Summer 2021: Friday Night Funkin’, Måneskin and pop it

This summer, several events that were postponed from 2020 due to the pandemic took place. Some of them interested children, while others barely registered by them. It is worth noting that childrens hobbies typically do not change from winter to summer — the only difference is that they devote mor...

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...

Dvmap: the first Android malware with code injection

In April 2017 we started observing new rooting malware being distributed through the Google Play Store. Unlike other rooting malware, this Trojan not only installs its modules into the system, it also injects malicious code into the system runtime libraries. Kaspersky Lab products detect it as...

Triada strikes back

Introduction Older versions of Android contained various vulnerabilities that allowed gaining root access to the device. Many malicious programs exploited these to elevate their system privileges and gain persistence. The notorious Triada Trojan also used this attack vector. With time, the...

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...

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 ...

Crimeware and financial cyberthreats in 2023

A look back on the year 2022 and what to expect in 2023 Every year, as part of the Kaspersky Security Bulletin, we predict which major trends will be followed in the coming year by attackers, who target financial organizations. The predictions, based on our extensive experience, help individuals...

Choosing Christmas gifts for kids: Squid Game and Huggy Wuggy are trending

As the holidays approach, many of us are trying to figure out what to buy our family and friends. We especially want to make this time of year festive for kids. If you want to delight children, you need to know what theyre interested in: what LEGO set theyre dreaming about, what superheroes theyd...

Privacy predictions 2022

We no longer rely on the Internet just for entertainment or chatting with friends. Global connectivity underpins the most basic functions of our society, such as logistics, government services and banking. Consumers connect to businesses via instant messengers and order food delivery instead of...

SAS 2021: Learning to ChaCha with APT41

Straight from the sunny UK to the stage of SAS-at-Home 2021, John Southworth PwC will be giving some insights about the threat actor APT41, also known as Red Kelpie and Winnti. Starting with APT10 Red Apollo, the presentation will dance you through the malware used by APT41 – the Motnug loader an...

DarkHalo after SolarWinds: the Tomiris connection

Background In December 2020, news of the SolarWinds incident took the world by storm. While supply-chain attacks were already a documented attack vector leveraged by a number of APT actors, this specific campaign stood out due to the extreme carefulness of the attackers and the high-profile natur...

Oh, what a boot-iful mornin’

In mid-April, our threat monitoring systems detected malicious files being distributed under the name "on the new initiative of the World Bank in connection with the coronavirus pandemic" in Russian with the extension EXE or RAR. Inside the files was the well-known Rovnix bootkit. There is nothin...

Dozens of malicious wallpapers found on Steam Workshop: gamers’ accounts at risk

Since late 2025, malware has been spreading rapidly through the Steam Workshop, the gaming platform's built-in service for players to create and share custom content. The attackers are primarily targeting gamers in China and Russia, aiming to hijack their accounts. To pull this off, they are...

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...

Hunting for Mythic in network traffic

Post-exploitation frameworks Threat actors frequently employ post-exploitation frameworks in cyberattacks to maintain control over compromised hosts and move laterally within the organization's network. While they once favored closed-source frameworks, such as Cobalt Strike and Brute Ratel C4,...

IT threat evolution in Q2 2025. Mobile statistics

IT threat evolution in Q2 2025. Mobile statistics IT threat evolution in Q2 2025. Non-mobile statistics The mobile section of our quarterly cyberthreat report includes statistics on malware, adware, and potentially unwanted software for Android, as well as descriptions of the most notable threats...

New SteelFox Trojan mimics software activators, stealing sensitive data and mining cryptocurrency

Introduction In August 2024, our team identified a new crimeware bundle, which we named "SteelFox". Delivered via sophisticated execution chains including shellcoding, this threat abuses Windows services and drivers. It spreads via forums posts, torrent trackers and blogs, imitating popular...

Developing and prioritizing a detection engineering backlog based on MITRE ATT&CK

Detection is a traditional type of cybersecurity control, along with blocking, adjustment, administrative and other controls. Whereas before 2015 teams asked themselves what it was that they were supposed to detect, as MITRE ATT&CK evolved, SOCs were presented with practically unlimited space for...

A hack in hand is worth two in the bush

The ongoing conflict between Israel and Hamas has also extended into the digital domain. The involvement of hackers highlights the evolving nature of warfare in the 21st century, where traditional military operations are complemented by sophisticated cyber tactics, and where the boundaries betwee...

Good, Perfect, Best: how the analyst can enhance penetration testing results

Penetration testing is something that many of those who know what a pentest is see as a search for weak spots and well-known vulnerabilities in clients infrastructure, and a bunch of copied-and-pasted recommendations on how to deal with the security holes thus discovered. In truth, it is not so...

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...

Black Friday shoppers beware: online threats so far in 2022

The shopping event of the year, Black Friday, is almost here, and while the big day does not officially arrive until Friday, November 25th, deals are already starting. The day kickstarts the frenzied holiday shopping season with eye-catching promotional deals that lure shoppers into spending more...

The life cycle of phishing pages

Introduction In this study, we analyzed how long phishing pages survive as well as the signs they show when they become inactive. In addition to the general data, we provided a number of options for classifying phishing pages according to formal criteria and analyzed the results for each of them...

Nhash: petty pranks with big finances

According to our data, cryptocurrency miners are rapidly gaining in popularity. In an earlier publication we noted that cybercriminals were making use of social engineering to install this sort of software on users' computers. This time, we'd like to dwell more on how exactly the computers of...

Kaspersky Security Bulletin: Story of the year 2017

Download the Kaspersky Security Bulletin: Story of the year 2017 Introduction: what we learned in 2017 In 2017, the ransomware threat suddenly and spectacularly evolved. Three unprecedented outbreaks transformed the landscape for ransomware, probably forever. The attacks targeted businesses and...

How an image could compromise your Mac: understanding an ExifTool vulnerability (CVE-2026-3102)

Introduction ExifTool is a widely adopted utility for reading and writing metadata in image, PDF, audio, and video files. It is available both as a standalone command-line application and as a library that can be embedded in other software. In this article, we break down CVE-2026-3102, an ExifToo...

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–...

Threat landscape for industrial automation systems. Statistics for H1 2023

Global threat statistics In the first half of 2023, the percentage of ICS computers on which malicious objects were blocked decreased from H2 2022 by just 0.3 pp to 34%. Percentage of ICS computers on which malicious objects were blocked, by half year That said, he percentage of attacked ICS...

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...

Business on the dark web: deals and regulatory mechanisms

Download the full version of the report PDF Hundreds of deals are struck on the dark web every day: cybercriminals buy and sell data, provide illegal services to one another, hire other individuals to work as "employees" with their groups, and so on. Large sums of money are often on the table. To...

Policy trends: where are we today on regulation in cyberspace?

This is the first edition of our policy analysis and observations of trends in the regulation of cyberspace, and cybersecurity, within the Kaspersky Security Bulletin. This year so far has been very challenging: increased tensions in international relations have had a huge impact on both cyberspa...

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...

Schroedinger’s Pet(ya)

UPDATE June 28th, 2017: After an analysis of the encryption routine of the malware used in the Petya/ExPetr attacks, we have thought that the threat actor cannot decrypt victims' disk, even if a payment was made. It appears this malware campaign was designed as a wiper pretending to be ransomware...

Ztorg: from rooting to SMS

I've been monitoring Google Play Store for new Ztorg Trojans since September 2016, and have so far found several dozen new malicious apps. All of them were rooting malware that used exploits to gain root rights on the infected device. Then, in the second half of May 2017 I found one that wasn't...

The Gentlemen are knocking: сustom backdoors and evolving tactics

Introduction This year saw the emergence of The Gentlemen, a prominent example of a group operating under the ransomware-as-a-service RaaS model. Although our initial assessment suggested the group first appeared in mid-2025, it actually started ramping up its activities at the beginning of 2026...

Analysis of the latest Mirai wave exploiting TBK DVR devices with CVE-2024-3721

The abuse of known security flaws to deploy bots on vulnerable systems is a widely recognized problem. Many automated bots constantly search the web for known vulnerabilities in servers and devices connected to the internet, especially those running popular services. These bots often carry Remote...

Threat landscape for industrial automation systems in Q1 2025

Trends Relative stability from quarter to quarter. The percentage of ICS computers on which malicious objects were blocked remained unchanged from Q4 2024 at 21.9%. Over the last three quarters, the value has ranged from 22.0% to 21.9%. The quarterly figures are decreasing from year to year. Sinc...

Trojans disguised as AI: Cybercriminals exploit DeepSeek’s popularity

Introduction Among the most significant events in the AI world in early 2025 was the release of DeepSeek-R1 – a powerful reasoning large language model LLM with open weights. It's available both for local use and as a free service. Since DeepSeek was the first service to offer access to a reasoni...

Angry Likho: Old beasts in a new forest

Angry Likho referred to as Sticky Werewolf by some vendors is an APT group we've been monitoring since 2023. It bears a strong resemblance to Awaken Likho, which we've analyzed before, so we classified it within the Likho malicious activity cluster. However, Angry Likho's attacks tend to be...

Threat landscape for industrial automation systems in Q3 2024

Statistics across all threats In the third quarter of 2024, the percentage of ICS computers on which malicious objects were blocked decreased by 1.5 pp to 22% when compared to the previous quarter. Percentage of ICS computers on which malicious objects were blocked, by quarter, 2022–2024 Compared...

EastWind campaign: new CloudSorcerer attacks on government organizations in Russia

In late July 2024, we detected a series of ongoing targeted cyberattacks on dozens of computers at Russian government organizations and IT companies. The threat actors infected devices using phishing emails with malicious shortcut attachments. These shortcuts were used to deliver malware that...

DinodasRAT Linux implant targeting entities worldwide

DinodasRAT, also known as XDealer, is a multi-platform backdoor written in C++ that offers a range of capabilities. This RAT allows the malicious actor to surveil and harvest sensitive data from a targets computer. A Windows version of this RAT was used in attacks against government entities in...

Phishing with hacked sites

Phishers want their fake pages to cost minimum effort but generate as much income as possible, so they eagerly use various tools and techniques to evade detection, and save time and money. Examples include automation with phishing kits or Telegram bots. Another tactic, popular with scammers big a...

IT threat evolution in Q3 2022. Mobile statistics

IT threat evolution in Q3 2022 IT threat evolution in Q3 2022. Non-mobile statistics IT threat evolution in Q3 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...

Cybersecurity threats: what awaits us in 2023?

Knowing what the future holds can help with being prepared for emerging threats better. Every year, Kaspersky experts prepare forecasts for different industries, helping them to build a strong defense against any cybersecurity threats they might face in the foreseeable future. Those predictions...

Uncommon infection and malware propagation methods

Introduction We are often asked how targets are infected with malware. Our answer is nearly always the same: spear phishing. There will be exceptions, naturally, as we will encounter RCE vulnerabilities every now and then, or if the attacker is already on the network, they will use tools like...

External attack surface and ongoing cybercriminal activity in APAC region

To prevent a cyberattack, it is vital to know what the attack surface for your organization is. To be prepared to repel the attacks of cybercriminals, businesses around the world collect threat intelligence themselves or subscribe for threat intelligence services. Continuous threat research enabl...

The hateful eight: Kaspersky’s guide to modern ransomware groups’ TTPs

These days ransomware analysis gets a lot of coverage in commercial and public reports, with vendors issuing dozens of ransomware-related publications each year. These reports provide analysis on specific malware families or new samples, describe the activities of a particular ransomware group,...

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...

Threat Landscape for Industrial Automation Systems in H1 2017

Kaspersky Lab Industrial Control Systems Cyber Emergency Response Team Kaspersky Lab ICS CERT publishes the results of its research on the threat landscape for industrial automation systems for the first six months of 2017. All statistical data used in this report was collected using the Kaspersk...