LuckyMouse signs malicious NDISProxy driver with certificate of Chinese IT company

What happened? Since March 2018 we have discovered several infections where a previously unknown Trojan was injected into the lsass.exe system process memory. These implants were injected by the digitally signed 32- and 64-bit network filtering driver NDISProxy. Interestingly, this driver is sign...

Threat Landscape for Industrial Automation Systems in H1 2018

For many years, Kaspersky Lab experts have been uncovering and researching cyberthreats that target a variety of information systems – those of commercial and government organizations, banks, telecoms operators, industrial enterprises, and individual users. In this report, Kaspersky Lab Industria...

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...

What are botnets downloading?

Spam mailshots with links to malware and bots downloading other malware are just a couple of botnet deployment scenarios. The choice of infectious payload is limited only by the imagination of the botnet operator or customer. It might be a ransomware, a banker, a miner, a backdoor, the list goes...

Loki Bot: On a hunt for corporate passwords

Starting from early July, we have seen malicious spam activity that has targeted corporate mailboxes. The messages discovered so far contain an attachment with an .iso extension that Kaspersky Lab solutions detect as Loki Bot. The malware's key objective is to steal passwords from browsers,...

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...

The rise of mobile banker Asacub

We encountered the Trojan-Banker.AndroidOS.Asacub family for the first time in 2015, when the first versions of the malware were detected, analyzed, and found to be more adept at spying than stealing funds. The Trojan has evolved since then, aided by a large-scale distribution campaign by its...

Operation AppleJeus: Lazarus hits cryptocurrency exchange with fake installer and macOS malware

Overview Lazarus has been a major threat actor in the APT arena for several years. Alongside goals like cyberespionage and cybersabotage, the attacker has been targeting banks and other financial companies around the globe. Over the last few months, Lazarus has successfully compromised several...

Dark Tequila Añejo

Dark Tequila is a complex malicious campaign targeting Mexican users, with the primary purpose of stealing financial information, as well as login credentials to popular websites that range from code versioning repositories to public file storage accounts and domain registrars. A multi-stage...

Security assessment of corporate information systems in 2017

Each year, Kaspersky Lab's Security Services department carries out dozens of cybersecurity assessment projects for companies worldwide. In this publication, we present a general summary and statistics for the cybersecurity assessments we have conducted of corporate information systems throughout...

Spam and phishing in Q2 2018

Quarterly highlights GDPR as a phishing opportunity In the first quarter, we discussed spam designed to exploit GDPR General Data Protection Regulation, which came into effect on May 25, 2018. Back then spam traffic was limited to invitations to participate in workshops and other educational even...

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...

IT threat evolution Q2 2018

Targeted attacks and malware campaigns Operation Parliament In April, we reported the workings of Operation Parliament, a cyber-espionage campaign aimed at high-profile legislative, executive and judicial organizations around the world – with its main focus in the MENA Middle East and North Afric...

IT threat evolution Q2 2018. Statistics

Q2 figures According to KSN: Kaspersky Lab solutions blocked 962,947,023 attacks launched from online resources located in 187 countries across the globe. 351,913,075 unique URLs were recognized as malicious by Web Anti-Virus components. Attempted infections by malware designed to steal money via...

How do file partner programs work?

It's easy to notice if you've fallen victim to an advertising partner program: the system has new apps that you didn't install, ad pages spontaneously open in the browser, ads appear on sites where they never used to, and so on. If you notice these symptoms on your computer, and in the list of...

Attacks on industrial enterprises using RMS and TeamViewer

Main facts Kaspersky Lab ICS CERT has identified a new wave of phishing emails with malicious attachments targeting primarily companies and organizations that are, in one way or another, associated with industrial production. The phishing emails are disguised as legitimate commercial offers and a...

A mining multitool

Recently, an interesting miner implementation appeared on Kaspersky Lab's radar. The malware, which we dubbed PowerGhost, is capable of stealthily establishing itself in a system and spreading across large corporate networks infecting both workstations and servers. This type of hidden consolidati...

A study of car sharing apps

The growing popularity of car sharing services has led some experts to predict an end to private car ownership in big cities. The statistics appear to back up this claim: for example, in 2017 Moscow saw the car sharing fleet, the number of active users and the number of trips they made almost...

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...

Calisto Trojan for macOS

An interesting aspect of studying a particular piece of malware is tracing its evolution and observing how the creators gradually add new monetization or entrenchment techniques. Also of interest are developmental prototypes that have had limited distribution or not even occurred in the wild. We...

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...

The return of Fantomas, or how we deciphered Cryakl

In early February this year, Belgian police seized the C&C servers of the infamous Cryakl cryptor. Soon afterwards, they handed over the private keys to our experts, who used them to update the free RakhniDecryptor tool for recovering files encrypted by the malware. The ransomware, which for year...

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...

APT Trends Report Q2 2018

In the second quarter of 2017, Kaspersky Lab's Global Research and Analysis Team GReAT began publishing summaries of the quarter's private threat intelligence reports, in an effort to make the public aware of the research we have been conducting. This report serves as the latest installment,...

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...

To crypt, or to mine – that is the question

Way back in 2013 our malware analysts spotted the first malicious samples related to the Trojan-Ransom.Win32.Rakhni family. That was the starting point for this long-lived Trojan family, which is still functioning to this day. During that time the malware writers have changed: the way their Troja...

Delving deep into VBScript

In late April we found and wrote a description of CVE-2018-8174, a new zero-day vulnerability for Internet Explorer that was picked up by our sandbox. The vulnerability uses a well-known technique from the proof-of-concept exploit CVE-2014-6332 that essentially "corrupts" two memory objects and...

Ransomware and malicious crypto miners in 2016-2018

Ransomware is not an unfamiliar threat. For the last few years it has been affecting the world of cybersecurity, infecting and blocking access to various devices or files and requiring users to pay a ransom usually in Bitcoins or another widely used e-currency, if they want to regain access to...

Pbot: evolving adware

The adware PBot PythonBot got its name because its core modules are written in Python. It was more than a year ago that we detected the first member of this family. Since then, we have encountered several modifications of the program, one of which went beyond adware by installing and running a...

Modern OSs for embedded systems

At Kaspersky Lab we analyze the technologies available on cybersecurity market and this time we decided to look at what OS developers are offering for embedded systems or, in other words, the internet of things. Our primary interest is how and to what degree these OSs can solve...

Olympic Destroyer is still alive

In March 2018 we published our research on Olympic Destroyer, an advanced threat actor that hit organizers, suppliers and partners of the Winter Olympic Games 2018 held in Pyeongchang, South Korea. Olympic Destroyer was a cyber-sabotage attack based on the spread of a destructive network worm. Th...

LuckyMouse hits national data center to organize country-level waterholing campaign

What happened? In March 2018 we detected an ongoing campaign targeting a national data center in the Central Asia that we believe has been active since autumn 2017. The choice of target made this campaign especially significant – it meant the attackers gained access to a wide range of government...

A MitM extension for Chrome

Browser extensions make our lives easier: they hide obtrusive advertising, translate text, help us choose in online stores, etc. There are also less desirable extensions, including those that bombard us with advertising or collect information about our activities. These pale into insignificance,...

FIFA public Wi-Fi guide: which host cities have the most secure networks?

We all know how easy it is for users to connect to open Wi-Fi networks in public places. Well, it is equally straightforward for criminals to position themselves near poorly protected access points – where they can intercept network traffic and compromise user data. A lack of essential traffic...

Netkids

Children today are completely at home in the digital space. They use digital diaries and textbooks at school, communicate via instant messaging, play games on mobile devices not to mention PCs and consoles, and create mini masterpieces on tablets and laptops. This total immersion in the digital...

Trojan watch

We continue to research how proliferation of IoT devices affects the daily lives of users and their information security. In our previous study, we touched upon ways of intercepting authentication data using single-board microcomputers. This time, we turned out attention to wearable devices:...

2018 Fraud World Cup

There are only two weeks to go before the start of the massive soccer event — FIFA World Cup. This championship has already attracted the attention of millions worldwide, including a fair few cybercriminals. Long before kick-off, email accounts began bulging with soccer-related spam, and scammers...

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...

Spam and phishing in Q1 2018

Quarterly highlights Data leaks Early 2018 will be remembered for a series of data leak scandals. The most high-profile saw Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg grilled by US Congress, with many public figures supporting the Delete Facebook campaign. As a result, Zuckerberg promised to get tough and make...

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...

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...

Roaming Mantis dabbles in mining and phishing multilingually

In April 2018, Kaspersky Lab published a blogpost titled 'Roaming Mantis uses DNS hijacking to infect Android smartphones'. Roaming Mantis uses Android malware which is designed to spread via DNS hijacking and targets Android devices. This activity is located mostly in Asia South Korea, Banglades...

IT threat evolution Q1 2018. Statistics

Q1 figures According to KSN: Kaspersky Lab solutions blocked 796,806,112 attacks launched from online resources located in 194 countries across the globe. 282,807,433 unique URLs were recognized as malicious by Web Anti-Virus components. Attempted infections by malware designed to steal money via...

IT threat evolution Q1 2018

Targeted attacks and malware campaigns Skygofree: sophisticated mobile surveillance In January, we uncovered a sophisticated mobile implant that provides attackers with remote control of infected Android devices. The malware, called Skygofree after one of the domains it uses, is a targeted...

OPC UA security analysis

This paper discusses our project that involved searching for vulnerabilities in implementations of the OPC UA protocol. In publishing this material, we hope to draw the attention of vendors that develop software for industrial automation systems and the industrial internet of things to problems...

The King is dead. Long live the King!

In late April 2018, a new zero-day vulnerability for Internet Explorer IE was found using our sandbox; more than two years since the last in the wild example CVE-2016-0189. This particular vulnerability and subsequent exploit are interesting for many reasons. The following article will examine th...

SynAck targeted ransomware uses the Doppelgänging technique

The Process Doppelgänging technique was first presented in December 2017 at the BlackHat conference. Since the presentation several threat actors have started using this sophisticated technique in an attempt to bypass modern security solutions. In April 2018, we spotted the first ransomware...

Who’s who in the Zoo

ZooPark is a cyberespionage operation that has been focusing on Middle Eastern targets since at least June 2015. The threat actors behind the operation infect Android devices using several generations of malware, with the attackers including new features in each iteration. We label them from v1-v...

DDoS attacks in Q1 2018

News overview In early January, it was reported that an amateur hacker had come close to pulling off a botnet attack using "improvised" materials. Armed with information gleaned from hacker forums, the DIYer created a Trojan using a zero-day exploit in Huawei routers and released it online. The...

Energetic Bear/Crouching Yeti: attacks on servers

Energetic Bear/Crouching Yeti is a widely known APT group active since at least 2010. The group tends to attack different companies with a strong focus on the energy and industrial sectors. Companies attacked by Energetic Bear/Crouching Yeti are geographically distributed worldwide with a more...