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...

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...

Argamal: Malware hidden in hentai games

In April 2026, we discovered a new malware campaign targeting players of "hentai" games. Once launched, the infected games install a previously unknown malicious implant on the user's machine. After a few days, the implant downloads and executes a Trojan, resulting in full system compromise and...

Pig in a poke: smartphone adware

Our support team continues to receive more and more requests from users complaining about intrusive ads on their smartphones from unknown sources. In some cases, the solution is quite simple. In others, the task is far harder: the adware plants itself in the system partition, and trying to get ri...

Kids on the Web in 2020

Technology is what is saving us from a complete change in the way of life in a world of a raging pandemic. It keeps the educational process going, relieves the shortage of human communication and helps us to live life as fully as possible given the isolation and social distancing. Many adults, an...

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...

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...

Bitscout – The Free Remote Digital Forensics Tool Builder

Being a malware researcher means you are always busy with the struggle against mountains of malware and cyberattacks around the world. Over the past decade, the number of daily new malware findings raised up to unimaginable heights: with hundreds of thousands of malware samples per day! However,...

Mallox ransomware: in-depth analysis and evolution

Mallox is a sophisticated and dangerous family of malicious software that has been causing significant damage to organizations worldwide. In 2023, this ransomware strain demonstrated an uptick in attacks, the overall number of discovered Mallox samples exceeding 700. In the first half of 2024, th...

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...

Cyberthreats to financial institutions 2019: overview and predictions

Kaspersky Security Bulletin: Threat Predictions for 2019 Threat predictions for industrial security in 2019 Cryptocurrency threat predictions for 2019 Introduction – key events in 2018 The past year has been extremely eventful in terms of the digital threats faced by financial institutions:...

New macOS Trojan-Proxy piggybacking on cracked software

Illegally distributed software historically has served as a way to sneak malware onto victims devices. Oftentimes, users are not willing to pay for software tools they need, so they go searching the Web for a "free lunch". They are an excellent target for cybercriminals who realize that an...

BlueNoroff introduces new methods bypassing MoTW

BlueNoroff group is a financially motivated threat actor eager to profit from its cyberattack capabilities. We have published technical details of how this notorious group steals cryptocurrency before. We continue to track the groups activities and this October we observed the adoption of new...

CowerSnail, from the creators of SambaCry

We recently reported about SambaCry, a new family of Linux Trojans exploiting a vulnerability in the Samba protocol. A week later, Kaspersky Lab analysts managed to detect a malicious program for Windows that was apparently created by the same group responsible for SambaCry. It was the common C&C...

Ymir: new stealthy ransomware in the wild

Introduction In a recent incident response case, we discovered a new and notable ransomware family in active use by the attackers, which we named "Ymir". The artifact has interesting features, including a large set of operations performed in memory with the help of the malloc , memmove and memcmp...

Gaming-related cyberthreats in 2023: Minecrafters targeted the most

Introduction and trends The gaming industry continues growing. The Newzoo report for 2023 reveals that two in five — more than three billion — across the globe are gamers, which is 6.3 percent more than last year. Globally, gaming revenue amounts to an estimated US$242.39 billion, with almost hal...

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...

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...

IoC detection experiments with ChatGPT

ChatGPT is a groundbreaking chatbot powered by the neural network-based language model text-davinci-003 and trained on a large dataset of text from the Internet. It is capable of generating human-like text in a wide range of styles and formats. ChatGPT can be fine-tuned for specific tasks, such a...

Hunting APTs with YARA

For the past few years, we have been spreading our knowledge and experience of using YARA, often called a pattern matching swiss knife for malware researchers and everyone else. Most of the time, this took the form of the Kaspersky training course titled, "Hunting APTs with YARA Like a GReAT...

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...

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...

APT group HoneyMyte upgrades CoolClient: the backdoor gets a kernel-level Windows rootkit

Introduction CoolClient is a backdoor family attributed to the HoneyMyte APT group also known as Mustang Panda that has been used in their cyber-espionage campaigns targeting organizations across Asia and Russia. It supports such capabilities as keylogging, clipboard theft, credential harvesting,...

Tropic Trooper spies on government entities in the Middle East

Executive summary Tropic Trooper also known as KeyBoy and Pirate Panda is an APT group active since 2011. This group has traditionally targeted sectors such as government, healthcare, transportation and high-tech industries in Taiwan, the Philippines and Hong Kong. Our recent investigation has...

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...

StripedFly: Perennially flying under the radar

Introduction Its just another cryptocurrency miner… Nobody would even suspect the mining malware was merely a mask, masquerading behind an intricate modular framework that supports both Linux and Windows. It comes equipped with a built-in TOR network tunnel for communication with command servers,...

Campaigns abusing corporate trusted infrastructure hunt for corporate credentials on ICS networks

Main facts Kaspersky ICS CERT has uncovered a number of spyware campaigns targeting industrial enterprises. Operators of these campaigns hunt for corporate credentials, aiming to commit financial fraud or to sell them to other malicious actors. Spearphishing emails with malicious attachments sent...

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...

APT trends report Q2 2024

For over six years now, Kasperskys Global Research and Analysis Team GReAT has been sharing quarterly updates on advanced persistent threats APTs. These summaries draw on our threat intelligence research, offering a representative overview of what weve published and discussed in more detail in ou...

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...

Windows CLFS and five exploits used by ransomware operators (Exploit #2 – September 2022)

This is the third part 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 skip to the other parts using this tab...

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...

IT threat evolution Q3 2024

IT threat evolution in Q3 2024 IT threat evolution in Q3 2024. Non-mobile statistics IT threat evolution in Q3 2024. Mobile statistics Targeted attacks New APT threat actor targets Russian government entities In May 2024, we discovered a new APT targeting Russian government organizations...

Top 10 web application vulnerabilities in 2021–2023

To help companies with navigating the world of web application vulnerabilities and securing their own web applications, the Open Web Application Security Project OWASP online community created the OWASP Top Ten. As we followed their rankings, we noticed that the way we ranked major vulnerabilitie...

Ransomware updates & 1-day exploits

Introduction In our crimeware reporting service, we analyze the latest crime-related trends we come across. Last month, we again posted a lot on ransomware, but we also covered other subjects, such as 1-day exploits. In this blogpost, we provide excerpts from these reports. For questions or more...

Andariel deploys DTrack and Maui ransomware

On July 7, 2022, the CISA published an alert, entitled, "North Korean State-Sponsored Cyber Actors Use Maui Ransomware To Target the Healthcare and Public Health Sector," related to a Stairwell report, "Maui Ransomware." Later, the Department of Justice announced that they had effectively clawed...

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...

BusyGasper – the unfriendly spy

In early 2018 our mobile intruder-detection technology was triggered by a suspicious Android sample that, as it turned out, belonged to an unknown spyware family. Further investigation showed that the malware, which we named BusyGasper, is not all that sophisticated, but demonstrates some unusual...

HelloNet campaign: new malicious modules launched through the ViPNet update system

UPD 16.07.2026: Added rules to protect companies using our Kaspersky SIEM system, and listed events for developing custom detection rules or conducting threat hunting. UPD 16.07.2026: Added detection of the malicious activity using Kaspersky Managed Detection and Response. UPD 16.07.2026: Added...

Ducktail fashion week

Ducktail is a malware family that has been active since the second half of 2021 and aims to steal Facebook business accounts. WithSecure and GridinSoft have covered Ducktail attacks: the infostealer spread under the guise of documents relating to well-known companies and brands projects and...

Operation Triangulation: iOS devices targeted with previously unknown malware

While monitoring the network traffic of our own corporate Wi-Fi network dedicated for mobile devices using the Kaspersky Unified Monitoring and Analysis Platform KUMA, we noticed suspicious activity that originated from several iOS-based phones. Since it is impossible to inspect modern iOS device...

LuminousMoth APT: Sweeping attacks for the chosen few

APT actors are known for the frequently targeted nature of their attacks. Typically, they will handpick a set of targets that in turn are handled with almost surgical precision, with infection vectors, malicious implants and payloads being tailored to the victims identities or environment. Its no...

MontysThree: Industrial espionage with steganography and a Russian accent on both sides

In summer 2020 we uncovered a previously unknown multi-module C++ toolset used in highly targeted industrial espionage attacks dating back to 2018. Initially the reason for our interest in this malware was its rarity, the obviously targeted nature of the campaign and the fact that there are no...

Kaspersky Security Bulletin 2019. Advanced threat predictions for 2020

Nothing is more difficult than making predictions. Rather than trying to gaze into a crystal ball, we will be making educated guesses based on what has happened during the last 12 months, to see where we can see trends that might be exploited in the near future. This is what we think might happen...

DDoS attacks in Q2 2018

News overview Q2 2018 news includes: non-standard use of old vulnerabilities, new botnets, the cutthroat world of cryptocurrencies, a high-profile DDoS attack or not with a political subtext, the slashdot effect, some half-baked attempts at activism, and a handful arrests. But first things first...

Introducing WhiteBear

As a part of our Kaspersky APT Intelligence Reporting subscription, customers received an update in mid-February 2017 on some interesting APT activity that we called WhiteBear. Much of the contents of that report are reproduced here. WhiteBear is a parallel project or second stage of the Skipper...

ShadowPad in corporate networks

ShadowPad, part 2: Technical Details PDF In July 2017, during an investigation, suspicious DNS requests were identified in a partner's network. The partner, which is a financial institution, discovered the requests originating on systems involved in the processing of financial transactions. Furth...

Websites with an undefined trust level: avoiding the trap

Executive summary A suspicious website is a web resource that cannot be definitively classified as phishing, but whose activities are unsafe. Such sites manipulate users, tricking them into voluntarily transferring money for non-existent services, signing up for hidden subscriptions, or disclosin...