Gang Wars: Breaking Trust Among Cyber Criminals

Gang Wars: Breaking Trust Among Cyber Criminals By John Fokker and Jambul Tologonov · August 5, 2025 Introduction In the final, unforgettable scene of the film Reservoir Dogs , a group of criminals — once united by a common goal — stand in a Mexican standoff, guns drawn, hearts pounding. Suspicio...

Automagic Reverse Engineering

Automagic Reverse Engineering By Trellix · July 1, 2025 This blog was written by Max Kersten Over the last few years, I have looked into methods to improve the reverse engineering process. This saves essential time during the analysis, which helps while defending from well prepared threat actors...

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...

Hidden Malware Discovered in jQuery Migrate: A Stealthy Supply Chain Threat

Hidden Malware Discovered in jQuery Migrate: A Stealthy Supply Chain Threat By Trellix · June 18, 2025 This blog was also written by Trishaan Kalra Introduction What happens when a trusted open source library becomes a conduit for stealthy malware delivery? That question became reality when the...

Inside LockBit's Admin Panel Leak

Inside the LockBit's Admin Panel Leak: Affiliates, Victims and Millions in Crypto By Jambul Tologonov · June 12, 2025 Introduction On May 7, 2025, the LockBit admin panel was hacked by an anonymous actor who replaced their TOR website with the text ‘ Don’t do crime CRIME IS BAD xoxo from Prague ’...

Closing the Security Gap From Threat Hunting to Detection Engineering

Closing the Security Gap From Threat Hunting to Detection Engineering By Ilya Kolmanovich, Alejandro Houspanossian, Joe Malenfant and Tomer Shloman · April 16, 2025 In today's rapidly evolving AI-fueled threat landscape, every organization is trying to stop threats as early as possible. Threat...

When Guardians Become Predators: How Malware Corrupts the Protectors

When Guardians Become Predators: How Malware Corrupts the Protectors By Trellix · November 20, 2024 This blog was also written by Trishaan Kalra Introduction We often trust our security software to stand as an unbreakable wall against malware and attacks, but what happens when that very wall is...

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...

Cyber Threats Targeting the US Government During the Democratic National Convention

Cyber Threats Targeting the US Government During the Democratic National Convention By Anne An · October 2, 2024 Introduction Trellix global sensors detected increased threat activities during the days that the Democratic National Convention DNC was held in August 2024, culminating into a massive...

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...

The Bug Report - April 2024 Edition

The Bug Report - April 2024 Edition By Jonathan Omakun and Tobi Olawale· April 29, 2024 Why am I here? Just when you thought it was safe to go back into the digital waters, out pops another series of rogue waves in the form of CVEs! It's like that beach vacation you planned to get away from it al...

Cybercrooks leveraging anti automation toolkit for phishing campaigns

Cybercrooks Leveraging Anti Automation Toolkit for Phishing Campaigns By Vihar Shah and Rohan Shah · December 18, 2023 Threat actors have a track record of abusing tools hosted on GitHub for malicious purposes. Last year we showed how attackers abused Python’s tarfile module. Trellix Advanced...

Peeling off QR Code Phishing Onion

Peeling off QR Code Phishing Onion: Revealing the Hidden Layers of Deceit By Neel H. Pathak and Pratik Sunil Kadam · October 10, 2023 Introduction: Malicious actors always seek innovative ways to bypass detection. The Trellix Advanced Research Center recently noticed an attack campaign with an...

A Royal Analysis of Royal Ransom

A Royal Analysis of Royal Ransom By Trellix · April 3, 2023 This blog was also written by Alexandre Mundo and Max Kersten We would like to thank Advanced Cyber Services team within Trellix Professional Services for the incident response-related data. Emerging in early 2022 as a private group whic...

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...

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’...

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...

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...

BlackMatter Ransomware Analysis; The Dark Side Returns

ARCHIVED STORY BlackMatter Ransomware Analysis; The Dark Side Returns By Alexandre Mundo and Marc Elias · September 22, 2021 BlackMatter is a new ransomware threat discovered at the end of July 2021. This malware started with a strong group of attacks and some advertising from its developers that...

Operation ‘Harvest’: A Deep Dive into a Long-term Campaign

ARCHIVED STORY Operation ‘Harvest’: A Deep Dive into a Long-term Campaign By Christiaan Beek · September 14, 2021 A special thanks to our Professional Services’ IR team,ShadowServer, for historical context on C2 domains, and Thomas Roccia/Leandro Velasco for malware analysis support. Executive...

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...

Securing Space 4.0 – One Small Step or a Giant Leap? - Part 1

ARCHIVED STORY Securing Space 4.0 – One Small Step or a Giant Leap? - Part 1 By Eoin Carroll · September 30, 2020 McAfee Advanced Threat Research ATR is collaborating with Cork Institute of Technology CIT and its Blackrock Castle Observatory BCO and the National Space Center NSC in Cork, Ireland...

Dopple-Ganging Up on Facial Recognition

ARCHIVED STORY Dopple-ganging up on Facial Recognition Systems By Steve Povolny · August 25, 2020 Co-authored with Jesse Chick, OSU Senior and Former McAfee Intern, Primary Researcher. Special thanks to Dr. Catherine Huang, McAfee Advanced Analytics Team Special thanks to Kyle Baldes, Former McAf...

Robot Character Analysis Reveals Trust Issues

ARCHIVED STORY Robot Character Analysis Reveals Trust Issues By Douglas McKee · August 05, 2020 Retired Marine fighter pilot and Top Gun instructor Dave Berke said “Every single thing you do in your life, every decision you make, is an OODA Loop.” OODA Loop? Observe–Orient–Decide–Act, the “OODA...

Call an Exorcist! My Robot! My Robot's Possessed!

ARCHIVED STORY Call an Exorcist! My Robot’s Possessed! By Mark Bereza · AUG 05, 2020 · 69 MIN READ Overview As part of our continued goal of helping developers provide safer products for businesses and consumers, we here at McAfee Advanced Threat Research ATR recently investigated temi , a...

My Adventures Hacking the iParcelBox

ARCHIVED STORY My Adventures Hacking the iParcelBox By Sam Quinn · June 18, 2020 In 2019, McAfee Advanced Threat Research ATR disclosed a vulnerability in a product called BoxLock. Sometime after this, the CEO of iParcelBox, a U.K. company, reached out to us and offered to send a few of their...

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...

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...

CSI: Evidence Indicators for Targeted Ransomware Attacks - Part II | McAfee Blogs

CSI: Evidence Indicators for Targeted Ransomware Attacks – Part II Christiaan Beek · FEB 20, 2020 In our first article we discussed the growing pattern of targeted ransomware attacks where the first infection stage is often an info-stealer kind of malware used to gain credentials/access to...

Model Hacking ADAS to Pave Safer Roads for Autonomous Vehicles

ARCHIVED STORY Model Hacking ADAS to Pave Safer Roads for Autonomous Vehicles Steve Povolny · FEB 19, 2020 The last several years have been fascinating for those of us who have been eagerly observing the steady move towards autonomous driving. While semi-autonomous vehicles have existed for many...

We Be Jammin’ – Bypassing Chamberlain myQ Garage Doors

ARCHIVED STORY We Be Jammin’ – Bypassing Chamberlain myQ Garage Doors Sam Quinn · JAN 06, 2020 The idea of controlling your garage door remotely and verifying that everything is secure at home, or having packages delivered directly into your garage is enticing for many people. The convenience tha...

Analysis of LooCipher, a New Ransomware Family Observed This Year

ARCHIVED STORY Analysis of LooCipher, a New Ransomware Family Observed This Year By ATR Operational Intelligence Team · December 05, 2019 Co-authored by Marc RiveroLopez. Initial Discovery This year seems to again be the year for ransomware. Notorious attacks were made using ransomware and new...

In NTDLL I Trust – Process Reimaging and Endpoint Security Solution Bypass

ARCHIVED STORY In NTDLL I Trust – Process Reimaging and Endpoint Security Solution Bypass By Eoin Carroll · June 20, 2019 Process Reimaging Overview The Windows Operating System has inconsistencies in how it determines process image FILEOBJECT locations, which impacts non-EDR Endpoint Detection a...

Crypto Currency Laundering Service, BestMixer.io, Taken Down by Law Enforcement

ARCHIVED STORY Cryptocurrency Laundering Service, BestMixer.io, Taken Down by Law Enforcement By John Fokker · May 22, 2019 A much overlooked but essential part in financially motivated cybercrime is making sure that the origins of criminal funds are obfuscated or made to appear legitimate, a...

Digging Up the Past: Windows Registry Forensics Revisited

ARCHIVED STORY Digging Up the Past: Windows Registry Forensics Revisited By David Via · Jan 08, 2019 Introduction FireEye consultants frequently utilize Windows registry data when performing forensic analysis of computer networks as part of incident response and compromise assessment missions. Th...

Rapidly Evolving Ransomware Gandcrab Version

ARCHIVED STORY Ransomware GandCrab Version 5 Partners With Crypter Service for Obfuscation By Alexandre Mundo · October 10, 2018 The GandCrab ransomware, which first appeared in January, has been updated rapidly during its short life, with Version 5.0.2 appearing this month. In this post we will...

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...

‘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...

SideCopy Threat Intel: MSHTA-driven Execution and RAT Deployment

SideCopy Threat Intel: MSHTA-driven Execution and RAT Deployment By Boggavarapu R S S Srinivas Gupta and Ravishankar N C · September 17, 2026 Introduction The modern cyber warfare landscape has evolved significantly as threat actors pivot toward simple yet highly effective and evasive malware...

Stitching the Kill Chain: Detecting NTDS.dit Exfiltration with Trellix Helix Correlation

Stitching the Kill Chain: Detecting NTDS.dit Exfiltration with Trellix Helix Correlation By Adithya Chandra and Maulik Maheta · August 18, 2026 Executive Summary While attackers continuously cycle through new tooling, their underlying techniques remain remarkably consistent. Credential theft from...

Weaponized AI: The Commoditization of Cybercrime

Weaponized AI: The Commoditization of Cybercrime By Jambul Tologonov · August 12, 2026 Executive Summary The Trellix Advanced Research Center has been actively monitoring dark web forums and criminal communication channels for emerging threats tied to artificial intelligence AI. What we are...

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...

The Ghost SPN Attack: Catching Stealthy Kerberoasting Before It's Too Late Using Trellix NDR

The Ghost SPN Attack: Catching Stealthy Kerberoasting Before It's Too Late Using Trellix NDR By Maulik Maheta and Henry Bernabe · March 23, 2026 Executive summary As organizations adopt an identity-first security posture, adversaries are increasingly exploiting the "identity fabric” using...

Dark Web Roast February 2026 Edition

Dark Web Roast - February 2026 Edition By Trellix Advanced Research Center · March 18, 2026 Executive Summary February 2026 delivered another stellar month in the ongoing theatre of the absurd that is the cybercriminal underground, where ransomware gangs bulk-scheduled their extortion like a...

Getting Roasted? Trellix Helix sees through AS-REP Attack

Getting Roasted? Trellix Helix sees through AS-REP Attack By Adithya Chandra and Maulik Maheta · March 17, 2026 Executive summary Threat actors regularly target Active Directory environments, continuously refining their toolsets and modifying attack frameworks to bypass security controls. However...

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...

Fileless Multi-Stage Remcos RAT: From Phishing to Memory-Resident Execution

Fileless Multi-Stage Remcos RAT: From Phishing to Memory-Resident Execution By Madhini Muralidharan · March 11, 2026 Traditional malware campaigns rely heavily on dropping executable files to disk—artifacts that defenders can scan, quarantine, and analyze with signature-based security tools. Mode...

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...

Technical Deep Dive: The Monero Mining Campaign

Technical Deep Dive: The Monero Mining Campaign By Aswath A · February 17, 2026 Executive summary In the contemporary threat landscape, while ransomware grabs headlines with high-impact disruptions, cryptojacking operations have quietly evolved into sophisticated, persistent threats. This report...