Ransomware Maze

ARCHIVED STORY Ransomware Maze Alexandre Mundo · MAR 26, 2020 Overview The Maze ransomware, previously known in the community as “ChaCha ransomware”, was discovered on May the 29th 2019 by Jerome Segura1. The main goal of the ransomware is to crypt all files that it can in an infected system and...

McAfee ATR Analyzes Sodinokibi aka REvil Ransomware-as-a-Service – Follow The Money

ARCHIVED STORY McAfee ATR Analyzes Sodinokibi aka REvil Ransomware-as-a-Service – Follow The Money By John Fokker · October 14, 2019 Episode 3: Follow the Money This is the third installment of the McAfee Advanced Threat Research ATR analysis of Sodinokibi and its connections to GandCrab, the mos...

Clop Ransomware

ARCHIVED STORY Clop Ransomware Alexandre Mundo · AUG 01, 2019 This new ransomware was discovered by Michael Gillespie on 8 February 2019 and it is still improving over time. This blog will explain the technical details and share information about how this new ransomware family is working. There a...

What’s in the Box?

ARCHIVED STORY What’s in the Box? By Sam Quinn · February 25, 2019 2018 was another record-setting year in the continuing trend for consumer online shopping. With an increase in technology and efficiency, and a decrease in cost and shipping time, consumers have clearly made a statement that...

Ryuk, Exploring the Human Connection

ARCHIVED STORY Ryuk, Exploring the Human Connection By John Fokker · Febraury 19, 2019 In collaboration with Bill Siegel and Alex Holdtman from Coveware At the beginning of 2019, McAfee ATR published an article describing how the hasty attribution of Ryuk ransomware to North Korea was missing the...

Ryuk Ransomware Attack: Rush to Attribution Misses the Point

ARCHIVED STORY Ryuk Ransomware Attack: Rush to Attribution Misses the Point By John Fokker · January 09, 2019 Senior analyst Ryan Sherstobitoff contributed to this report. During the past week, an outbreak of Ryuk ransomware that impeded newspaper printing services in the United States has garner...

BIOS Boots What? Finding Evil in Boot Code at Scale! | Trellix

ARCHIVED STORY BIOS Boots What? Finding Evil in Boot Code at Scale! By Ryan Fisher, Andrew Davis · August 08, 2018 Malware continues to take advantage of a legacy component of modern systems designed in the 1980s. Despite the cyber threat landscape continuing to evolve at an ever-increasing pace,...

Apply MITRE’s ‘ATT&CK’ Model to Check Your Defenses

ARCHIVED STORY Apply MITRE’s ‘ATT&CK’ Model to Check Your Defenses By Trellix · June 18, 2018 Every week we read about adversaries attacking their targets as part of online criminal campaigns. Information gathering, strategic advantage, and theft of intellectual property are some of the...

‘BadRabbit’ Ransomware Burrows Into Russia, Ukraine

ARCHIVED STORY ‘BadRabbit’ Ransomware Burrows Into Russia, Ukraine By Raj Samani · October 24, 2017 This post was researched and written by Tim Hux, David Marcus, Charles McFarland, Douglas McKee, and Raj Samani. McAfee is currently investigating a ransomware campaign known as BadRabbit, which...

Malware-As-A-Service Redefined: Why XWorm is outpacing every other RAT in the underground malware market

Malware-As-A-Service Redefined: Why XWorm is outpacing every other RAT in the underground malware market By Boggavarapu R S S Srinivas Gupta and Ravishankar N C · March 12, 2026 Introduction In the evolving landscape of cybercrime, threat actors are constantly pursuing the "perfect" weapon: malwa...

Turf Wars vs. Supply Chains: The Great Divergence in State Cyber Threats

Turf Wars vs. Supply Chains: The Great Divergence in State Cyber Threats By Ryan Slaney and Emma DeCarli · February 18, 2026 For years, the cybersecurity community has treated advanced persistent threat APT groups as monoliths. We assumed that if we found a specific Russian tool, we were fighting...

SideWinder's Shifting Sands: Click Once for Espionage

SideWinder's Shifting Sands: Click Once for Espionage By Ernesto Fernández Provecho and Pham Duy Phuc · October 22, 2025 In September 2025, the Trellix Advanced Research Center ARC detected a campaign targeting a European embassy located in New Delhi, India. Further investigation led to the...

The Coordinated Embassy Hunt: Unmasking the DPRK-linked GitHub C2 Espionage Campaign

The Coordinated Embassy Hunt: Unmasking the DPRK-linked GitHub C2 Espionage Campaign By Pham Duy Phuc and Alex Lanstein · August 18, 2025 The Trellix Advanced Research Center uncovered a sophisticated espionage operation targeting diplomatic missions across several regions in South Korea during...

Critical SharePoint Vulnerabilities Under Active Exploitation

Critical SharePoint Vulnerabilities Under Active Exploitation By Jeffrey Sman, Mo Cashman and Marc Bolz Robinson · July 23, 2025 On-premises Microsoft SharePoint servers are currently facing high-impact, ongoing threat activity due to a set of critical vulnerabilities, notably CVE-2025-49704,...

Dark Web Roast - June 2025 Edition

Dark Web Roast - June 2025 Edition By Trellix Advanced Research Center · July 21, 2025 Executive Summary Welcome to the very first Dark Web Roast! Each month, we're going to take a peek into the shadowy world of cybercrime and playfully "roast" some of its characters, all with a little help from...

Tale of Greatness: Journey Through Dark Roads

Tale of Greatness: Journey Through Dark Roads By Daksh Kapur, Vihar Shah, Pooja Khyadgi · May 22, 2024 Cybercriminals have a new weapon in their arsenal: Greatness, a PaaS tool specifically designed to steal your Microsoft 365 login credentials. First detected in mid-2022, it allows attackers to...

JAVA-based Sophisticated Stealer Using Discord Bot as EventListener

JAVA-Based Sophisticated Stealer Using Discord Bot as EventListener By Trellix · January 18, 2024 This blog was written by Gurumoorthi Ramanathan Executive Summary: In mid-November 2023, Trellix Advanced Research Center team members observed a Java-based stealer being spread through cracked...

The Anatomy of HTML Attachment Phishing

The Anatomy of HTML Attachment Phishing: One Code, Many Variants By Mathanraj Thangaraju, Niranjan Hegde, and Sijo Jacob · June 14, 2023 Introduction Phishing is the malevolent practise of pretending to be a reliable entity in electronic communication to steal sensitive data, such as login...

QakBot's Endgame: The Final Move Before the Takedown

QakBot's Endgame: The Final Move Before the Takedown By Daksh Kapur, Nico Paulo Yturriaga and Alfred Alvarado · September 06, 2023 Figure 1 Attribution at the bottom Qakbot, known under aliases like QBot, QuakBot, and Pinkslipbot, represents an intricately advanced malware strain that has...

Supply Chain Security Leaders Collaborate to Help Developers Choose Open-Source

Supply Chain Security Leaders Collaborate to Help Developers Choose Open-Source By Trellix, Checkmarx and Illustria · September 05, 2023 Working together to keep open source safe At the beginning of 2023, top researchers from industry-leading companies established the Supply Chain Attack Research...

ICYMI: Emotet Reappeared Early This Year, Unfortunately

ICYMI: Emotet Reappeared Early This Year, Unfortunately By Adithya Chandra, Joao Marques, and Raghav Kapoor · September 1, 2023 Executive Summary Emotet first appeared in 2014 and continues to be a dangerous and resilient malware, despite attempts by law enforcement agencies to take it down in...

Feeding Gophers to Ghidra

Feeding Gophers to Ghidra By Trellix · June 6, 2023 This blog was written by Max Kersten The scripts discussed in the article are based on the magnificent work ofDorka Palotay from CUJOai. Golang malware is becoming increasingly prevalent, requiring analysts to know how to effectively analyze the...

Read The Manual Locker: A Private RaaS Provider

Read The Manual Locker: A Private RaaS Provider By Trellix · April 13, 2023 This blog was written by Max Kersten The underground intelligence was obtained byN074B07. Another day, another ransomware-as-a-service RaaS provider, or so it seems. We’ve observed the “Read The Manual” RTM Locker gang,...

No More Macros? Better Watch Your Search Results!

No More Macros? Better Watch Your Search Results! By Pham Duy Phuc and Max Kersten · February 08, 2023 Threat actors often rely on the same techniques until their hand is forced, usually due to defensive changes or chance-based opportunities, to leverage a new technique. Malicious macros in...

Cyber Tools and Foreign Policy: A False Flag Chinese “APT” and Nancy Pelosi’s Visit to Taiwan

Cyber Tools and Foreign Policy: A False Flag Chinese “APT” and Nancy Pelosi’s Visit to Taiwan By Anne An · September 29, 2022 Preface U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s visit to Taiwan led to an aftershock across the Taiwan Strait and through the Asia Pacific region. Immediately after Pelosi’s...

Nation-State Crosshairs: France, Germany & United Kingdom

In the Nation-State Crosshairs: France, Germany & the United Kingdom By Trellix · March 28, 2022 Today Trellix and the Center for Strategic and International Studies CSIS released a global report, In the Crosshairs: Organizations and Nation-State Cyber Threats, examining security professionals’...

PlugX: A Talisman to Behold

PlugX: A Talisman to Behold By Max Kersten, Marc Elias, Leandro Velasco, and Alexandre Mundo Alguacil · March 28, 2022 For over a decade, the PlugX malware has been observed internationally with different variants found around the world. This blog covers a PlugX variant that we have named Talisma...

Trellix Global Defenders: BlackCat Ransomware as a Service - The Cat is certainly out of the bag!

Trellix Global Defenders: BlackCat Ransomware as a Service - The Cat is certainly out of the bag! By Trellix · February 8, 2022 Research Contributions and Analysis: Filippo Sitzia This story was written by Arnab Roy Threat Summary Blackcat also known as ALPHV/Noberus is a Ransomware as a Service...

Trellix Global Defenders: Invasion of the Information Snatchers - Protecting against RedLine Infostealer

Trellix Global Defenders: Invasion of the Information Snatchers - Protecting against RedLine Infostealer By Taylor Mullins · February 7, 2022 What information are you storing in your Browsers? Storing credentials and other important information in web browsers is a helpful method to not have to...

Trellix Threat Report: Log4j Attack, Ransomware & APT Threats

Trellix Threat Report: Log4j Attack, Ransomware & APT Threats By Trellix · January 31, 2022 This story was written by Raj Samani. Ransomware continues to threaten enterprises and assets around the globe, but it was the discovery of a new vulnerability affecting widely used Log4j library that...

2022 Threat Predictions

Trellix 2022 Threat Predictions By Trellix · January 19, 2022 Ransomware, nation states, social media, and a shifting reliance on a remote workforce made headlines in 2021, proving that bad actors only continue to rise to the challenge. Defiantly, they thwart solution stacks and gain momentum eac...

Ryuk Ransomware Attack: Rush to Attribution Misses the Point

ARCHIVED STORY Ryuk Ransomware Attack: Rush to Attribution Misses the Point By John Fokker · January 09, 2019 Senior analyst Ryan Sherstobitoff contributed to this report. During the past week, an outbreak of Ryuk ransomware that impeded newspaper printing services in the United States has garner...

BIOS Boots What? Finding Evil in Boot Code at Scale! | Trellix

ARCHIVED STORY BIOS Boots What? Finding Evil in Boot Code at Scale! By Ryan Fisher, Andrew Davis · August 08, 2018 Malware continues to take advantage of a legacy component of modern systems designed in the 1980s. Despite the cyber threat landscape continuing to evolve at an ever-increasing pace,...

Cybercrime in the Spotlight: How Crooks Capitalize on Cultural Events

ARCHIVED STORY Cybercrime in the Spotlight: How Crooks Capitalize on Cultural Events By John Fokker · July 03, 2018 Every four years, everyone’s head around the globe turns toward the television. The Olympics, the World Cup – world events like these have all eyes viewing friendly competition...

Apply MITRE’s ‘ATT&CK’ Model to Check Your Defenses

ARCHIVED STORY Apply MITRE’s ‘ATT&CK’ Model to Check Your Defenses By Trellix · June 18, 2018 Every week we read about adversaries attacking their targets as part of online criminal campaigns. Information gathering, strategic advantage, and theft of intellectual property are some of the...

‘Popcorn Time’ Ransomware Sure to Cause Indigestion

ARCHIVED STORY ‘Popcorn Time’ Ransomware Sure to Cause Indigestion By Tim Hux · December 19, 2016 In early December the new ransomware “Popcorn Time” was discovered. It gives the victim the option of paying the ransom or infecting two other individuals and getting them to pay. “Popcorn Time” is a...

The Ghost in the Machine: Unmasking CrazyHunter's Stealth Tactics

The Ghost in the Machine: Unmasking CrazyHunter's Stealth Tactics By Aswath A · January 6, 2026 CrazyHunter ransomware has emerged as a significant and concerning threat, highlighting the increasing sophistication of cybercriminal tactics. Trellix has been actively tracking this ransomware since...

The Fake Domain Controller You Didn’t See Coming: Detecting DCShadow Attacks Using Trellix NDR

The Fake Domain Controller You Didn’t See Coming: Detecting DCShadow Attacks Using Trellix NDR By Maulik Maheta and Chao Sun · December 17, 2025 Executive summary DCShadow is a covert post-exploitation technique that enables an attacker to impersonate a domain controller and make unauthorized,...

The Bug Report – August 2025 Edition

The Bug Report – August 2025 Edition By Jonathan Omakun, Tola Olawale · August 27, 2025 Why am I here? Welcome back to The Bug Report! Did you miss us? The Trellix Advanced Research Center has been playing a high-stakes game of whack-a-mole with this month's vulnerabilities. We've dug through all...

The Democratization of Phishing: Popularity of PhaaS platforms on the rise

The Democratization of Phishing: Popularity of PhaaS Platforms on the Rise By Ryan Slaney · June 30, 2025 The phishing industry is being profoundly reshaped by the surge of Phishing-as-a-Service PhaaS platforms. These accessible, often Artificial Intelligence AI-powered, offerings are democratizi...

AIOps - Revolutionizing Incident Management with Advanced Automation and LLM Integration

AIOps - Revolutionizing Incident Management with Advanced Automation and LLM Integration By Trellix · November 14, 2024 Contributed by Chalapathy Jampal, Siddhesh Shinde, Alagiri Annadurai, Lakshmi Ram Teja Eluri and Anil Pokhrel Managing infrastructure and applications across a complex IT...

Cracking Cobalt Strike: Taking Down Malicious Cybercriminal Infrastructure with Threat Intelligence

Cracking Cobalt Strike Taking Down Malicious Cybercriminal Infrastructure with Threat Intelligence By Joao Marques, John Fokker and Leandro Velasco · July 3, 2024 Introduction In a significant global effort to combat cybercrime, law enforcement agencies from around the world have joined forces to...

Cybercrime Takes Advantage of 2023-Recession with Job-Themed Scams

Cybercrime Takes Advantage of 2023 Recession with Job-Themed Scams By Daksh Kapur · February 28, 2023 Figure 1 image from freepik.com and flaticon.com The current economic climate globally is grim because of the ongoing recession. In this environment, job-themed emails have become a prime target...

LockBit3.0: A Threat that Persists

LockBit3.0: A Threat that Persists By Trellix · November 17, 2022 This blog was written by Alexandre Mundo LockBit is a very well-known family of ransomware that has created havoc worldwide over the last few years. In March 2022, a new variant of the ransomware was discovered. The LockBit3.0...

Get to Know Fred House

Meet Fred House Senior Director, Product Detection and Research By Trellix · July 12, 2022 This blog was written by Michael Alicea At Trellix, we celebrate and champion our people. For a long time now, I’ve been looking forward to connecting with Fred House, a Senior Director at Trellix Threat La...

Ukrainian Companies Targeted by Wipers - Impact & Prevention

War, weapons, and wipers By Max Kersten · March 31, 2022 In the recent weeks, Ukrainian companies have been targeted by wipers, likely created by pro-Russian actors. There has been a lot of talk about a “cyber war” and the usage of “cyber weapons.” Whereas the digital domain is certainly abused,...

Cyberattacks Targeting Ukraine and HermeticWiper Protections

Trellix Global Defenders: Cyberattacks Targeting Ukraine and HermeticWiper Protections By Taylor Mullins · February 28, 2022 Trellix is monitoring the ongoing cyberattacks targeting the Ukraine and any threat activity targeting entities outside of the Ukraine. Trellix is continuing to add...

Who Will Bend the Knee in RaaS Game of Thrones in 2022?

ARCHIVED STORY Who Will Bend the Knee in RaaS Game of Thrones in 2022? By John Fokker and Raj Samani · November 07, 2021 McAfee Enterprise and FireEye recently released its 2022 Threat Predictions. In this blog, we take a deeper dive into a Game of Thrones power struggle among...

Operation Dianxun Cyberespionage Campaign Targeting Telecommunication Companies

ARCHIVED STORY Operation Diànxùn: Cyberespionage Campaign Targeting Telecommunication Companies By Thomas Roccia · MAR 16, 2021 In this report the McAfee Advanced Threat Research ATR Strategic Intelligence team details an espionage campaign, targeting telecommunication companies, dubbed Operation...

RagnarLocker Ransomware Threatens to Release Confidential Information | McAfee Blogs

ARCHIVED STORY RagnarLocker Ransomware Threatens to Release Confidential Information Alexandre Mundo · JUN 09, 2020 EXECUTIVE SUMMARY The RagnarLocker ransomware first appeared in the wild at the end of December 2019 as part of a campaign against compromised networks targeted by its operators. Th...