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...

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...