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...

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...

QakBot attacks with Windows zero-day (CVE-2024-30051)

In early April 2024, we decided to take a closer look at the Windows DWM Core Library Elevation of Privilege Vulnerability CVE-2023-36033, which was previously discovered as a zero-day exploited in the wild. While searching for samples related to this exploit and attacks that used it, we found a...

Uncommon infection methods—part 2

Introduction Although ransomware is still a hot topic on which we will keep on publishing, we also investigate and publish about other threats. Recently we explored the topic of infection methods, including malvertising and malicious downloads. In this blog post, we provide excerpts from the rece...

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...

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...

I know what you did last summer, MuddyWater blending in the crowd

Introduction MuddyWater is an APT with a focus on governmental and telco targets in the Middle East Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Jordan, Turkey and Lebanon and also a few other countries in nearby regions Azerbaijan, Pakistan and Afghanistan. MuddyWater first surfaced in 2017 and has been active...

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...

Focus on DroxiDat/SystemBC

Recently we pushed a report to our customers about an interesting and common component of the cybercrime malware set - SystemBC. And, in much the same vein as the 2021 Darkside Colonial Pipeline incident, we found a new SystemBC variant deployed to a critical infrastructure target. This time, the...

Targeted Malware Reverse Engineering Workshop follow-up. Part 2

If you have read our previous blogpost "Targeted Malware Reverse Engineering Workshop follow-up. Part 1", you probably know about the webinar we conducted on April 8, 2021, with Kaspersky GReATs Ivan Kwiatkowski and Denis Legezo, to share best practices in reverse engineering and demonstrate...

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...

A glimpse into the present state of security in robotics

Download full report PDF The world of today continues its progress toward higher digitalization and mobility. From developments in the Internet of Things IoT through augmented reality to Industry 4.0, whichrely on stronger automation and use of robots, all of these bring more efficiency to...

I know where your pet is

Kaspersky Lab's many years of cyberthreat research would suggest that any device with access to the Internet will inevitably be hacked. In recent years, we have seen hacked toys, kettles, cameras, and irons. It would seem that no gadget has escaped the attention of hackers, yet there is one last...

Exploits and vulnerabilities in Q2 2024

Q2 2024 was eventful in terms of new interesting vulnerabilities and exploitation techniques for applications and operating systems. Attacks through vulnerable drivers have become prevalent as a general means of privilege escalation in the operating system. Such attacks are notable in that the...

Smartphone shopaholic

Have you ever noticed strange reviews of Google Play apps that look totally out of place? Their creators might give it five stars, while dozens of users rate it with just one, and in some cases the reviews seem to be talking about some other program entirely. If so, you may be unknowingly...

Threat predictions for industrial security in 2019

Kaspersky Security Bulletin: Threat Predictions for 2019 Cryptocurrency threat predictions for 2019 Cyberthreats to financial institutions 2019: overview and predictions The past few years have been very intense and eventful when it comes to incidents affecting the information security of...

Time of death? A therapeutic postmortem of connected medicine

TheSAS2017 presentation: Smart Medicine Breaches Its "First Do No Harm" Principle At last year's Security Analyst Summit 2017 we predicted that medical networks would be a titbit for cybercriminals. Unfortunately, we were right. The numbers of medical data breaches and leaks are increasing...

Threat Predictions for Connected Life in 2018

Download the Kaspersky Security Bulletin: Threat Predictions for Connected Life in 2018 Introduction: To be awake is to be online The average home now has around three connected computers and four smart mobile devices. Hardly surprising, considering that 86 per cent of us check the Internet sever...

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...

No Free Pass for ExPetr

Recently, there have been discussions around the topic that if our product is installed, ExPetr malware won't write the special malicious code which encrypts the MFT to MBR. Some have even speculated that some kind of conspiracy might be ongoing. Others have pointed out it's plain and simple...

Awaken Likho is awake: new techniques of an APT group

Introduction In July 2021, a campaign was launched primarily targeting Russian government agencies and industrial enterprises. Shortly after the campaign started, we began tracking it, and published three reports in August and September 2024 through our threat research subscription on the threat...

Approach to mainframe penetration testing on z/OS

Information technology is developing at a rapid pace, with completely new areas emerging, such as DevOps and DevSecOps – and were striving to keep up. However, in some projects, you may encounter systems built on rather outdated principles. Such systems must be approached with care, since a singl...

APT trends report Q1 2023

For more than five years, the Global Research and Analysis Team GReAT at Kaspersky has been publishing quarterly summaries of advanced persistent threat APT activity. These summaries are based on our threat intelligence research; and they provide a representative snapshot of what we have publishe...

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...

DDoS attacks in Q3 2022

News overview In Q3 2022, DDoS attacks were, more often than not, it seemed, politically motivated. As before, most news was focused on the conflict between Russia and Ukraine, but other high-profile events also affected the DDoS landscape this quarter. The pro-Russian group Killnet, active since...

MoonBounce: the dark side of UEFI firmware

What happened? At the end of 2021, we were made aware of a UEFI firmware-level compromise through logs from our Firmware Scanner, which has been integrated into Kaspersky products since the beginning of 2019. Further analysis has shown that a single component within the inspected firmwares image...

Attacks on industrial enterprises using RMS and TeamViewer: new data

Download full report PDF Executive Summary In summer 2019, Kaspersky ICS CERT identified a new wave of phishing emails containing various malicious attachments. The emails target companies and organizations from different sectors of the economy that are associated with industrial production in on...

Lifting the veil on DeathStalker, a mercenary triumvirate

State-sponsored threat actors and sophisticated attacks are often in the spotlight. Indeed, their innovative techniques, advanced malware platforms and 0-day exploit chains capture our collective imagination. Yet these groups still arent likely to be a part of the risk model at most companies, no...

DarkUniverse – the mysterious APT framework #27

In April 2017, ShadowBrokers published their well-known 'Lost in Translation' leak, which, among other things, contained an interesting script that checked for traces of other APTs in the compromised system. In 2018, we found an APT described as the 27th function of this script, which we call...

KeyPass ransomware

In the last few days, our anti-ransomware module has been detecting a new variant of malware - KeyPass ransomware. Others in the security community have also noticed that this ransomware began to actively spread in August: Notification from MalwareHunterTeam Distribution model According to our...

In cryptoland, trust can be costly

While the legal status of cryptocurrencies and laws to regulate them continue to be hammered out, scammers are busy exploiting the digital gold rush. Besides hacking cryptocurrency exchanges, exploiting smart-contract vulnerabilities, and deploying malicious miners, cybercriminals are also...

Dissecting the Chrome Extension Facebook malware

It's been a few days since Kaspersky Lab's blog post about the Multi Platform Facebook malware that was spread through Facebook Messenger. At the same time as Kaspersky Lab were analyzing this threat, a few researchers where doing the same, including Frans Rosén, Security Advisor at Detectify...

WAP-billing Trojan-Clickers on rise

During the preparation of the "IT threat evolution Q2 2017" report I found several common Trojans in the "Top 20 mobile malware programs" list that were stealing money from users using WAP-billing - a form of mobile payment that charges costs directly to the user's mobile phone bill so they don't...

Spring Dragon – Updated Activity

Spring Dragon is a long running APT actor that operates on a massive scale. The group has been running campaigns, mostly in countries and territories around the South China Sea, since as early as 2012. The main targets of Spring Dragon attacks are high profile governmental organizations and...

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...

The mobile malware threat landscape in 2022

These statistics are based on detection verdicts of Kaspersky products received from users who consented to providing statistical data. Figures of the year In 2022, Kaspersky mobile products and technology detected: 1,661,743 malicious installers 196,476 new mobile banking Trojans 10,543 new mobi...

Hackers attacking your memories: science fiction or future threat?

Authors: Kaspersky Lab and the Oxford University Functional Neurosurgery Group There is an episode in the dystopian near-future series Black Mirror about an implanted chip that allows users to record and replay everything they see and hear. A recent YouGov survey found that 29% of viewers would b...

Mining is the new black

UPDATED March 5th, 15.00 Last year we published a story revealing the rise of miners across the globe. At the time we had discovered botnets earning millions of USD. We knew this was just the beginning of the story, which turned out to develop rapidly. Together with the rest of the world, we have...

DDoS attacks in Q3 2017

News Overview In the third quarter of 2017, the trends of the preceding quarters continued to develop further. The number of DDoS attacks in China, the United States, South Korea and Russia increased, which were reflected in the statistics we gathered for botnets. A sharp surge in the number more...

Operation ForumTroll: APT attack with Google Chrome zero-day exploit chain

In mid-March 2025, Kaspersky technologies detected a wave of infections by previously unknown and highly sophisticated malware. In all cases, infection occurred immediately after the victim clicked on a link in a phishing email, and the attackers' website was opened using the Google Chrome web...

Modern Asian APT groups’ tactics, techniques and procedures (TTPs)

Almost every quarter, someone publishes major research focusing on campaigns or incidents that involve Asian APT groups. These campaigns and incidents target various organizations from a multitude of industries. Likewise, the geographic location of victims is not limited to just one region. This...

Ad blocker with miner included

Some time ago, we discovered a number of fake apps delivering a Monero cryptocurrency miner to user computers. They are distributed through malicious websites that may turn up in the victims search results. By the look of it, it appears to be a continuation of the summer campaign covered by our...

How kids coped with COVID-hit winter holidays

Due to the pandemic situation in late 2020, street festivities got canceled worldwide. For many families, get-togethers with grandparents over the Christmas period were also put on hold. As a result, children across the globe sought holiday fun and games from the comfort of home. And thanks to...

We know what your kids did this summer

For many kids and teenagers, summer is all about ditching school books in favor of hobbies and fun. Every year we release a report on children's interests, as reflected in their online activity. This summer, we investigated what they prefer in their free time. The Parental Control module in...

A King’s Ransom It is Not

The first half of 2017 began with two intriguing ransomware events, both partly enabled by wormable exploit technology dumped by a group calling themselves "The ShadowBrokers". These WannaCry and ExPetr ransomware events are the biggest in the sense that they spread the quickest and most...

ExPetr/Petya/NotPetya is a Wiper, Not Ransomware

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. This supports the theory that this malware campaign was not designed as a ransomware attack for financial...

IT threat evolution in Q3 2023. 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 received from users who consented to providing statistical data. Quarterly figures Accordin...

APT trends report Q3 2023

For more than six years, the Global Research and Analysis Team GReAT at Kaspersky has been publishing quarterly summaries of advanced persistent threat APT activity. These summaries are based on our threat intelligence research; and they provide a representative snapshot of what we have published...

New ransomware trends in 2022

Ahead of the Anti-Ransomware Day, we summarized the tendencies that characterize ransomware landscape in 2022. This year, ransomware is no less active than before: cybercriminals continue to threaten nationwide retailers and enterprises, old variants of malware return while the new ones develop...