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,...

Amadey Exploiting Self-Hosted GitLab to Distribute StealC

Amadey Exploiting Self-Hosted GitLab to Distribute StealC By Rahul Sharma · December 18, 2025 Executive summary Amadey is a malware loader that has been active since 2018, primarily used to distribute second-stage payloads and infostealers. While Amadey has been previously known to distribute...

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...

The Developer's Newest Bug: Speed

The Developer's Newest Bug: Speed By Tola Olawale · December 2, 2025 Artificial intelligence AI has unequivocally entered its “main character” era, moving from a niche tool to a universal creator. This massive shift has given rise to "vibe coding ": the practice of using AI to generate functional...

XWorm V6: Exploring Pivotal Plugins

XWorm V6: Exploring Pivotal Plugins By Niranjan Hegde and Sijo Jacob · October 2, 2025 Introduction In the constantly evolving world of cyber threats, staying informed is not just an advantage; it's a necessity. First observed in 2022, XWorm quickly gained notoriety as a highly effective malware,...

When AD Gets Breached: Detecting NTDS.dit Dumps and Exfiltration with Trellix NDR

When AD Gets Breached: Detecting NTDS.dit Dumps and Exfiltration with Trellix NDR By Maulik Maheta · September 25, 2025 Executive summary Active Directory AD stores the digital keys to an organization's kingdom. When attackers gain access to a network, they often target the NTDS.dit file, which...

Dark Web Roast - August 2025 Edition

Dark Web Roast - August 2025 Edition By Trellix Advanced Research Center · September 18, 2025 Executive Summary August 2025 delivered a masterclass in cybercriminal incompetence that would make amateur hour look professional. From racist social engineering recruiters who prioritize race over actu...

Silent Pivot: Detecting Fileless Lateral Movement via Service Manager with Trellix NDR

Silent Pivot: Detecting Fileless Lateral Movement via Service Manager with Trellix NDR By Maulik Maheta and Lishoy Mathew · September 8, 2025 Executive summary The tactics of cyber adversaries continue to evolve as they attempt to bypass security vendors. Rather than traditional malware, today’s...

ToolShell Unleashed: Decoding the SharePoint Attack Chain

ToolShell Unleashed: Decoding the SharePoint Attack Chain By Aniket Choukde, Aparna Aripirala, Satyajit Daulaguphu and Yadunadh · September 4, 2025 This blog was also written by Akhil Reddy Introduction A wave of active exploitation is targeting recently disclosed vulnerabilities in Microsoft...

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...

The Bug Report - July 2025 Edition

The Bug Report – July 2025 Edition By Jonathan Omakun and Tola Olawale · August 6, 2025 Why am I here? July usually means barbecues, fireworks and pool parties—but this year, it brought something far more explosive: unauthenticated remote code execution, deserialization chaos, and an old-school...

Detecting and Visualizing Lateral Movement Attacks with Trellix XDR

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...

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...

Threat Analysis: SquidLoader - Still Swimming Under the Radar

Threat Analysis: SquidLoader - Still Swimming Under the Radar By Charles Crofford · July 15, 2025 Executive summary A new wave of SquidLoader malware samples are actively targeting financial services institutions in Hong Kong. This sophisticated malware exhibits significant evasion capabilities,...

OneClik: A ClickOnce-Based APT Campaign Targeting Energy, Oil and Gas Infrastructure

OneClik: A ClickOnce-Based Red Team Campaign Simulating APT Tactics in Energy Infrastructure By Nico Paulo Yturriaga and Pham Duy Phuc · Updated : June 30, 2025 The Trellix Advanced Research Center previously uncovered what appeared to be a sophisticated APT malware campaign, which we dubbed...

The Growing Threat of Vishing: How Cybercriminals Are Using Multimedia to Target You

The Growing Threat of Vishing: How Cybercriminals Are Using Multimedia to Target You By Mark Joseph Marti and Sandra Pagkaliwagan · May 8, 2025 Introduction Imagine being hacked through a phone call, and you can't even complain because you were the one who provided your sensitive information or...

The Bug Report - April 2025 Edition

The Bug Report - April 2025 Edition By Jonathan Omakun · May 8, 2025 Why am I here? Ah, spring. The season of blossoms, allergies, and — apparently — auth bypasses, remote code execution, and buffer overflows is in full bloom. Welcome to The Bug Report – April 2025 Edition, where we roll up our...

A Deep Dive into the Latest Version of Lumma InfoStealer

Unmasking the Evolving Threat: A Deep Dive into the Latest Version of Lumma InfoStealer with Code Flow Obfuscation By Mohideen Abdul Khader · April 21, 2025 Summary Lumma Stealer, first identified in 2022, remains a significant threat to this day, continuously evolving its tactics, techniques, an...

The Bug Report - January 2025 Edition

The Bug Report - January 2025 Edition By Jonathan Omakun · January 30, 2025 Why am I here? Ah, January—the month of resolutions, regrets, and, apparently, really bad code. While you’re trying to get back to the gym or cut down on caffeine, attackers have been busy exploiting vulnerabilities faste...

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,...

Hacktivist Groups: The Shadowy Links to Nation-State Agendas

Hacktivist Groups: The Shadowy Links to Nation-State Agendas By Ernesto Fernández Provecho · December 16, 2024 Introduction Hacktivism, the intersection of hacking and activism, has emerged as a potent force in the digital age. It involves using technology to achieve social or political goals,...

Phobos: Stealthy Ransomware That Operated Under the Radar - Until Now

Phobos: Stealthy Ransomware That Operated Under the Radar - Until Now By Jambul Tologonov, John Fokker and Duy-Phuc Pham · November 20, 2024 On November 18th, the US Justice Department unsealed criminal charges against a Russian national for allegedly administering the sale, distribution, and...

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...

No symbols? No problem!

No symbols? No problem! By Trellix · August 9, 2024 This blog was written by Max Kersten Malware analysts know it all too well: the ominous feeling that washes over you when opening an unknown file in your favorite analysis tool and being greeted with hundreds or thousands of unknown functions,...

Managing Risk During the CrowdStrike Global Tech Outage

Managing Risk During the CrowdStrike Global Tech Outage By Mo Cashman & Trellix Advanced Research Center · July 19, 2024 Updated: July 25, 2024 How it Happened A defective content update provided by cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike caused Microsoft Windows systems to crash, disrupting airline trave...

The Mechanics of ViperSoftX: Exploiting AutoIt and CLR for Stealthy PowerShell Execution

The Mechanics of ViperSoftX: Exploiting AutoIt and CLR for Stealthy PowerShell Execution By Sijo Jacob · July 9, 2024 This blog was also written by Mathanraj Thangaraju Threat Summary In the dynamic landscape of cyber threats, ViperSoftX has emerged as a highly sophisticated malware, adept at...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

The Continued Evolution of the DarkGate Malware-as-a-Service

The Continued Evolution of the DarkGate Malware-as-a-Service By Ernesto Fernández Provecho, Pham Duy Phuc, Ciana Driscoll and Vinoo Thomas · November 21, 2023 On September 2023, the Trellix Security Operations Center SOC successfully detected and stopped an attack against Musarubra, the holding...

Rhysida Ransomware

Rhysida Ransomware By Leandro Velasco · October 9, 2023 This blog was also written by Alexandre Mundo and Max Kersten New ransomware victims are made every day by ransom gangs with a variety of ransomware malware families, one of which is the Rhysida ransomware family. Within this blog, an...

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...

Old Loader, New Threat: Exploring XWorm RAT's Distribution and Tactics 

Old Loader, New Threat: Exploring XWorm RAT's Distribution and Tactics By Pratik Pachpor and Adarsh S · July 31, 2023 Executive Summary: In March-April 2023, we detected a malicious email campaign delivering .Net based XWorm RAT in which embedded blogspot.com URLs were used as an entry point. Thi...

Skuld: The Infostealer that Speaks Golang

Skuld: The Infostealer that Speaks Golang By Ernesto Fernández Provecho · June 13, 2023 In May 2023, the Trellix Advanced Research Center discovered a new Golang stealer, known as Skuld, that compromised systems worldwide, something that security researchers had also noticed. The usage of Golang,...

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...

Trucking on with DotDumper

Trucking on with DotDumper By Trellix · May 11, 2023 This blog was written by Max Kersten On the 11th of August 2022, the initial public version of DotDumper was released. A brief refresh: DotDumper is an open-source automatic unpacker for DotNet Framework targeting files. This blog marks a publi...

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,...

Genesis Market No Longer Feeds The Evil Cookie Monster

Genesis Market No Longer Feeds The Evil Cookie Monster By John Fokker and Ernesto Fernández Provecho · April 05, 2023 This blog was also written by Max Kersten We would like to thank Steen Pedersen and Mo Cashman for their remediation advice. On the 4th and the 5th of April, a law enforcement...

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...

Qakbot Evolves to OneNote Malware Distribution

Qakbot Evolves to OneNote Malware Distribution By Pham Duy Phuc, John Fokker J.E. and Alejandro Houspanossian · March 07, 2023 This blog was also written by Raghav Kapoor and Mathanraj Thangaraju Qakbot aka QBot, QuakBot, and Pinkslipbot is a sophisticated piece of malware that has been active...

Exploiting Tragedy: Fake Donation Scams Amid Earthquake in Turkey & Syria

Exploiting Tragedy: Fake Donation Scams Amid Earthquake in Turkey & Syria By Daksh Kapur · February 23, 2023 Figure 1 image from freepik.com & flaticon.com The recent earthquake that shook Syria and Turkey left a devastating trail of destruction. The whole world has shown its support and...

Cyberattacks Targeting Ukraine Increase 20-fold at End of 2022 Fueled by Russia-linked Gamaredon Activity

Cyberattacks Targeting Ukraine Increase 20-fold at End of 2022 Fueled by Russia-linked Gamaredon Activity By Daksh Kapur, Tomer Shloman, Robert Venal and John Fokker · January 24, 2023 Figure 1 It has been almost a year since Russia invaded Ukraine in a major escalation of the Russo-Ukrainian War...

GuLoader: The NSIS Vantage Point

GuLoader: The NSIS Vantage Point By Nico Paulo Yturriaga · January 24, 2023 GuLoader is an advanced shellcode downloader infamous for using anti-analysis tricks to evade detection and obstruct reverse engineering. As of this writing, the GuLoader campaign is aggressively ongoing. Trellix’s...

Yanluowang Ransomware Leaks Analysis: Organization, Collaboration with HelloKitty, Babuk and Conti

Yanluowang Ransomware Leaks Analysis: Organization, Collaboration with HelloKitty, Babuk and Conti By Jambul Tologonov· November 22, 2022 Introduction On October 31, 2022, Yanluowang’s TOR site was hacked displaying a message “check and mate!! Yanluowang Matrix chat hacked @yanluowangleaks Time’s...

Email Cyberattacks on Arab Countries Rise in Lead to Global Football Tournament

Email Cyberattacks on Arab Countries Rise in Lead to Global Football Tournament By Daksh Kapur · November 17, 2022 This story was also written by Sparsh Jain. Figure 1 Global eyes are soon to be turned to the first global football tournament to be held in the Arab world kicking off on November 20...

Wipermania: An All You Can Wipe Buffet

Wipermania: An All You Can Wipe Buffet By Trellix · November 15, 2022 This blog was written by Max Kersten In early 2022, Ukrainian companies were struck by multiple destructive wipers, attacking various organizations across sectors. This raised questions about the usage and impact of “digital...