Prilex: the pricey prickle credit card complex

Prilex is a Brazilian threat actor that has evolved out of ATM-focused malware into modular point-of-sale malware. The group was behind one of the largest attacks on ATMs in the country, infecting and jackpotting more than 1,000 machines, while also cloning in excess of 28,000 credit cards that...

NullMixer: oodles of Trojans in a single dropper

Executive Summary NullMixer is a dropper leading to an infection chain of a wide variety of malware families. NullMixer spreads via malicious websites that can be found mainly via search engines. These websites are often related to crack, keygen and activators for downloading software illegally,...

Mass email campaign with a pinch of targeted spam

Most mass malicious mailing campaigns are very primitive and hardly diverse, with the content limited to several sentences offering the user to download archives that supposedly contain some urgent bills or unpaid fines. The email messages may contain no signatures or logos, with typos and other...

External attack surface and ongoing cybercriminal activity in APAC region

To prevent a cyberattack, it is vital to know what the attack surface for your organization is. To be prepared to repel the attacks of cybercriminals, businesses around the world collect threat intelligence themselves or subscribe for threat intelligence services. Continuous threat research enabl...

Self-spreading stealer attacks gamers via YouTube

UPD: A notice on Googles response to the issue was added. An unusual malicious bundle a collection of malicious programs distributed in the form of a single installation file, self-extracting archive or other file with installer-type functionality recently caught our eye. Its main payload is the...

Threat landscape for industrial automation systems for H1 2022

H1 2022 in numbers Geography In H1 2022, malicious objects were blocked at least once on 31.8% of ICS computers globally. Percentage of ICS computers on which malicious objects were blocked For the first time in five years of observations, the lowest percentage in the ‎first half of the year was...

Good game, well played: an overview of gaming-related cyberthreats in 2022

The gaming industry went into full gear during the pandemic, as many people took up online gaming as their new hobby to escape the socially-distanced reality. Since then, the industry has never stopped growing. According to the analytical agency Newzoo, in 2022, the global gaming market will exce...

The nature of cyber incidents

Kaspersky provides incident response services and trainings to organizations around the world. In our annual incident response report, we share our observations and statistics based on investigation of real-life incidents. The report contains anonymized data collected by the Kaspersky Global...

Kimsuky’s GoldDragon cluster and its C2 operations

Kimsuky also known as Thallium, Black Banshee and Velvet Chollima is a prolific and active threat actor primarily targeting Korea-related entities. Like other sophisticated adversaries, this group also updates its tools very quickly. In early 2022, we observed this group was attacking the media a...

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...

Black Hat USA 2022 and DEF CON 30

Black Hat 2022 USA Briefings wrapped up this past week, along with its sister conference DEF CON 30. The DEF CON theme was a "Hacker Homecoming", and it really was a fun one. Coming back from the COVID hiatus, the conferences were enthusiastically full compared to the 2021 ghost town. Many of the...

Two more malicious Python packages in the PyPI

On August 8, CheckPoint published a report on ten malicious Python packages in the Python Package Index PyPI, the most popular Python repository among software developers. The malicious packages were intended to steal developers personal data and credentials. Following this research, we used our...

Threat in your browser: what dangers innocent-looking extensions hold for users

Whether you want to block ads, keep a to-do list or check your spelling, browser extensions allow you to do all of the above and more, improving convenience, productivity and efficiency for free, which is why they are so popular. Chrome, Safari, Mozilla — these and many other major Web browsers —...

IT threat evolution in Q2 2022. Mobile statistics

IT threat evolution in Q2 2022 IT threat evolution in Q2 2022. Non-mobile statistics IT threat evolution in Q2 2022. Mobile statistics These statistics are based on detection verdicts of Kaspersky products received from users who consented to providing statistical data. Quarterly figures Accordin...

IT threat evolution in Q2 2022. Non-mobile statistics

IT threat evolution in Q2 2022 IT threat evolution in Q2 2022. Non-mobile statistics IT threat evolution in Q2 2022. Mobile statistics These statistics are based on detection verdicts of Kaspersky products and services received from users who consented to providing statistical data. Quarterly...

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...

OpenTIP, command line edition

For more than a year, we have been providing free intelligence services via the OpenTIP portal. Using the web interface, anyone can upload and scan files with our antivirus engine, get a basic sandbox report, look up various network indicators IP addresses, hosts, URLs. Later on, we presented an...

VileRAT: DeathStalker’s continuous strike at foreign and cryptocurrency exchanges

In late August 2020, we published an overview of DeathStalkers profile and malicious activities, including their Janicab, Evilnum and PowerSing campaigns PowerPepper was later documented in 2020. Notably, we exposed why we believe the threat actor may fit a group of mercenaries, offering...

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...

Targeted attack on industrial enterprises and public institutions

In January 2022, Kaspersky ICS CERT experts detected a wave of targeted attacks on military industrial complex enterprises and public institutions in several countries. In the course of our research, we were able to identify over a dozen of attacked organizations. The attack targeted industrial...

DDoS attacks in Q2 2022

News overview Politically-motivated cyberattacks dominated the DDoS landscape in the second quarter of 2022 just as they did in the previous reporting period. ALtahrea Team, a group targeting NATO and its partners, attacked public transportation websites in Israel and the United Kingdom. Israel s...

LofyLife: malicious npm packages steal Discord tokens and bank card data

On July 26, using the internal automated system for monitoring open-source repositories, we identified four suspicious packages in the Node Package Manager npm repository. All these packages contained highly obfuscated malicious Python and JavaScript code. We dubbed this malicious campaign...

APT trends report Q2 2022

For 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 published and...

CosmicStrand: the discovery of a sophisticated UEFI firmware rootkit

Introduction Rootkits are malware implants which burrow themselves in the deepest corners of the operating system. Although on paper they may seem attractive to attackers, creating them poses significant technical challenges and the slightest programming error has the potential to completely cras...

Luna and Black Basta — new ransomware for Windows, Linux and ESXi

Introduction In our crimeware reporting service, we analyze the latest crime-related trends we come across. If we look back at what we covered last month, we will see that ransomware surprise, surprise! definitely stands out. In this blog post, we provide several excerpts from last months reports...

Text-based fraud: from 419 scams to vishing

E-mail scammers typically combine social engineering with technical skills to bypass spam filters and persuade the recipient to reply. But there is a specific class of attacks that is technically stuck somewhere in the late 90s/early 00s, in the era of CRT monitors and sluggish internet: we are...

Dynamic analysis of firmware components in IoT devices

Among the various offensive security techniques, vulnerability assessment takes priority when it comes to analyzing the security of IoT/IIoT devices. In most cases, such devices are analyzed using the black box testing approach, in which the researcher has virtually no knowledge about the object ...

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...

The hateful eight: Kaspersky’s guide to modern ransomware groups’ TTPs

These days ransomware analysis gets a lot of coverage in commercial and public reports, with vendors issuing dozens of ransomware-related publications each year. These reports provide analysis on specific malware families or new samples, describe the activities of a particular ransomware group,...

APT ToddyCat

ToddyCat is a relatively new APT actor that we have not been able to relate to other known actors, responsible for multiple sets of attacks detected since December 2020 against high-profile entities in Europe and Asia. We still have little information about this actor, but we know that its main...

‘Unpacking’ technical attribution and challenges for ensuring stability in cyberspace

Introduction When reports of a cyberattack appear in the headlines, questions abound regarding who launched it and why. Even if an attacker has what are to it perfectly rational reasons for conducting such an attack, these reasons are often known only to them. The rest of the world, including the...

How much does access to corporate infrastructure cost?

Division of labor Money has been and remains the main motivator for cybercriminals. The most widespread techniques of monetizing cyberattacks include selling stolen databases, extortion using ransomware and carding. However, there is demand on the dark web not only for data obtained through an...

Router security in 2021

A router is a gateway from the internet to a home or office — despite being conceived quite the opposite. Routers are forever being hacked and infected, and used to infiltrate local networks. Keeping this gate locked so that no one can stroll right through is no easy task. It is not always clear...

CVE-2022-30190 (Follina) vulnerability in MSDT: description and counteraction

At the end of May, researchers from the naosec team reported a new zero-day vulnerability in Microsoft Support Diagnostic Tool MSDT that can be exploited using Microsoft Office documents. It allowed attackers to remotely execute code on Windows systems, while the victim could not even open the...

WinDealer dealing on the side

Introduction LuoYu is a lesser-known threat actor that has been active since 2008. It primarily goes after targets located in China, such as foreign diplomatic organizations established in the country, members of the academic community, or companies from the defense, logistics and...

IT threat evolution in Q1 2022. Mobile statistics

IT threat evolution in Q1 2022 IT threat evolution in Q1 2022. Non-mobile statistics IT threat evolution in Q1 2022. Mobile statistics These statistics are based on detection verdicts of Kaspersky products received from users who consented to providing statistical data. Quarterly figures Accordin...

IT threat evolution Q1 2022

IT threat evolution in Q1 2022 IT threat evolution in Q1 2022. Non-mobile statistics IT threat evolution in Q1 2022. Mobile statistics Targeted attacks MoonBounce: the dark side of UEFI firmware Late last year, we became aware of a UEFI firmware-level compromise through logs from our firmware...

IT threat evolution in Q1 2022. Non-mobile statistics

IT threat evolution in Q1 2022 IT threat evolution in Q1 2022. Non-mobile statistics IT threat evolution in Q1 2022. Mobile statistics These statistics are based on detection verdicts of Kaspersky products and services received from users who consented to providing statistical data. Quarterly...

Managed detection and response in 2021

Kaspersky Managed Detection and Response MDR helps organizations to complement existing detection capabilities or to expand limited in-house resources to protect their infrastructure from the growing number and complexity of threats in real time. We collect telemetry from clients networks and...

The Verizon 2022 DBIR

The Verizon 2022 Data Breach Investigations Report is out. We are proud to collaborate as a supporting contributor to this years data efforts once again and to have contributed for the past 8 years. The report provides interesting analysis of a full amount of global incident data. Several things...

What’s wrong with automotive mobile apps?

Introduction The recent story about the 19-year-old hacker who took control of several dozen Tesla cars has become something of a sensation. We already know that there was an issue with a third-party app that enabled access to data from Teslas. This made it possible for the security researcher to...

ISaPWN – research on the security of ISaGRAF Runtime

In early 2020, we notified the Rockwell Automation Product Security Incident Response Team RA PSIRT of several vulnerabilities we had identified in the ISaGRAF Runtime execution environment. According to public sources of information, ISaGRAF Runtime is used as an automation framework in multiple...

Evaluation of cyber activities and the threat landscape in Ukraine

Introduction When the war in Ukraine broke out, many analysts were surprised to discover that what was simultaneously happening in the cyber domain did not match their predictions1. Since the beginning of the fighting, new cyberattacks taking place in Ukraine have been identified every week, whic...

HTML attachments in phishing e-mails

The use of embedded HTML documents in phishing e-mails is a standard technique employed by cybercriminals. It does away with the need to put links in the e-mail body, which antispam engines and e-mail antiviruses usually detect with ease. HTML offers more possibilities than e-mail for camouflagin...

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 subscription Trojans and their little tricks

Billing fraud is one of the most common sources of income for cybercriminals. There are currently a number of known mobile Trojans specializing in secretly subscribing users to paid services. They usually pay for legitimate services in a users name and scammers take a cut from the money billed...

A new secret stash for “fileless” malware

In February 2022 we observed the technique of putting the shellcode into Windows event logs for the first time "in the wild" during the malicious campaign. It allows the "fileless" last stage Trojan to be hidden from plain sight in the file system. Such attention to the event logs in the campaign...

APT trends report Q1 2022

For 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 published and...

DDoS attacks in Q1 2022

News overview The DDoS landscape in Q1 2022 was shaped by the ongoing conflict between Russia and Ukraine: a significant part of all DDoS-related news concerned these countries. In mid-January, the website of Kyiv Mayor Vitali Klitschko was hit by a DDoS attack, and the websites of a number of...

How to recover files encrypted by Yanluowang

Yanluowang is a type of targeted ransomware discovered by the Symantec Threat Hunter team as they were investigating an incident on a large corporate network. Kaspersky experts have found a vulnerability in the Yanluowang encryption algorithm and created a free decryptor to help victims of this...