-=TWELVE=- is back

In the spring of 2024, posts with real people's personal data began appearing on the -=TWELVE=- Telegram channel. Soon it was blocked for falling foul of the Telegram terms of service. The group stayed off the radar for several months, but as we investigated a late June 2024 attack, we found that...

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,...

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...

KoffeyMaker: notebook vs. ATM

Despite CCTV and the risk of being caught by security staff, attacks on ATMs using a direct connection — so-called black box attacks — are still popular with cybercriminals. The main reason is the low "entry requirements" for would-be cyber-robbers: specialized sites offer both the necessary tool...

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...

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...

The SessionManager IIS backdoor

Following on from our earlier Owowa discovery, we continued to hunt for more backdoors potentially set up as malicious modules within IIS, a popular web server edited by Microsoft. And we didnt come back empty-handed… In 2021, we noticed a trend among several threat actors for deploying a backdoo...

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...

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...

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,...

The GitVenom campaign: cryptocurrency theft using GitHub

In our modern world, it's difficult to underestimate the impact that open-source code has on software development. Over the years, the global community has managed to publish a tremendous number of projects with freely accessible code that can be viewed and enhanced by anyone on the planet. Very...

Mercedes-Benz Head Unit security research report

Introduction This report covers the research of the Mercedes-Benz Head Unit, which was made by our team. Mercedes-Benz's latest Head Unit infotainment system is called Mercedes-Benz User Experience MBUX. We performed analysis of the first generation MBUX. MBUX was previously analysed by KeenLab...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

The return of Mamba ransomware

At the end of 2016, there was a major attack against San Francisco's Municipal Transportation Agency. The attack was done using Mamba ransomware. This ransomware uses a legitimate utility called DiskCryptor for full disk encryption. This month, we noted that the group behind this ransomware has...

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,...

The Telegram phishing market

Telegram has been gaining popularity with users around the world year by year. Common users are not the only ones who have recognized the messaging apps handy features — cybercrooks have already made it a branch of the dark web, their Telegram activity soaring since late 2021. The service is...

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...

Crimeware trends: self-propagation and driver exploitation

Introduction If one sheep leaps over the ditch, the rest will follow. This is an old saying, found in various languages, and it can be applied to ransomware developers. In previous blog posts, we highlighted an increase in the popularity of platform-independent languages and ESXi support, and...

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...

AZORult spreads as a fake ProtonVPN installer

AZORult has its history. However, a few days ago, we discovered what appears to be one of its most unusual campaigns: abusing the ProtonVPN service and dropping malware via fake ProtonVPN installers for Windows. Screenshot of a fake ProtonVPN website The campaign started at the end of November 20...

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...

Tens of thousands per Gram

Looking at Instagram one morning, I spotted several posts from some fairly well-known people in certain circles who had invested in an ICO held by Telegram. Interesting, I thought to myself. I fancy a piece of that. Only I was pretty sure that if Telegram was indeed holding an ICO, it would be a...

Exploits and vulnerabilities in Q3 2024

Q3 2024 saw multiple vulnerabilities discovered in Windows and Linux subsystems that are not standard for cyberattacks. This is because operating system developers have been releasing new security mitigations for whole sets of vulnerabilities in commonly used subsystems. For example, a log...

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...

Windows CLFS and five exploits used by ransomware operators (Exploit #4 – CVE-2023-23376)

This is part five 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 table of...

Windows CLFS and five exploits used by ransomware operators (Exploit #3 – October 2022)

This is part four 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 table of...

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...

DDoS attacks in Q4 2019

News overview In the past quarter, DDoS organizers continued to harness non-standard protocols for amplification attacks. In the wake of WS-Discovery, which we covered in the previous report, cybercriminals turned to Apple Remote Management Service ARMS, part of the Apple Remote Desktop ARD...

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...

A look at the ATM/PoS malware landscape from 2017-2019

From remote administration and jackpotting, to malware sold on the Darknet, attacks against ATMs have a long and storied history. And, much like other areas of cybercrime, attackers only refine and grow their skillset for infecting ATM systems from year-to-year. So what does the ATM landscape loo...

KBOT: sometimes they come back

Although by force of habit many still refer to any malware as a virus, this once extremely common class of threats is gradually becoming a thing of the past. However, there are some interesting exceptions to this trend: we recently discovered malware that spread through injecting malicious code...

VPNFilter EXIF to C2 mechanism analysed

On May 23 2018, our colleagues from Cisco Talos published their excellent analysis of VPNFilter, an IoT / router malware which exhibits some worrying characteristics. Some of the things which stand out about VPNFilter are: It has a redundant, multi-stage command and control mechanism which uses...

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...

Unveiling NKAbuse: a new multiplatform threat abusing the NKN protocol

During an incident response performed by Kasperskys Global Emergency Response Team GERT and GReAT, we uncovered a novel multiplatform threat named "NKAbuse". The malware utilizes NKN technology for data exchange between peers, functioning as a potent implant, and equipped with both flooder and...

Online generators… of dashed expectations

Quite recently, we and hence our security solutions started to designate an entire class of sites — gift card generators — as fraudulent, despite their not stealing any money or personal data from visitors. Why? Let's try to unpick these sites and see how they work. How it works Ads for all kinds...

Leaking ads

When we use popular apps with good ratings from official app stores we assume they are safe. This is partially true – usually these apps have been developed with security in mind and have been reviewed by the app store's security team. However, we found that because of third-party SDKs many popul...

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...

Free Download Manager backdoored – a possible supply chain attack on Linux machines

UPDATE 13.09.2023. Free Download Manager team issued an official statement regarding this incident. Over the last few years, Linux machines have become a more and more prominent target for all sorts of threat actors. According to our telemetry, 260,000 unique Linux samples appeared in the first...

Nokoyawa ransomware attacks with Windows zero-day

Updated April 20, 2023 In February 2023, Kaspersky technologies detected a number of attempts to execute similar elevation-of-privilege exploits on Microsoft Windows servers belonging to small and medium-sized businesses in the Middle East, in North America, and previously in Asia regions. These...

GhostEmperor: From ProxyLogon to kernel mode

Download GhostEmperors technical details PDF While investigating a recent rise of attacks against Exchange servers, we noticed a recurring cluster of activity that appeared in several distinct compromised networks. This cluster stood out for its usage of a formerly unknown Windows kernel mode...

Privacy predictions for 2021

2020 saw an unprecedented increase in the importance and value of digital services and infrastructure. From the rise of remote working and the global shift in consumer habits to huge profits booked by internet entertainers, we are witnessing how overwhelmingly important the connected infrastructu...

Aggressive in-app advertising in Android

Recently, we've been noticing ever more dubious advertising libraries in popular apps on Google Play. The monetization methods used in such SDKs can pose a threat to users, yet they pull in more revenue for developers than whitelisted ad modules due to the greater number of views. In this post we...

Silence – a new Trojan attacking financial organizations

More information about the Silence Trojan is available to customers of Kaspersky Intelligence Reporting Service. Contact: [email protected] In September 2017, we discovered a new targeted attack on financial institutions. Victims are mostly Russian banks but we also found infected...

Advanced threat predictions for 2023

It is fair to say that since last years predictions, the world has dramatically changed. While the geopolitical landscape has durably shifted, cyberattacks remain a constant threat and show no signs of receding – quite the contrary. No matter where they are, people around the world should be...

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...