What your SOC will be facing in 2023

As the role of cybersecurity in large businesses increases remarkably year over year, the importance of Security Operations Centers SOCs is becoming paramount. This years Kaspersky Security Bulletin ends with tailored predictions for SOCs – from external and internal points of view. The first par...

Roaming Mantis implements new DNS changer in its malicious mobile app in 2022

Roaming Mantis a.k.a Shaoye is well-known as a long-term cyberattack campaign that uses malicious Android package APK files to control infected Android devices and steal device information; it also uses phishing pages to steal user credentials, with a strong financial motivation. Kaspersky has be...

What threatens corporations in 2023: media blackmail, fake leaks and cloud attacks

Kaspersky detects an average of 400,000 malicious files every day. These add up to 144 million annually. The threat landscape is constantly updated through new malware and spyware, advanced phishing methods, and new social engineering techniques. The media routinely report incidents and leaks of...

How much security is enough?

According to a prominent Soviet science fiction writer, beauty is a fine line, a razors edge between two opposites locked in a never-ending battle. Today, we would put it less poetically as an ideal compromise between contradictions. An elegant, or beautiful, design is one that allows reaching th...

BlueNoroff introduces new methods bypassing MoTW

BlueNoroff group is a financially motivated threat actor eager to profit from its cyberattack capabilities. We have published technical details of how this notorious group steals cryptocurrency before. We continue to track the groups activities and this October we observed the adoption of new...

Ransomware and wiper signed with stolen certificates

Introduction On July 17, 2022, Albanian news outlets reported a massive cyberattack that affected Albanian government e-services. A few weeks later, it was revealed that the cyberattacks were part of a coordinated effort likely intended to cripple the countrys computer systems. On September 10,...

CVE-2022-41040 and CVE-2022-41082 – zero-days in MS Exchange

Summary At the end of September, GTSC reported an attack on critical infrastructure that took place in August. During the investigation, experts found that two 0-day vulnerabilities in Microsoft Exchange Server were used in the attack. The first one, later identified as CVE-2022-41040, is a...

Reassessing cyberwarfare. Lessons learned in 2022

At this point, it has become cliché to say that nothing in 2022 turned out the way we expected. We left the COVID-19 crisis behind hoping for a long-awaited return to normality and were immediately plunged into the chaos and uncertainty of a twentieth-century-style military conflict that posed...

How to train your Ghidra

Getting started with Ghidra For about two decades, being a reverse engineer meant that you had to master the ultimate disassembly tool, IDA Pro. Over the years, many other tools were created to complement or directly replace it, but only a few succeeded. Then came the era of decompilation, adding...

DeathStalker targets legal entities with new Janicab variant

Just to clarify, the above subheading isnt a normal quote, but a message that Janicab malware attempted to decode in its newest use of YouTube dead-drop resolvers DDRs. While hunting for less common Deathstalker intrusions that use the Janicab malware family, we identified a new Janicab variant...

Main phishing and scamming trends and techniques

There are two main types of online fraud aimed at stealing user data and money: phishing and scams. Phishers primarily seek to extract confidential information from victims, such as credentials or bank card details, while scammers deploy social engineering to persuade targets to transfer money on...

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...

Indicators of compromise (IOCs): how we collect and use them

It would hardly be an exaggeration to say that the phrase "indicators of compromise" or IOCs can be found in every report published on the Securelist. Usually after the phrase there are MD5 hashes1, IP addresses and other technical data that should help information security specialists to counter...

Kaspersky Security Bulletin 2022. Statistics

All statistics in this report are from the global cloud service Kaspersky Security Network KSN, which receives information from components in our security solutions. The data was obtained from users who had given their consent to it being sent to KSN. Millions of Kaspersky users around the globe...

Privacy predictions 2023

Our last edition of privacy predictions focused on a few important trends where business and government interests intersect, with regulators becoming more active in a wide array of privacy issues. Indeed, we saw regulatory activity around the globe. In the US, for example, the FTC has requested...

Consumer cyberthreats: predictions for 2023

The consumer threat landscape constantly changes. Although the main types of threats phishing, scams, malware, etc. remain the same, lures that fraudsters use vary greatly depending on the time of year, current major events, news, etc. This year, we have seen spikes in cybercriminal activity aime...

Who tracked internet users in 2021–2022

Every time you go online, someone is watching over you. The services you use, the websites you visit, the apps on your phone, smart TVs, gaming consoles, and any networked devices collect data on you with the help of trackers installed on web pages or in software. The websites and services send...

Black Friday shoppers beware: online threats so far in 2022

The shopping event of the year, Black Friday, is almost here, and while the big day does not officially arrive until Friday, November 25th, deals are already starting. The day kickstarts the frenzied holiday shopping season with eye-catching promotional deals that lure shoppers into spending more...

ICS cyberthreats in 2023 – what to expect

Cybersecurity incidents were plentiful in 2022, causing many problems for industrial infrastructure owners and operators. However, luckily, we did not see any sudden or catastrophic changes in the overall threat landscape – none that were difficult to handle, despite many colorful headlines in th...

Policy trends: where are we today on regulation in cyberspace?

This is the first edition of our policy analysis and observations of trends in the regulation of cyberspace, and cybersecurity, within the Kaspersky Security Bulletin. This year so far has been very challenging: increased tensions in international relations have had a huge impact on both cyberspa...

Crimeware and financial cyberthreats in 2023

A look back on the year 2022 and what to expect in 2023 Every year, as part of the Kaspersky Security Bulletin, we predict which major trends will be followed in the coming year by attackers, who target financial organizations. The predictions, based on our extensive experience, help individuals...

IT threat evolution in Q3 2022. Non-mobile statistics

IT threat evolution in Q3 2022 IT threat evolution in Q3 2022. Non-mobile statistics IT threat evolution in Q3 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 in Q3 2022. Mobile statistics

IT threat evolution in Q3 2022 IT threat evolution in Q3 2022. Non-mobile statistics IT threat evolution in Q3 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 Q3 2022

IT threat evolution in Q3 2022 IT threat evolution in Q3 2022. Non-mobile statistics IT threat evolution in Q3 2022. Mobile statistics Targeted attacks CosmicStrand: discovery of a sophisticated UEFI rootkit In July, we reported a rootkit that we found in modified Unified Extensible Firmware...

DTrack activity targeting Europe and Latin America

Introduction DTrack is a backdoor used by the Lazarus group. Initially discovered in 2019, the backdoor remains in use three years later. It is used by the Lazarus group against a wide variety of targets. For example, weve seen it being used in financial environments where ATMs were breached, in...

Advanced threat predictions for 2023

It is fair to say that since last years predictions, the world has dramatically changed. While the geopolitical landscape has durably shifted, cyberattacks remain a constant threat and show no signs of receding – quite the contrary. No matter where they are, people around the world should be...

The state of cryptojacking in the first three quarters of 2022

Cryptocurrency prices were dropping from the end of 2021 and throughout the first half of 2022. Although finance experts and retail investors estimate crypto to have a solid chance of recovery in the long term, at the time of writing this report the prices remain low. However, cybercriminals are...

Cybersecurity threats: what awaits us in 2023?

Knowing what the future holds can help with being prepared for emerging threats better. Every year, Kaspersky experts prepare forecasts for different industries, helping them to build a strong defense against any cybersecurity threats they might face in the foreseeable future. Those predictions...

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...

Server-side attacks, C&C in public clouds and other MDR cases we observed

Introduction This report describes several interesting incidents observed by the Kaspersky Managed Detection and Response MDR team. The goal of the report is to inform our customers about techniques used by attackers. We hope that learning about the attacks that took place in the wild helps you t...

APT trends report Q3 2022

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...

APT10: Tracking down LODEINFO 2022, part II

In the previous publication Tracking down LODEINFO 2022, part I, we mentioned that the initial infection methods vary in different attack scenarios and that the LODEINFO shellcode was regularly updated for use with each infection vector. In this article, we discuss improvements made to the LODEIN...

APT10: Tracking down LODEINFO 2022, part I

Kaspersky has been tracking activities involving the LODEINFO malware family since 2019, looking for new modifications and thoroughly investigating any attacks utilizing those new variants. LODEINFO is sophisticated fileless malware first named in a blogpost from JPCERT/CC in February 2020. The...

DiceyF deploys GamePlayerFramework in online casino development studio

The Hacktivity 2022 security festival was held at the MOM Cultural Center in Budapest, Hungary, over two days, October 6-7th 2022. One of several presentations by our GReAT researchers included an interesting set of APT activity targeting online casino development and operations environments in...

Ongoing exploitation of CVE-2022-41352 (Zimbra 0-day)

Overview On September 10, 2022, a user reported on Zimbras official forums that their team detected a security incident originating from a fully patched instance of Zimbra. The details they provided allowed Zimbra to confirm that an unknown vulnerability allowed attackers to upload arbitrary file...

Malicious WhatsApp mod distributed through legitimate apps

Last year, we wrote about the Triada Trojan inside FMWhatsApp, a modified WhatsApp build. At that time, we discovered that a dropper was found inside the distribution, along with an advertising SDK. This year, the situation has repeated, but with a different modified build, YoWhatsApp version...

TOP 10 unattributed APT mysteries

Targeted attack attribution is always a tricky thing, and in general, we believe that attribution is best left to law enforcement agencies. The reason is that, while in 90% of cases it is possible to understand a few things about the attackers, such as their native language or even location, the...

A look at the 2020–2022 ATM/PoS malware landscape

During the pandemic, lockdowns forced people to stay at home and do their shopping online, which was mirrored in point-of-sale PoS and ATM malware activity, as certain regions saw malicious transactions drop significantly. Now, as we predicted in last years forecast, many are returning to their...

Uncommon infection and malware propagation methods

Introduction We are often asked how targets are infected with malware. Our answer is nearly always the same: spear phishing. There will be exceptions, naturally, as we will encounter RCE vulnerabilities every now and then, or if the attacker is already on the network, they will use tools like...

OnionPoison: infected Tor Browser installer distributed through popular YouTube channel

While performing regular threat hunting activities, we identified multiple downloads of previously unclustered malicious Tor Browser installers. According to our telemetry, all the victims targeted by these installers are located in China. As the Tor Browser website is blocked in China, individua...

DeftTorero: tactics, techniques and procedures of intrusions revealed

Earlier this year, we started hunting for possible new DeftTorero aka Lebanese Cedar, Volatile Cedar artifacts. This threat actor is believed to originate from the Middle East and was publicly disclosed to the cybersecurity community as early as 2015. Notably, no other intelligence was shared unt...

The secrets of Schneider Electric’s UMAS protocol

UMAS Unified Messaging Application Services is a proprietary Schneider Electric SE protocol used to configure and monitor Schneider Electric PLCs. Schneider Electric controllers that use UMAS include Modicon M580 CPU part numbers BMEP and BMEH and Modicon M340 CPU part numbers BMXP34. Controllers...

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...