

Tusk: unraveling a complex infostealer campaign

Summary Kaspersky Global Emergency Response Team GERT has identified a complex campaign, consisting of multiple sub-campaigns orchestrated by Russian-speaking cybercriminals. The sub-campaigns imitate legitimate projects, slightly modifying names and branding and using multiple social media...

Analysis of user password strength

The processing power of computers keeps growing, helping users to solve increasingly complex problems faster. A side effect is that passwords that were impossible to guess just a few years ago can be cracked by hackers within mere seconds in 2024. For example, the RTX 4090 GPU is capable of...

What to do if your company was mentioned on Darknet?

Every year is abundant with major data leaks, biggest data breaches and hacks drawing massive media attention such as Medibank and Optus data breach, Twitter data breach, and Uber and Rockstar compromise in 2022 and in T-Mobile, MailChimp and OpenAI in 2023. But are we really conscious of the tru...

In search of the Triangulation: triangle_check utility

In our initial blogpost about "Operation Triangulation", we published a comprehensive guide on how to manually check iOS device backups for possible indicators of compromise using MVT. This process takes time and requires manual search for several types of indicators. To automate this process, we...

PseudoManuscrypt: a mass-scale spyware attack campaign

In June 2021, Kaspersky ICS CERT experts identified malware whose loader has some similarities to the Manuscrypt malware, which is part of the Lazarus APT groups arsenal. In 2020, the group used Manuscrypt in attacks on defense enterprises in different countries. These attacks are described in th...

IT threat evolution in Q3 2021. Mobile statistics

IT threat evolution Q3 2021 IT threat evolution in Q3 2021. PC statistics IT threat evolution in Q3 2021. Mobile statistics These statistics are based on detection verdicts of Kaspersky products received from users who consented to provide statistical data. Quarterly figures According to Kaspersk...

Advanced threat predictions for 2022

Over the past 12 months, the style and severity of APT threats has continued to evolve. Despite their constantly changing nature, there is a lot we can learn from recent APT trends to predict what might lie ahead in the coming year. Based on the collective knowledge and insights of our experts, w...

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...

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...

Transparent Tribe: Evolution analysis, part 2

Background + Key findings Transparent Tribe, also known as PROJECTM or MYTHIC LEOPARD, is a highly prolific group whose activities can be traced as far back as 2013. In the last four years, this APT group has never taken time off. They continue to hit their targets, which typically are Indian...

Trojan watch

We continue to research how proliferation of IoT devices affects the daily lives of users and their information security. In our previous study, we touched upon ways of intercepting authentication data using single-board microcomputers. This time, we turned out attention to wearable devices:...

Roaming Mantis dabbles in mining and phishing multilingually

In April 2018, Kaspersky Lab published a blogpost titled 'Roaming Mantis uses DNS hijacking to infect Android smartphones'. Roaming Mantis uses Android malware which is designed to spread via DNS hijacking and targets Android devices. This activity is located mostly in Asia South Korea, Banglades...

Beware of the license manager: how a Schneider Electric software vulnerability puts industrial facilities at risk

About the vulnerability The CVE-2024-2658 vulnerability was discovered in 2024 within the FlexNet Publisher component of the Schneider Electric Floating License Manager. This software handles license management across various Schneider Electric products used for comprehensive industrial automatio...

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...

Mass email campaign with a pinch of targeted spam

Most mass malicious mailing campaigns are very primitive and hardly diverse, with the content limited to several sentences offering the user to download archives that supposedly contain some urgent bills or unpaid fines. The email messages may contain no signatures or logos, with typos and other...

How to recover files encrypted by Yanluowang

Yanluowang is a type of targeted ransomware discovered by the Symantec Threat Hunter team as they were investigating an incident on a large corporate network. Kaspersky experts have found a vulnerability in the Yanluowang encryption algorithm and created a free decryptor to help victims of this...

How we took part in MLSEC and (almost) won

This summer Kaspersky experts took part in the Machine Learning Security Evasion Competition MLSEC — a series of trials testing contestants ability to create and attack machine learning models. The event is comprised of two main challenges — one for attackers, and the other for defenders. The...

Incident response analyst report 2020

Download full report PDF The Incident response analyst report provides insights into incident investigation services conducted by Kaspersky in 2020. We deliver a range of services to help organizations when they are in need: incident response, digital forensics and malware analysis. Data in the...

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...

Spam and phishing in Q1 2018

Quarterly highlights Data leaks Early 2018 will be remembered for a series of data leak scandals. The most high-profile saw Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg grilled by US Congress, with many public figures supporting the Delete Facebook campaign. As a result, Zuckerberg promised to get tough and make...

KSN Report: Ransomware in 2016-2017

This report has been prepared using depersonalized data processed by Kaspersky Security Network KSN. The metrics are based on the number of distinct users of Kaspersky Lab products with the KSN feature enabled, who encountered ransomware at least once in a given period, as well as research into t...

Wardriving assessment across Mexico: Preparing for the 2026 World Cup

Introduction Mexico is one of the host countries for the 2026 FIFA World Cup, with matches to be played in three major cities: Mexico City, Monterrey, and Guadalajara. These locations are expected to see a large influx of international visitors, increasing the potential security risks. Many of...

Exploits and vulnerabilities in Q1 2026

During Q1 2026, the exploit kits leveraged by threat actors to target user systems expanded once again, incorporating new exploits for the Microsoft Office platform, as well as Windows and Linux operating systems. In this report, we dive into the statistics on published vulnerabilities and...

Mobile malware evolution in 2025

Starting from the third quarter of 2025, we have updated our statistical methodology based on the Kaspersky Security Network. These changes affect all sections of the report except for the installation package statistics, which remain unchanged. To illustrate trends between reporting periods, we...

Threat landscape for industrial automation systems in Q3 2025

Statistics across all threats In Q3 2025, the percentage of ICS computers on which malicious objects were blocked decreased from the previous quarter by 0.4 pp to 20.1%. This is the lowest level for the observed period. Percentage of ICS computers on which malicious objects were blocked, Q3 2022–...

Toxic trend: Another malware threat targets DeepSeek

Introduction DeepSeek-R1 is one of the most popular LLMs right now. Users of all experience levels look for chatbot websites on search engines, and threat actors have started abusing the popularity of LLMs. We previously reported attacks with malware being spread under the guise of DeepSeek to...

Download a banker to track your parcel

In late October 2024, a new scheme for distributing a certain Android banking Trojan called "Mamont" was uncovered. The victim would receive an instant message from an unknown sender asking to identify a person in a photo. The attackers would then send what appeared to be the photo itself but was...

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...

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...

Privacy predictions for 2024

In our previous privacy predictions piece, we outlined trends for 2023. As expected, there was a notable increase in the adoption of digital IDs to replace paper documents. For example, California expanded a pilot program for digital drivers licenses, and Russia introduced laws enabling...