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...

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...

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...

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...

SAS@Home is back this fall

The world during the pandemic prepares many surprises for us. Most of them are certainly unpleasant: health risks, inability to travel or meet old friends. One of these unpleasant surprises awaited us in the early spring, when the organizing team of the beloved SAS conference were forced to...

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...

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...

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...

Head Mare: adventures of a unicorn in Russia and Belarus

Head Mare is a hacktivist group that first made itself known in 2023 on the social network X formerly Twitter1. In their public posts, the attackers reveal information about some of their victims, including organization names, internal documents stolen during attacks, and screenshots of desktops...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

COMpfun successor Reductor infects files on the fly to compromise TLS traffic

In April 2019, we discovered new malware that compromises encrypted web communications in an impressive way. Analysis of the malware allowed us to confirm that the operators have some control over the target's network channel and could replace legitimate installers with infected ones on the fly...

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...

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...

Financial cyberthreats in 2022

Financial gain remains the key driver of cybercriminal activity. In the past year, weve seen multiple developments in this area – from new attack schemes targeting contactless payments to multiple ransomware groups continuing to emerge and haunt businesses. However, traditional financial threats ...

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...

What’s in your notepad? Infected text editors target Chinese users

"Malvertising" is a popular way of attracting victims to malicious sites: an advertisement block is placed at the top of the search results, increasing the likelihood of users clicking the link. Sites at the top of search results also tend to be more trusted by users. A year ago, our experts...

IT threat evolution in Q2 2023. 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 received from users who consented to providing statistical data. Quarterly figures Accordin...

Meet the GoldenJackal APT group. Don’t expect any howls

GoldenJackal is an APT group, active since 2019, that usually targets government and diplomatic entities in the Middle East and South Asia. Despite the fact that they began their activities years ago, this group is generally unknown and, as far as we know, has not been publicly described. We...

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...

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...

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...

OctLurk and SilkLurk: newly identified tailored backdoors in cyber-espionage campaign in Central Asia

Introduction We have been tracking two new backdoors, OctLurk and SilkLurk , observed in attacks against government organizations primarily in Central Asia since January 2025. Identified victims are located in Afghanistan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, and the Syrian Arab...

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...

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...

Cyberthreats to financial institutions 2020: Overview and predictions

Kaspersky Security Bulletin 2019. Advanced threat predictions for 2020 Cybersecurity of connected healthcare 2020: Overview and predictions 5G technology predictions 2020 Corporate security prediction 2020 Key events 2019 Large-scale anti-fraud bypass: Genesis digital fingerprints market uncovere...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

Mirage Kitten targeting aviation and FinTech sectors across the Middle East and Africa with a new malware set

While monitoring Mirage Kitten activity, we uncovered a previously undocumented malware family that we dubbed NodeRabbit. We identified the first sample on a system in Afghanistan. Further threat hunting revealed two additional, more advanced, variants: one on a system in Egypt and another on a...

The invisible passenger in your car

While monitoring Android threats in June 2026, we discovered a new piece of Android malware. What struck us as unusual was that it installed like an ordinary user app yet made no attempt to disguise itself as legitimate software: it had no user interface at all. This led us to suspect the app mig...

New Project CAV3RN module abuses Outlook calendar events for C2 and DNS AAAA records for configuration recovery

Introduction In June 2026, as part of our Kaspersky Threat Intelligence Reporting service, we published extensive research on Project CAV3RN, a sophisticated modular framework used for cyberespionage activity against targets in Israel. We have been tracking this cluster since December 2025, and i...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

A cascade of compromise: unveiling Lazarus’ new campaign

Earlier this year, a software vendor was compromised by the Lazarus malware delivered through unpatched legitimate software. Whats remarkable is that these software vulnerabilities were not new, and despite warnings and patches from the vendor, many of the vendors systems continued to use the...

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...

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...

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...