Pbot: evolving adware

The adware PBot PythonBot got its name because its core modules are written in Python. It was more than a year ago that we detected the first member of this family. Since then, we have encountered several modifications of the program, one of which went beyond adware by installing and running a...

Tax refund, or How to lose your remaining cash

Every year, vast numbers of people around the globe relish the delightful prospect of filling out tax returns, applying for tax refunds, etc. Given that tax authorities and their taxpayers are moving online, it's no surprise to find cybercriminals hard on their heels. By spoofing trusted governme...

A deep dive into the most interesting incident response cases of last year

In 2023, Kasperskys Global Emergency Response Team GERT participated in services around the world that allowed our experts to gain insight into various threats and techniques used by APT groups, common crimeware and, in some cases, internal adversaries. As we highlighted in our annual report, the...

REvil ransomware attack against MSPs and its clients around the world

An attack perpetrated by REvil aka Sodinokibi ransomware gang against Managed Service Providers MSPs and their clients was discovered on July 2. Some of the victims have reportedly been compromised through a popular MSP software which led to encryption of their customers. The total number of...

Mokes and Buerak distributed under the guise of security certificates

The technique of distributing malware under the guise of legitimate software updates is not new. As a rule, cybercriminals invite potential victims to install a new version of a browser or Adobe Flash Player. However, we recently discovered a new approach to this well-known method: visitors to...

Titanium: the Platinum group strikes again

Platinum is one of the most technologically advanced APT actors with a traditional focus on the APAC region. During recent analysis we discovered Platinum using a new backdoor that we call Titanium named after a password to one of the self-executable archives. Titanium is the final result of a...

Windows CLFS and five exploits used by ransomware operators (Exploit #5 – CVE-2023-28252)

This is part six of our study about the Common Log File System CLFS and five vulnerabilities in this Windows OS component that have been used in ransomware attacks throughout the year. Please read the previous parts first if you havent already. You can go to other parts using this table of...

Threat landscape for smart buildings

The Kaspersky Industrial Cybersecurity Conference 2019 takes place this week in Sochi, the seventh such conference dedicated to the problems of industrial cybersecurity. Among other things, the conference will address the security of automation systems in buildings — industrial versions of the no...

Goodfellas, the Brazilian carding scene is after you

There are three ways of doing things in the malware business: the right way, the wrong way and the way Brazilians do it. From the early beginnings, using skimmers on ATMs, compromising point of sales systems, or even modifying the hardware of processing devices, Latin America has been a fertile...

Tales from the blockchain

Cryptocurrency has gradually evolved from an element of a new world, utopian economy to a business that has affected even those sectors of society least involved in information technology. At the same time, it has acquired a fair number of "undesirable" supporters who aim to enrich themselves at...

DeftTorero: tactics, techniques and procedures of intrusions revealed

Earlier this year, we started hunting for possible new DeftTorero aka Lebanese Cedar, Volatile Cedar artifacts. This threat actor is believed to originate from the Middle East and was publicly disclosed to the cybersecurity community as early as 2015. Notably, no other intelligence was shared unt...

Sunburst backdoor – code overlaps with Kazuar

Introduction On December 13, 2020, FireEye published a blog post detailing a supply chain attack leveraging Orion IT, an infrastructure monitoring and management platform by SolarWinds. In parallel, Volexity published an article with their analysis of related attacks, attributed to an actor named...

Steam-powered scammers

Digital game distribution services have not only simplified the sale of games themselves, but provided developers with additional monetization levers. For example, in-game items, such as skins, equipment, and other character-enhancing elements as well as those that help one show up, can be sold f...

Data collectors

Who owns data owns the world. And with the Internet taking over much of our daily lives, it has become far easier and faster to receive, collect, and analyze data. The average user cannot even imagine how much data gets collected on them. Besides technical information for example, about a...

Financial threats in H1 2019

Introduction and methodology Financial cyberthreats are malicious programs that attack users of online banking services, electronic money, cryptocurrency and other similar services, as well as threats aimed at gaining access to financial organizations and their infrastructure. Kaspersky experts...

An (un)documented Word feature abused by attackers

A little while back we were investigating the malicious activities of the Freakyshelly targeted attack and came across spear phishing emails that had some interesting documents attached to them. They were in OLE2 format and contained no macros, exploits or any other active content. However, a clo...

IT threat evolution in Q2 2023. Non-mobile statistics

IT threat evolution in Q2 2023 IT threat evolution in Q2 2023. Non-mobile statistics IT threat evolution in Q2 2023. Mobile statistics These statistics are based on detection verdicts of Kaspersky products and services received from users who consented to providing statistical data. Quarterly...

Cookiethief: a cookie-stealing Trojan for Android

We recently discovered a new strain of Android malware. The Trojan detected as: Trojan-Spy.AndroidOS.Cookiethief turned out to be quite simple. Its main task was to acquire root rights on the victim device, and transfer cookies used by the browser and Facebook app to the cybercriminals' server...

Hello! My name is Dtrack

Our investigation into the Dtrack RAT actually began with a different activity. In the late summer of 2018, we discovered ATMDtrack, a piece of banking malware targeting Indian banks. Further analysis showed that the malware was designed to be planted on the victim's ATMs, where it could read and...

Kimsuky targets organizations with PebbleDash-based tools

Over the past few months, we have conducted an in-depth analysis of specific activity clusters of Kimsuky aka APT43, Ruby Sleet, Black Banshee, Sparkling Pisces, Velvet Chollima, and Springtail, a prolific Korean-speaking threat actor. Our research revealed notable tactical shifts throughout...

How we developed our simple Harbour decompiler

https://github.com/KasperskyLab/hbdec Every once in a while we get a request that leaves us scratching our heads. With these types of requests, existing tools are usually not enough and we have to create our own custom tooling to solve the "problem". One such request dropped onto our desk at the...

AZORult++: Rewriting history

The AZORult Trojan is one of the most commonly bought and sold stealers in Russian forums. Despite the relatively high price tag $100, buyers like AZORult for its broad functionality for example, the use of .bit domains as C&C servers to ensure owner anonymity and to make it difficult to block th...

ATMii: a small but effective ATM robber

While some criminals blow up ATMs to steal cash, others use less destructive methods, such as infecting the ATM with malware and then stealing the money. We have written about this phenomenon extensively in the past and today we can add another family of malware to the list - Backdoor.Win32.ATMii...

Operation SyncHole: Lazarus APT goes back to the well

We have been tracking the latest attack campaign by the Lazarus group since last November, as it targeted organizations in South Korea with a sophisticated combination of a watering hole strategy and vulnerability exploitation within South Korean software. The campaign, dubbed "Operation SyncHole...

A patched Windows attack surface is still exploitable

On August 8, 2023, Microsoft finally released a kernel patch for a class of vulnerabilities affecting Microsoft Windows since 2015. The vulnerabilities lead to elevation of privilege EoP, which allows an account with user rights to gain SYSTEM privileges on a vulnerable host. The root cause of th...

Researchers call for a determined path to cybersecurity

Despite our continuous research efforts to detect cyberattacks and enable defense, we often feel that we, as members of a global community, are failing to achieve an adequate level of cybersecurity. This is threatening the proper development and use of information technologies and digital assets,...

ATM robber WinPot: a slot machine instead of cutlets

Automation of all kinds is there to help people with their routine work, make it faster and simpler. Although ATM fraud is a very peculiar sort of work, some cybercriminals spend a lot of effort to automate it. In March 2018, we came across a fairly simple but effective piece of malware named...

DDoS attacks in Q1 2018

News overview In early January, it was reported that an amateur hacker had come close to pulling off a botnet attack using "improvised" materials. Armed with information gleaned from hacker forums, the DIYer created a Trojan using a zero-day exploit in Huawei routers and released it online. The...

The devil’s in the Rich header

In our previous blog, we detailed our findings on the attack against the Pyeongchang 2018 Winter Olympics. For this investigation, our analysts were provided with administrative access to one of the affected servers, located in a hotel based in Pyeongchang county, South Korea. In addition, we...

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...

Targeted ransomware: it’s not just about encrypting your data!

When we talk about ransomware, we need to draw a line between what it used to be and what it currently is. Why? Because nowadays ransomware is not just about encrypting data – its primarily about data exfiltration. After that, its about data encryption and leaving convincing proof that the attack...

A predatory tale: Who’s afraid of the thief?

In mid-February, Kaspersky Lab received a request for incident response from one of its clients. The individual who initially reported the issue to our client refused to disclose the origin of the indicator that they shared. What we do know is that it was a screenshot from one of the client's...

DDoS attacks in Q1 2020

News overview Since the beginning of 2020, due to the COVID-2019 pandemic, life has shifted almost entirely to the Web — people worldwide are now working, studying, shopping, and having fun online like never before. This is reflected in the goals of recent DDoS attacks, with the most targeted...

Unkillable xHelper and a Trojan matryoshka

It was the middle of last year that we detected the start of mass attacks by the xHelper Trojan on Android smartphones, but even now the malware remains as active as ever. The main feature of xHelper is entrenchment — once it gets into the phone, it somehow remains there even after the user delet...

ToddyCat: Keep calm and check logs

ToddyCat is an advanced APT actor that we described in a previous publication last year. The group started its activities in December 2020 and has been responsible for multiple sets of attacks against high-profile entities in Europe and Asia. Our first publication was focused on their main tools,...

Hiding in plain sight: PhantomLance walks into a market

In July 2019, Dr. Web reported about a backdoor trojan in Google Play, which appeared to be sophisticated and unlike common malware often uploaded for stealing victims' money or displaying ads. So, we conducted an inquiry of our own, discovering a long-term campaign, which we dubbed "PhantomLance...

An advertising dropper in Google Play

Recently, the popular CamScanner – Phone PDF creator app caught our attention. According to Google Play, it has been installed more than 100 million times. The developers position it as a solution for scanning and managing digitized documents, but negative user reviews that have been left over th...

Operation ShadowHammer

Earlier today, Motherboard published a story by Kim Zetter on Operation ShadowHammer, a newly discovered supply chain attack that leveraged ASUS Live Update software. While the investigation is still in progress and full results and technical paper will be published during SAS 2019 conference in...

Gas is too expensive? Let’s make it cheap!

A few months ago, while undertaking unrelated research into online connected devices, we uncovered something surprising and realized almost immediately that we could be looking at a critical security threat. What we found was a simple purple web interface that was in fact a link to a real-life ga...

Satoshi Bomb

Let us discuss what defines the profitability of bitcoin mining, what principles for mining speed adaptation were initially embedded into it, and why these principles can lead to the failure of the cryptocurrency in the long run. We assume that the reader has an idea of basic Bitcoin mechanics su...

Trusted relationship attacks: trust, but verify

IT outsourcing market continues to demonstrate strong growth globally – such services are becoming increasingly popular. But along with the advantages, such as saved time and resources, delegating non-core tasks creates new challenges in terms of information security. By providing third-party...

YARA webinar follow up

If you read my previous blogpost Hunting APTs with YARA then you probably know about the webinar we conducted on March 31, 2020, showcasing some of our experience in developing and using YARA rules for malware hunting. In case you missed the webinar - or if you attended and want to re-watch it -...

MonitorMinor: vicious stalkerware?

Updated March 17th, 2020 The other day, our Android traps ensnared an interesting specimen of commercial software that is positioned as a parental control app, but may also be used to secretly monitor family members or colleagues – or, in other words, for stalking. Such apps are often called...

Kaspersky Security Bulletin 2019. Statistics

All the statistics used in this report were obtained using Kaspersky Security Network KSN, a distributed antivirus network that works with various anti-malware protection components. The data was collected from KSN users who agreed to provide it. Millions of Kaspersky product users from 203...

APT review of the year

What were the most interesting developments in terms of APT activity throughout the year and what can we learn from them? Not an easy question to answer; everybody has partial visibility and it's never possible to really understand the motivations of some attacks or the developments behind them...

Armored Likho digging a snake pit: inside the covert BusySnake Stealer campaign

Introduction During our routine threat monitoring, we uncovered a new phishing campaign tied to a previously unknown APT group that we dubbed Armored Likho also known as Eagle Werewolf based on circumstantial evidence. This targeted campaign focuses heavily on government agencies and the electric...

Neutralization reaction

Incident Response Guide PDF Despite there being no revolutionary changes to the cyberthreat landscape in the last few years, the growing informatization of business processes provides cybercriminals with numerous opportunities for attacks. They are focusing on targeted attacks and learning to use...

IT threat evolution Q2 2022

IT threat evolution in Q2 2022 IT threat evolution in Q2 2022. Non-mobile statistics IT threat evolution in Q2 2022. Mobile statistics Targeted attacks New technique for installing fileless malware Earlier this year, we discovered a malicious campaign that employed a new technique for installing...

COMpfun authors spoof visa application with HTTP status-based Trojan

You may remember that in autumn 2019 we published a story about how a COMpfun successor known as Reductor infected files on the fly to compromise TLS traffic. If you're wondering whether the actor behind the malware is still developing new features, the answer is yes. Later in November 2019 our...

Bots and botnets in 2018

Due to the wide media coverage of incidents involving Mirai and other specialized botnets, their activities have become largely associated with DDoS attacks. Yet this is merely the tip of the iceberg, and botnets are used widely not only to carry out DDoS attacks, but to steal various user...