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...

Convuster: macOS adware now in Rust

Introduction Traditionally, most malicious objects detected on the macOS platform are adware: besides the already familiar Shlayer family, the TOP 10 includes Bnodlero, Cimpli, Adload and Pirrit adware. As a rule, most tend to be written in C, Objective-C or Swift. Recently, however, cybercrimina...

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,...

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...

IAmTheKing and the SlothfulMedia malware family

On October 1, 2020, the DHS CISA agency released information about a malware family called SlothfulMedia, which they attribute to a sophisticated threat actor. We have been tracking this set of activity through our private reporting service, and we would like to provide the community with...

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...

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...

To crypt, or to mine – that is the question

Way back in 2013 our malware analysts spotted the first malicious samples related to the Trojan-Ransom.Win32.Rakhni family. That was the starting point for this long-lived Trojan family, which is still functioning to this day. During that time the malware writers have changed: the way their Troja...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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 -...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

Spam and phishing in 2023

The year in figures 45.60% of all email sent worldwide and 46.59% of all email sent in the Runet the Russian web segment was spam 31.45% of all spam email was sent from Russia Kaspersky Mail Anti-Virus blocked 135,980,457 malicious email attachments Our Anti-Phishing system thwarted 709,590,011...

Digital Education: The cyberrisks of the online classroom

This past spring, as the COVID-19 pandemic took hold, online learning became the new norm as universities and classrooms around the world were forced to close their doors. By April 29, 2020, more than 1.2 billion children across 186 countries were impacted by school closures. Shortly after school...

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...

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...

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...

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...

APT ToddyCat

ToddyCat is a relatively new APT actor that we have not been able to relate to other known actors, responsible for multiple sets of attacks detected since December 2020 against high-profile entities in Europe and Asia. We still have little information about this actor, but we know that its main...

Looking for sophisticated malware in IoT devices

One of the motivations for this post is to encourage other researchers who are interested in this topic to join in, to share ideas and knowledge and to help build more capabilities in order to better protect our smart devices. Research background Smart watches, smart home devices and even smart...

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...

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...

Loncom packer: from backdoors to Cobalt Strike

The previous story described an unusual way of distributing malware under disguise of an update for an expired security certificate. After the story went out, we conducted a detailed analysis of the samples we had obtained, with some interesting findings. All of the malware we examined from the...

Pirate matryoshka

The use of torrent trackers to spread malware is a well-known practice; cybercriminals disguise it as popular software, computer games, media files, and other sought-after content. We detected one such campaign early this year, when The Pirate Bay TPB tracker filled up with harmful files used to...

First Annual Cyberwarcon

Cyberwarcon is a brand new event organized yesterday in Arlington, Virginia, and delivered eight hours of fantastic content. "CyberwarCon is a one-day conference in the Washington D.C. area focused on the specter of destruction, disruption, and malicious influence on our society through cyber...

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...

IT threat evolution Q3 2017

Targeted attacks and malware campaigns Re-enter the dragon In July, we reported on the recent activities of a targeted attack group called 'Spring Dragon' also known as LotusBlossom, whose activities data back to 2012. Spring Dragon makes extensive use of spear-phishing and watering-hole attacks...

iOS exploit chain deploys LightSpy feature-rich malware

A watering hole was discovered on January 10, 2020 utilizing a full remote iOS exploit chain to deploy a feature-rich implant named LightSpy. The site appears to have been designed to target users in Hong Kong based on the content of the landing page. Since the initial activity, we released two...

Octopus-infested seas of Central Asia

For the last two years we have been monitoring a Russian-language cyberespionage actor that focuses on Central Asian users and diplomatic entities. We named the actor DustSquad and have provided private intelligence reports to our customers on four of their campaigns involving custom Android 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...

ShrinkLocker: Turning BitLocker into ransomware

Introduction Attackers always find creative ways to bypass defensive features and accomplish their goals. This can be done with packers, crypters, and code obfuscation. However, one of the best ways of evading detection, as well as maximizing compatibility, is to use the operating systems own...

IT threat evolution in Q3 2023. Non-mobile statistics

IT threat evolution in Q3 2023 IT threat evolution in Q3 2023. Non-mobile statistics IT threat evolution in Q3 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...

Cyberthreats to financial organizations in 2021

It is hard to believe that a year has gone since our last article on financial attacks and our predictions for 2020. It has been a tough one, but first things first. Let us review the forecasts we made at the end of 2019 and see how accurate we were. Then we will go through the key events of 2020...

Cybersecurity Research During the Coronavirus Outbreak and After

Virus outbreaks are always gruesome: people, animals or computer systems get infected within a short time. Of course, viruses spreading across our physical world always take priority over the virtual world. Nevertheless, everyone should keep doing their job, which includes all kinds of malware...

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...