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...

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...

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...

Backdoors in D-Link’s backyard

"If you want to change the world, start with yourself." In the case of security research this can be rephrased to: "If you want to make the world safer, start with the smart things in your home." Or, to be more specific, start with your router – the core of any home network as well as an...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

The Tetrade: Brazilian banking malware goes global

Introduction Brazil is a well-known country with plenty of banking trojans developed by local crooks. The Brazilian criminal underground is home to some of the worlds busiest and most creative perpetrators of cybercrime. Like their counterparts in China and Russia, their cyberattacks have a stron...

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...

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...

Booking a Taxi for Faketoken

The Trojan-Banker.AndroidOS.Faketoken malware has been known about for already more than a year. Throughout the time of its existence, it has worked its way up from a primitive Trojan intercepting mTAN codes to an encrypter. The authors of its newer modifications continue to upgrade the malware,...

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...

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...

Holy water: ongoing targeted water-holing attack in Asia

On December 4, 2019, we discovered watering hole websites that were compromised to selectively trigger a drive-by download attack with fake Adobe Flash update warnings. This campaign has been active since at least May 2019, and targets an Asian religious and ethnic group. The threat actor's...

Every little bitcoin helps

It often happens that inventions and technologies that start out good end up turning into dangerous tools in the hands of criminals. Blockchain is no exception to this rule, especially in its most common cryptocurrency incarnation. Cryptocurrencies crop up in all kinds of spam: from traditional...

Cybercriminals target early IRS 2018 refunds now

On Monday, Jan 29th, IRS officially opened its 2018 season. Some taxpayers already filed their taxes and cybercriminals know it too. So, right after two days of the official 2018 season opening, we got phishing messages with a fake refund status Websites: The link in the email leads to a hacked...

Happy IR in the New Year!

At the end of last year Mr. Jake Williams from aka @MalwareJake asked a very important question about Lack of visibility during detecting APT intrusions in twitter. Results show us that endpoint analysis is the most important part of any research connected with APTs. Also, for sure endpoint...

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...

Lazarus covets COVID-19-related intelligence

As the COVID-19 crisis grinds on, some threat actors are trying to speed up vaccine development by any means available. We have found evidence that actors, such as the Lazarus group, are going after intelligence that could help these efforts by attacking entities related to COVID-19 research. Whi...

DDoS attacks in Q2 2019

News overview The second quarter of 2019 turned out to be richer than the first in terms of high-profile DDoS attacks. True, most of the campaigns that attracted media attention appeared to be politically, rather than commercially, motivated — and that despite the fact that some security experts...

BasBanke: Trend-setting Brazilian banking Trojan

BasBanke is a new Android malware family targeting Brazilian users. It is a banking Trojan built to steal financial data such as credentials and credit/debit card numbers, but not limited to this functionality. The propagation of this threat began during the 2018 Brazilian elections, registering...

The return of the BOM

There's nothing new in Brazilian cybercriminals trying out new ways to stay under the radar. It's just that this time around the bad guys have started using a method that was reported in the wild years ago. Russian gangs used this technique to distribute malware capable of modifying the hosts fil...

Coinvault, the court case

Today, after almost 3 years of waiting, it was finally the day of the trial. In the Netherlands, where the whole case took place, the hearings are open to the public. Meaning anyone who is interested can visit. And it was quite busy. Because besides the suspects, their lawyers, the judges and the...

Masha and these Bears

Sofacy, also known as APT28, Fancy Bear, and Tsar Team, is a prolific, well resourced, and persistent adversary. They are sometimes portrayed as wild and reckless, but as seen under our visibility, the group can be pragmatic, measured, and agile. Our previous post on their 2017 activity stepped...

Threat Predictions for Automotive in 2018

The landscape in 2017 Modern cars are no longer just electro-mechanical vehicles. With each generation, they become more connected and incorporate more intelligent technologies to make them smarter, more efficient, comfortable and safe. The connected-car market is growing at a five-year compound...

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...

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...

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...

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...

Happy New Fear! Gift-wrapped spam and phishing

Pre-holiday spam Easy money In the run-up to Christmas and New Year, scam е-mails mentioning easy pickings, lottery winnings, and other cash surprises are especially popular. All the more so given how simple it is to adapt existing schemes simply by mentioning the holiday in the subject line. For...

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...

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...

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...

Mobile malware evolution 2021

These statistics are based on detection verdicts of Kaspersky products received from users who consented to providing statistical data. Figures of the year In 2021, Kaspersky mobile products and technologies detected: 3,464,756 malicious installation packages 97,661 new mobile banking Trojans...

Threat landscape for industrial automation systems. Statistics for H2 2020

Figures Indicator | H1 2020 | H2 2020 | 2020 ---|---|---|--- Global percentage of attacked ICS computers | 32.6% | 33.42% | 38.55% Percentage of attacked ICS computers by region Northern Europe | 10.1% | 11.5% | 12.3% Western Europe | 15.1% | 14.8% | 17.6% Australia | 16.3% | 17.0% | 18.9% United...

IoT hack: how to break a smart home… again

There can never be too many IoT gadgets – that's what people usually think when buying yet another connected device with advanced functionality. From our perspective, we also think there can't be too many IoT investigations. So, we have continued our experiments into checking and uncovering how...

Miners on the Rise

Miners are a class of malware whose popularity has grown substantially this year. The actual process of cryptocurrency mining is perfectly legal, though there are groups of people who hoodwink unwitting users into installing mining software on their computers, or exploiting software vulnerabiliti...

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...

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...

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...

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...

Managed Detection and Response in Q4 2020

Download full report PDF As cyberattacks become more sophisticated, and security solutions require more resources to analyze the huge amount of data gathered every day, many organizations feel the need for advanced security services that can deal with this growing complexity in real time, 24/7...

DDoS attacks in Q2 2020

News overview Not just one but two new DDoS amplification methods were discovered last quarter. In mid-May, Israeli researchers reported a new DNS server vulnerability that lurks in the DNS delegation process. The vulnerability exploitation scheme was dubbed "NXNSAttack". The hacker sends to a...

Financial Cyberthreats in 2019

Methodology Financial cyberthreats are malicious programs that target users of services such as online banking, e-money, and cryptocurrency, or that attempt to gain access to financial organizations and their infrastructure. These threats are usually accompanied by spam and phishing activities,...

Threat Landscape for Industrial Automation Systems in H2 2018

H2 2018 in figures All statistical data used in this report was collected using the Kaspersky Security Network KSN, a distributed antivirus network. The data was received from those KSN users who gave their consent to have data anonymously transferred from their computers. We do not identify the...