The Hermit Kingdom’s Ransomware Play

The Hermit Kingdom’s Ransomware play By Trellix · May 3, 2022 With a special thanks to @ValidHorizon who helped and shared information In February 2016, news broke about what is now known as the ‘Bangladesh Bank Heist’. Hackers attempted to transfer nearly one billion USD through the SWIFT system...

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...

Breaking the Security Barrier of a Globally Deployed Infusion Pump

ARCHIVED STORY Overmedicated: Breaking the Security Barrier of a Globally Deployed Infusion Pump By Douglas McKee, Steve Povolny and Philippe Laulheret · August 24, 2021 Cyberattacks on medical centers are one of the most despicable forms of cyber threat there is. For instance, on October 28th,...

Babuk: Biting off More than they Could Chew by Aiming to Encrypt VM and *nix Systems? | McAfee Blogs

Babuk: Biting off More than they Could Chew by Aiming to Encrypt VM and nix Systems? Thibault Seret · JUL 28, 2021 Co-written with Northwave’s Noël Keijzer. Executive Summary For a long time, ransomware gangs were mostly focused on Microsoft Windows operating systems. Yes, we observed the...

Additional Analysis into the SUNBURST Backdoor | McAfee Blogs

ARCHIVED STORY Additional Analysis into the SUNBURST Backdoor Christiaan Beek · DEC 17, 2020 Executive Summary There has been considerable focus on the recent disclosures associated with SolarWinds, and while existing analysis on the broader campaign has resulted in detection against specific IoC...

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...

Spanish MSSP Targeted by BitPaymer Ransomware

ARCHIVED STORY Spanish MSSP Targeted by BitPaymer Ransomware By ATR Operational Intelligence Team · November 08, 2019 Co-authored by Marc RiveroLopez Initial Discovery This week the news hit that several companies in Spain were hit by a ransomware attack. Ransomware attacks themselves are not new...

Mr. Coffee with WeMo: Double Roast

ARCHIVED STORY Mr. Coffee with WeMo: Double Roast By Sam Quinn · May 30, 2019 McAfee Advanced Threat Research recently released a blog detailing a vulnerability in the Mr. Coffee Coffee Maker with WeMo. Please refer to the earlier blog to catch up with the processes and techniques I used to...

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...

McAfee Labs Advanced Threat Research Aids Arrest of Suspected Cybercrime Gang Linked to Top Malware CTB Locker

ARCHIVED STORY McAfee Labs Advanced Threat Research Aids Arrest of Suspected Cybercrime Gang Linked to Top Malware CTB Locker By Trellix · December 20, 2017 In our recent research, we interviewed the actors behind ransomware campaigns. One of the interesting findings was cybercriminals seemed to...

Signed, sealed, injected: The mechanics of DCRat in 2026

Signed, sealed, injected: The mechanics of DCRat in 2026 By Madhini Muralidharan, Shalaka Patil and Kaushal Sarda · August 13, 2026 Introduction In early 2026, the Trellix Advanced Research Center ARC identified and analyzed an active DarkCrystal RAT DCRat campaign following a critical customer...

PureRAT: A Multi-Stage, Fileless RAT Utilizing Image Steganography and Process Hollowing

PureRAT: A Multi-Stage, Fileless RAT Utilizing Image Steganography and Process Hollowing By Prashanth A N and Mallikarjun Wali · April 20, 2026 PureRAT is an advanced remote access trojan RAT characterized by its complex infection stages. The intrusion sequence is initiated by a malicious .LNK fi...

DCSync Detection Without Signatures: Trellix NDR and the Power of Technique-Based Defense

DCSync Detection Without Signatures: Trellix NDR and the Power of Technique-Based Defense By Maulik Maheta and Chao Sun · April 14, 2026 Executive summary A DCSync attack is one of the most formidable techniques an adversary can deploy after gaining a foothold in an Active Directory AD environmen...

Dark Web Roast - January 2026 Edition

Dark Web Roast - January 2026 Edition By Trellix Advanced Research Center · February 11, 2026 Executive Summary Welcome to January 2026's underground intelligence roundup, where criminal masterminds continue to demonstrate that the phrase "honour among thieves" remains the greatest oxymoron in...

Dark Web Roast December 2025 Edition

Dark Web Roast - December 2025 Edition By Trellix Advanced Research Center · January 15, 2026 Executive summary December 2025 delivered a spectacular finale to the year's cybercriminal comedy show, featuring Global Ransomware-as-a-Service RaaS operator liquidating their empire for pocket change,...

Detecting and Visualizing Lateral Movement Attacks with Trellix Helix Connect

Detecting and Visualizing Lateral Movement Attacks with Trellix Helix Connect By Maulik Maheta and Adithya Chandra · July 17, 2025 Executive summary This blog marks the third installment in our series on detecting and visualizing lateral movement attacks with Trellix Helix Connect. A lateral...

Demystifying Myth Stealer: A Rust Based InfoStealer

Demystifying Myth Stealer: A Rust Based InfoStealer By Niranjan Hegde, Vasantha Lakshmanan Ambasankar and Adarsh S · June 5, 2025 Introduction During regular proactive threat hunting, the Trellix Advanced Research Center identified a fully undetected infostealer malware sample written in Rust. Up...

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...

Midnight Blizzard Attack Detection in Trellix Helix

Midnight Blizzard Attack Detection in Trellix Helix By Ian Shefferman · March 18, 2024 On January 25, 2024, Microsoft reported a breach of their systems by the Russian APT group Midnight Blizzard, also known as APT29 and Cozy Bear. The attackers performed a password spray, compromised a Microsoft...

Cyberattack on Democracy: Escalating Cyber Threats Immediately Ahead of Taiwan’s 2024 Presidential Election

Cyberattack on Democracy: Escalating Cyber Threats Immediately Ahead of Taiwan’s 2024 Presidential Election By Anne An · February 13, 2024 Preface Cybersecurity has become an integral part of election security. Nation-state actors and other politically motivated groups are likely to try to...

The Psychology of Phishing: Unraveling the Success Behind Phishing Attacks and Effective Countermeasures

The Psychology of Phishing: Unraveling the Success Behind Phishing Attacks and Effective Countermeasures By Tomer Shloman · February 1, 2024 Phishing is one of the most sneaky and widespread attacks in the constantly changing world of cybersecurity threats. This form of cyber attack, deceiving...

Saints Turned Evil

Saints Turned Evil By Daksh Kapur and Rohan Shah · January 2, 2024 This blog was also written by Sushant Kumar Arya Attribution at the Bottom As technology advances, attackers are constantly developing new evasion mechanisms to bypass security products and stay one step ahead of security vendors...

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...

Feeding Gophers to Ghidra

Feeding Gophers to Ghidra By Max Kersten · June 6, 2023 The scripts discussed in the article are based on the magnificent work of Dorka Palotay from CUJOai. Golang malware is becoming increasingly prevalent, requiring analysts to know how to effectively analyze these files without diving into a...

Shining Light on Dark Power: Yet Another Ransomware Gang

Shining Light on Dark Power: Yet Another Ransomware Gang By Pham Duy Phuc and Tomer Shloman · March 23, 2023 This blog was also written by Max Kersten Another day, another ransomware gang. The Dark Power ransomware gang is new on the block, and is trying to make a name for itself. This blog dives...

2022 Election Phishing Attacks Target Election Workers

2022 Election Phishing Attacks Target Election Workers By Rohan Shah · October 12, 2022 This blog was written by Patrick Flynn and Fred House Highly publicized campaign and political party breaches during the 2016 U.S. presidential campaign raised election security as a critical issue among U.S...

Nation-State Crosshairs: Australia, India & Japan

In The Nation-State Crosshairs: Australia, India & Japan 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’ mindsets...

Detection of ‘Leave Behinds’ From Nation-State Actors

Who left the backdoor open? By Trellix · March 28, 2022 In our recent report, In the Crosshairs: Companies and Nation-State Cyber Threats, over 800 IT decision makers from around the world were interviewed on their experiences with nation-state cyber attacks. One of the questions sought to...

Babuk: Biting off More than they Could Chew by Aiming to Encrypt VM and *nix Systems? | McAfee Blogs

Babuk: Biting off More than they Could Chew by Aiming to Encrypt VM and nix Systems? Thibault Seret · JUL 28, 2021 Co-written with Northwave’s Noël Keijzer. Executive Summary For a long time, ransomware gangs were mostly focused on Microsoft Windows operating systems. Yes, we observed the...

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...

Avaya Deskphone: Decade-Old Vulnerability Found in Phone's Firmware

ARCHIVED STORY Avaya Deskphone: Decade-Old Vulnerability Found in Phone’s Firmware By Philippe Laulheret · August 08, 2019 Avaya is the second largest VOIP solution provider source with an install base covering 90% of the Fortune 100 companies source, with products targeting a wide spectrum of...

LockerGoga Ransomware Family Used in Targeted Attacks

ARCHIVED STORY LockerGoga Ransomware Family Used in Targeted Attacks By ATR Operational Intelligence Team · April 29, 2019 Co-authored by Marc RiveroLopez. Initial discovery Once again, we have seen a significant new ransomware family in the news. LockerGoga, which adds new features to the tried...

Organizations Leave Backdoors Open to Cheap Remote Desktop Protocol Attacks

ARCHIVED STORY Organizations Leave Backdoors Open to Cheap Remote Desktop Protocol Attacks By John Fokker · July 11, 2018 Thanks to my colleague Christiaan Beek for his advice and contributions. While researching underground hacker marketplaces, the McAfee Advanced Threat Research team has...

From Digital Innovation to Patient Harm: Why Healthcare Cybersecurity Is Now a C-Suite Imperative

From Digital Innovation to Patient Harm: Why Healthcare Cybersecurity Is Now a C-Suite Imperative By John Fokker · January 27, 2026 For decades, healthcare systems were designed with one core principle: patient safety. Clinical devices operated in largely closed environments, disconnected from th...

Dark Web Roast – November 2025 Edition

Dark Web Roast – November 2025 Edition By Trellix Advanced Research Center · December 9, 2025 Executive summary November 2025 delivered a masterclass in underground incompetence that would make any cybersecurity professional simultaneously laugh and cry. From the Silent data-extortion group getti...

Exposing PathWiper: DCOM Abuse and Network Erasure

Exposing PathWiper: A Deep Dive into DCOM Abuse and Network Erasure With Trellix NDR By Maulik Maheta and Lishoy Mathew · August 12, 2025 Executive summary Ukraine’s national energy and telecommunications infrastructure was the primary targets of the PathWiper attack in 2025. The attack was...

Blurring the Lines: How Nation-States and Organized Cybercriminals Are Becoming Alike

Blurring the Lines: How Nation-States and Organized Cybercriminals Are Becoming Alike By Tomer Shloman · January 7, 2025 The distinction between nation-state actors and organized cybercriminals is becoming increasingly blurred in our rapidly evolving cyber landscape. Historically, these groups ha...

Safeguarding Election Integrity: Threat Hunting for the U.S. Elections

Safeguarding Election Integrity: Threat Hunting for the U.S. Elections By Ernesto Provecho and John Fokker · December 20, 2024 This blog was also written by Max Kersten With 2024 being a major election year globally, the stakes for election security were and remain high. More than 60 countries,...

New Stealer Uses Invalid Cert To Compromise Systems

New Stealer Uses Invalid Cert To Compromise Systems By Mohinder Gill, Mallikarjun Wali and Sangram Mohapatro · November 07, 2024 A new Stealer has been making the rounds. Its name: Fickle. Fickle Stealer is a new Rust-based information stealer that spreads through various attack vectors, includin...

A Catalog of Hazardous AV Sites – A Tale of Malware Hosting

A Catalog of Hazardous AV Sites – A Tale of Malware Hosting By Trellix · May 23, 2024 This blog was written by Gurumoorthi Ramanathan Executive summary In mid-April 2024, Trellix Advanced Research Center team members observed multiple fake AV sites hosting highly sophisticated malicious files suc...

RansomHouse am See

RansomHouse am See By Pham Duy Phuc in collaboration with Noël Keijzer and Michaël Schrijver from Northwave · February 14, 2024 This blog was also written by Max Kersten Ransom gangs make big bucks by extorting victims, which sadly isn’t new. Their lucrative business allows them not only to live...

Resilient Security Requires Mature Cyber Threat Intelligence Capabilities

Resilient Security Requires Mature Cyber Threat Intelligence Capabilities By Trellix Advanced Research Center · August 5, 2023 Threat intelligence and the ability to add context to each technology environment to global threats has never been more important to the role of the CISO, or to the board...

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...

China-Taiwan Tensions Spark Surge in Cyberattacks on Taiwan

China-Taiwan Tensions Spark Surge in Cyberattacks on Taiwan By Daksh Kapur, Leandro Velasco · May 17, 2023 Figure 1 image from freepik.com “In the past few years, we noticed that geopolitical conflicts are one of the main drivers for cyber-attacks on a variety of industries and institutions...

2022 Election Phishing Attacks Target Election Workers

2022 Election Phishing Attacks Target Election Workers By Rohan Shah · October 12, 2022 This blog was written by Patrick Flynn and Fred House Highly publicized campaign and political party breaches during the 2016 U.S. presidential campaign raised election security as a critical issue among U.S...

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...

A Door Isn’t a Door When It’s Ajar - Part 3

A Door Isn’t a Door When It’s Ajar - Part III By Trellix · August 25, 2022 This story was also written by Steve Povolny and Sam Quinn Contents Installing OnGuard by Third Party Vendor Exploitation and Hacking the Planet! Putting it all Together Building the Final Demo System The Demo Lessons and...

The Race to Secure eBPF for Windows

The Race to Secure eBPF for Windows By Trellix · August 11, 2022 This blog was written by Douglas McKee Innovation often improves functionality and even security; however, adoption starts slow. Adoption often doesn’t increase at a linear rate but at an exponential rate leaving behind attack...

Cyberattacks Rise Targeting Infrastructure and Geo Tensions

Trellix Threat Labs Research Report: Cyberattacks Targeting Critical Infrastructure Rise Along with Geopolitical Tensions By Trellix · April 27, 2022 The release of our Trellix Threat Labs Research Report: April 2022 examines cybercriminal behavior and activity related to cyber threats in the...