Analysis of Elpaco: a Mimic variant

Introduction In a recent incident response case, we dealt with a variant of the Mimic ransomware with some interesting customization features. The attackers were able to connect via RDP to the victim's server after a successful brute force attack and then launch the ransomware. After that, the...

Advanced threat predictions for 2025

We at Kaspersky's Global Research and Analysis Team monitor over 900 APT advanced persistent threat groups and operations. At the end of each year, we take a step back to assess the most complex and sophisticated attacks that have shaped the threat landscape. These insights enable us to anticipat...

Scammer Black Friday offers: Online shopping threats and dark web sales

Intro The e-commerce market continues to grow every year. According to FTI consulting, in Q1 2024, online retail comprised 57% of total sales in the US, and it is expected to increase by 9.8% over 2023 by the end of this year. In Europe, 72% of those aged 16–74 buy online, their share growing by...

Сrimeware and financial cyberthreats in 2025

Kaspersky's Global Research and Analysis Team constantly monitors known and emerging cyberthreats directed at the financial industry, with banks and fintech companies being the most targeted. We also closely follow threats that aim to infiltrate a wider range of industries, namely ransomware...

Threats in space (or rather, on Earth): internet-exposed GNSS receivers

What is GNSS? Global Navigation Satellite Systems GNSS are collections, or constellations of satellite positioning systems. There are several GNSSs launched by different countries currently in operation: GPS US, GLONASS Russia, Galileo EU, BeiDou Navigation Satellite System BDS, China, Navigation...

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...

QSC: A multi-plugin framework used by CloudComputating group in cyberespionage campaigns

Introduction In 2021, we began to investigate an attack on the telecom industry in South Asia. During the investigation, we discovered QSC: a multi-plugin malware framework that loads and runs plugins modules in memory. The framework includes a Loader, a Core module, a Network module, a Command...

New SteelFox Trojan mimics software activators, stealing sensitive data and mining cryptocurrency

Introduction In August 2024, our team identified a new crimeware bundle, which we named "SteelFox". Delivered via sophisticated execution chains including shellcoding, this threat abuses Windows services and drivers. It spreads via forums posts, torrent trackers and blogs, imitating popular...

Loose-lipped neural networks and lazy scammers

One topic being actively researched in connection with the breakout of LLMs is capability uplift – when employees with limited experience or resources in some area become able to perform at a much higher level thanks to LLM technology. This is especially important in information security, where...

Risk reduction redefined: How compromise assessment helps strengthen cyberdefenses

Introduction Organizations often rely on a layered defense strategy, yet breaches still occur, slipping past multiple levels of protection unnoticed. This is where compromise assessment enters the game. The primary objective of these services is risk reduction. They help discover active...

Lumma/Amadey: fake CAPTCHAs want to know if you’re human

Attackers are increasingly distributing malware through a rather unusual method: a fake CAPTCHA as the initial infection vector. Researchers from various companies reported this campaign in August and September. The attackers, primarily targeting gamers, initially delivered the Lumma stealer to...

The Crypto Game of Lazarus APT: Investors vs. Zero-days

Introduction Lazarus APT and its BlueNoroff subgroup are a highly sophisticated and multifaceted Korean-speaking threat actor. We closely monitor their activities and quite often see them using their signature malware in their attacks — a full-feature backdoor called Manuscrypt. According to our...

Grandoreiro, the global trojan with grandiose goals

Grandoreiro is a well-known Brazilian banking trojan — part of the Tetrade umbrella — that enables threat actors to perform fraudulent banking operations by using the victim's computer to bypass the security measures of banking institutions. It's been active since at least 2016 and is now one of...

Stealer here, stealer there, stealers everywhere!

Introduction Information stealers, which are used to collect credentials to then sell them on the dark web or use in subsequent cyberattacks, are actively distributed by cybercriminals. Some of them are available through a monthly subscription model, thus attracting novice cybercriminals. Accordi...

Analysis of the Crypt Ghouls group: continuing the investigation into a series of attacks on Russia

Last December, we discovered a new group targeting Russian businesses and government agencies with ransomware. Further investigation into this group's activity suggests a connection to other groups currently targeting Russia. We have seen overlaps not only in indicators of compromise and tools, b...

SAS CTF and the many ways to persist a kernel shellcode on Windows 7

On May 18, 2024, Kaspersky's Global Research & Analysis Team GReAT, with the help of its partners, held the qualifying stage of the SAS CTF, an international competition of cybersecurity experts held as part of the Security Analyst Summit conference. More than 800 teams from all over the world to...

Beyond the Surface: the evolution and expansion of the SideWinder APT group

SideWinder, aka T-APT-04 or RattleSnake, is one of the most prolific APT groups that began its activities in 2012 and was first publicly mentioned by us in 2018. Over the years, the group has launched attacks against high-profile entities in South and Southeast Asia. Its primary targets have been...

Whispers from the Dark Web Cave. Cyberthreats in the Middle East

The Kaspersky Digital Footprint Intelligence team analyzed cybersecurity threats coming from dark web cybercriminals who targeted businesses and governments in the Middle East in H1 2024. Our research highlights the most severe and pervasive threats, and identifies potential risks and consequence...

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...

Scam Information and Event Management

While trying to deliver malware on victims' devices and stay on them as long as they can, sometimes attackers are using quite unusual techniques. In a recent campaign starting in 2022, unknown malicious actors have been trying to mine cryptocurrency on victims' devices without user consent; they'...

Finding a needle in a haystack: Machine learning at the forefront of threat hunting research

Introduction In the ever-evolving landscape of cybersecurity, logs, that is information collected from various sources like network devices, endpoints, and applications, plays a crucial role in identifying and responding to threats. By analyzing this data, organizations can detect anomalies,...

Key Group: another ransomware group using leaked builders

Key Group, or keygroup777, is a financially motivated ransomware group primarily targeting Russian users. The group is known for negotiating with victims on Telegram and using the Chaos ransomware builder. The first public report on Key Group's activity was released in 2023 by BI.ZONE, a...

Threat landscape for industrial automation systems, Q2 2024

Statistics across all threats In the second quarter of 2024, the percentage of ICS computers on which malicious objects were blocked decreased by 0.9 pp from the previous quarter to 23.5%. The percentage has decreased by 3.3 pp compared to the second quarter of 2023, when the indicator reached it...

From 12 to 21: how we discovered connections between the Twelve and BlackJack groups

While analyzing attacks on Russian organizations, our team regularly encounters overlapping tactics, techniques, and procedures TTPs among different cybercrime groups, and sometimes even shared tools. We recently discovered one such overlap: similar tools and tactics between two hacktivist groups...

Web tracking report: who monitored users’ online activities in 2023–2024 the most

Web tracking has become a pervasive aspect of our online experience. Whether we're browsing social media, playing video games, shopping for products, or simply reading news articles, trackers are silently monitoring our online behavior, fueling the ceaseless hum of countless data centers worldwid...

How the Necro Trojan infiltrated Google Play, again

Introduction We sometimes come across modified applications when analyzing suspicious files. These are created in response to user requests for more customization options within the app or for new features that the official versions don't have. Unfortunately, it's not uncommon for popular mods to...

-=TWELVE=- is back

In the spring of 2024, posts with real people's personal data began appearing on the -=TWELVE=- Telegram channel. Soon it was blocked for falling foul of the Telegram terms of service. The group stayed off the radar for several months, but as we investigated a late June 2024 attack, we found that...

Exotic SambaSpy is now dancing with Italian users

Introduction In May 2024, we detected a campaign exclusively targeting victims in Italy. We were rather surprised by this, as cybercriminals typically select a broader target to maximize their profits. For example, a certain type of malware might target users in France and Spain, with the phishin...

Loki: a new private agent for the popular Mythic framework

In July 2024, we discovered the previously unknown Loki backdoor, which was used in a series of targeted attacks. By analyzing the malicious file and open sources, we determined that Loki is a private version of an agent for the open-source Mythic framework. One of the agent's decrypted strings O...

Tropic Trooper spies on government entities in the Middle East

Executive summary Tropic Trooper also known as KeyBoy and Pirate Panda is an APT group active since 2011. This group has traditionally targeted sectors such as government, healthcare, transportation and high-tech industries in Taiwan, the Philippines and Hong Kong. Our recent investigation has...

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...

A deep dive into the most interesting incident response cases of last year

In 2023, Kasperskys Global Emergency Response Team GERT participated in services around the world that allowed our experts to gain insight into various threats and techniques used by APT groups, common crimeware and, in some cases, internal adversaries. As we highlighted in our annual report, the...

IT threat evolution in Q2 2024. Non-mobile statistics

The statistics presented here are based on detection verdicts by Kaspersky products and services received from users who consented to providing statistical data. Quarterly figures In Q2 2024: Kaspersky solutions blocked over 664 million attacks from various internet sources. The web antivirus...

IT threat evolution in Q2 2024. Mobile statistics

Quarterly figures According to Kaspersky Security Network, in Q2 2024: 7 million attacks using malware, adware or unwanted mobile software were blocked. The most common threat to mobile devices was RiskTool software – 41% of all detected threats. A total of 367,418 malicious installation packages...

IT threat evolution Q2 2024

Targeted attacks XZ backdoor: a supply chain attack in the making On March 29, a message on the Openwall oss-security mailing list announced the discovery of a backdoor in XZ, a compression utility included in many popular Linux distributions. The backdoored library is used by the OpenSSH server...

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...

HZ Rat backdoor for macOS attacks users of China’s DingTalk and WeChat

In June 2024, we discovered a macOS version of the HZ Rat backdoor targeting users of the enterprise messenger DingTalk and the social network and messaging platform WeChat. The samples we found almost exactly replicate the functionality of the Windows version of the backdoor and differ only in t...

Memory corruption vulnerabilities in Suricata and FreeRDP

As a cybersecurity company, before we release our products, we perform penetration tests on them to make sure they are secure. Recently, new versions of KasperskyOS-based products were released, namely Kaspersky Thin Client KTC and Kaspersky IoT Secure Gateway KISG. As part of the pre-release...

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...

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...

BlindEagle flying high in Latin America

BlindEagle, also known as "APT-C-36", is an APT actor recognized for employing straightforward yet impactful attack techniques and methodologies. The group is known for their persistent campaigns targeting entities and individuals in Colombia, Ecuador, Chile, Panama and other countries in Latin...

Tusk: unraveling a complex infostealer campaign

Summary Kaspersky Global Emergency Response Team GERT has identified a complex campaign, consisting of multiple sub-campaigns orchestrated by Russian-speaking cybercriminals. The sub-campaigns imitate legitimate projects, slightly modifying names and branding and using multiple social media...

EastWind campaign: new CloudSorcerer attacks on government organizations in Russia

In late July 2024, we detected a series of ongoing targeted cyberattacks on dozens of computers at Russian government organizations and IT companies. The threat actors infected devices using phishing emails with malicious shortcut attachments. These shortcuts were used to deliver malware that...

APT trends report Q2 2024

For over six years now, Kasperskys Global Research and Analysis Team GReAT has been sharing quarterly updates on advanced persistent threats APTs. These summaries draw on our threat intelligence research, offering a representative overview of what weve published and discussed in more detail in ou...

Indirect prompt injection in the real world: how people manipulate neural networks

What is prompt injection? Large language models LLMs – the neural network algorithms that underpin ChatGPT and other popular chatbots – are becoming ever more powerful and inexpensive. For this reason, third-party applications that make use of them are also mushrooming, from systems for document...

LianSpy: new Android spyware targeting Russian users

In March 2024, we discovered a campaign targeting individuals in Russia with previously unseen Android spyware we dubbed LianSpy. Our analysis indicates that the malware has been active since July 2021. This threat is equipped to capture screencasts, exfiltrate user files, and harvest call logs a...

How “professional” ransomware variants boost cybercrime groups

Introduction Cybercriminals who specialize in ransomware do not always create it themselves. They have many other ways to get their hands on ransomware samples: buying a sample on the dark web, affiliating with other groups or finding a leaked ransomware variant. This requires no extraordinary...

Mandrake spyware sneaks onto Google Play again, flying under the radar for two years

Introduction In May 2020, Bitdefender released a white paper containing a detailed analysis of Mandrake, a sophisticated Android cyber-espionage platform, which had been active in the wild for at least four years. In April 2024, we discovered a suspicious sample that appeared to be a new version ...

When spear phishing met mass phishing

Introduction Bulk phishing email campaigns tend to target large audiences. They use catch-all wordings and simplistic formatting, and typos are not uncommon. Targeted attacks take greater effort, with attackers sending personalized messages that include personal details and might look more like...

Developing and prioritizing a detection engineering backlog based on MITRE ATT&CK

Detection is a traditional type of cybersecurity control, along with blocking, adjustment, administrative and other controls. Whereas before 2015 teams asked themselves what it was that they were supposed to detect, as MITRE ATT&CK evolved, SOCs were presented with practically unlimited space for...