DotDumper: Automatically Unpacking DotNet based Malware

DotDumper: Automatically Unpacking DotNet Based Malware By Trellix · August 11, 2022 This blog was written by Max Kersten The automatic detection and classification of any given file in a reliable manner is often considered the holy grail of malware analysis. The trials and tribulations to get...

Netop Vision Pro - Distance Learning Software is 20/20 in Hindsight

ARCHIVED STORY Netop Vision Pro – Distance Learning Software is 20/20 in Hindsight By Sam Quinn · MAR 21, 2021 · 27 MIN READ The McAfee Labs Advanced Threat Research team is committed to uncovering security issues in both software and hardware to help developers provide safer products for...

Ripple20 Vulnerability Mitigation Best Practices

ARCHIVED STORY Ripple20 Vulnerability Mitigation Best Practices By Kevin McGrath · June 22, 2020 On June 16th, the Department of Homeland Security and CISA ICS-CERT issued a critical security advisory warning covering multiple newly discovered vulnerabilities affecting Internet-connected devices...

CurveBall – An Unimaginative Pun but a Devastating Bug

ARCHIVED STORY CurveBall – An Unimaginative Pun but a Devastating Bug By Steve Povolny · June 17, 2020 Enterprise customers looking for information on defending against Curveball can find information here. 2020 came in with a bang this year, and it wasn’t from the record-setting number of firewor...

JAVA-based Sophisticated Stealer Using Discord Bot as EventListener

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

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...

Decoding the DNA of Ransomware Attacks: Unveiling the Anatomy Behind the Threat

Decoding the DNA of Ransomware Attacks: Unveiling the Anatomy Behind the Threat By Trellix Advanced Research Center · August 28, 2023 Introduction Ransomware, a malicious software that encrypts valuable data and demands a ransom for its release, has a notorious history marked by its evolution fro...

Trellix HAX 2023 CTF Competition

Trellix HAX 2023 CTF Competition Now Open for Registration! By Mark Bereza · February 17, 2023 This story was also written by John Dunlap. Introduction Trellix’s Advanced Research Center is happy to announce the launch of Trellix HAX 2023, our third annual capture the flag CTF competition! With 1...

Digging into HermeticWiper

Digging into HermeticWiper By Max Kersten · March 2, 2022 A special thanks toMarc Elias for his help during my analysis. Additionally, I’d like to commend all researchers who have publicly shared their initial findings to help incident response teams; I hope this deep dive contributes to a furthe...

On Drovorub: Linux Kernel Security Best Practices | McAfee Blogs

ARCHIVED STORY On Drovorub: Linux Kernel Security Best Practices By ATR Operational Intelligence Team/b · AUG 13, 2020 Intro In a U.S. government cyber security advisory released today, the National Security Agency and Federal Bureau of Investigation warn of a previously undisclosed piece of Linu...

Ripple20 Critical Vulnerabilities – Detection Logic and Signatures

ARCHIVED STORY Ripple20 Critical Vulnerabilities – Detection Logic and Signatures By Steve Povolny · August 05, 2020 This document has been prepared by McAfee Advanced Threat Research in collaboration with JSOF who discovered and responsibly disclosed the vulnerabilities. It is intended to serve ...

Ripple20 Vulnerability Mitigation Best Practices

ARCHIVED STORY Ripple20 Vulnerability Mitigation Best Practices By Kevin McGrath · June 22, 2020 On June 16th, the Department of Homeland Security and CISA ICS-CERT issued a critical security advisory warning covering multiple newly discovered vulnerabilities affecting Internet-connected devices...

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...

Shamoon Attackers Employ New Tool Kit to Wipe Infected Systems

ARCHIVED STORY Shamoon Attackers Employ New Tool Kit to Wipe Infected Systems By Thomas Roccia · December 19, 2018 Last week the McAfee Advanced Threat Research team posted an analysis of a new wave of Shamoon “wiper” malware attacks that struck several companies in the Middle East and Europe. In...

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...

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...

Return of Pseudo Ransomware

Return of Pseudo Ransomware By Trellix, Max Kersten and Raj Samani · January 20, 2022 Arnab Roy, Filippo Sitzia and Mo Cashman contributed to the research supporting this blog Recent news reports of a “ransomware” campaign targeting Ukraine has resulted in significant press coverage regarding not...

What’s in the Box? Part II: Hacking the iParcelBox

ARCHIVED STORY What’s in the Box? Part II: Hacking the iParcelBox By Steve Povolny · June 18, 2020 Package delivery is just one of those things we take for granted these days. This is especially true in the age of Coronavirus, where e-commerce and at-home deliveries make up a growing portion of...

Trellix SecondSight Threat Hunting Report: How AI and Human Intelligence Expose 2026 Cyber Threats

Trellix SecondSight Threat Hunting Report: How AI and Human Intelligence Expose 2026 Cyber Threats By John Fokker and Adam Rocker · September 8, 2026 Threat hunting is changing. As adversaries adopt new technologies, techniques, and increasingly AI-enabled ways of operating, defenders have access...

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...

Handala’s Wiper Targets Israel

Handala’s Wiper Targets Israel By Tomer Shloman · July 26, 2024 This blog was also written by Mathanraj Thangaraju and Max Kersten CrowdStrike’s Falcon agent caused downtime for millions of computers across the globe beginning July 19. This event caused panic and chaos, which threat actors quickl...

AI is the Solution, Not the Problem

AI is the Solution, Not the Problem By Trellix · August 07, 2023 This story was also written by Oded Margalit. AI Artificial Intelligence / ML Machine Learning has recently been painted as the master evil. In this blog I would like to suggest a different view, where we can use it to make a better...

Genesis Market No Longer Feeds The Evil Cookie Monster

Genesis Market No Longer Feeds The Evil Cookie Monster By John Fokker, Ernesto Fernández Provecho and Max Kersten · April 05, 2023 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 taskforce spanning agencies acro...

Evolution of BazarCall Social Engineering Tactics

Evolution of BazarCall Social Engineering Tactics By Daksh Kapur · October 6, 2022 What is BazarCall? As nicely defined in this article by Microsoft: BazarCall campaigns forgo malicious links or attachments in email messages in favor of phone numbers that recipients are misled into calling. It’s ...

Growling Bears Make Thunderous Noise

Growling Bears Make Thunderous Noise By Trellix · June 6, 2022 Per public attribution, Russian cybercriminal groups have always been active. Their tactics, techniques, and procedures TTPs have not significantly evolved over time, although some changes have been observed. Lately, the threat...

Conti Group Targets ESXi Hypervisors With its Linux Variant

Conti Group Targets ESXi Hypervisors With its Linux Variant By Marc Elias, Jambul Tologonov and Alexandre Mundo · Apr 20, 2022 Despite the leak of the conversations of the Conti members that happened in March 2022, which we analyzed and published recently, the group seems to continue its operatio...

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,...

Beyond Clubhouse: Vulnerable Agora SDKs Still in Widespread Use | McAfee Blogs

Beyond Clubhouse: Vulnerable Agora SDKs Still in Widespread Use Steve Povolny · FEB 18, 2021 On February 17th, 2021, McAfee disclosed findings based on a 10-month long disclosure process with major video conferencing vendor Agora, Inc. As we disclosed the findings to Agora in April 2020, this...

Industrial Security Featuring Delta's enteliBUS Manager

ARCHIVED STORY From Building Control to Damage Control: A Case Study in Industrial Security Featuring Delta's enteliBUS Manager By Mark Bereza · August 09, 2019 Management. Control. It seems that you can’t stick five people in a room together without one of them trying to order the others around...

The Unfriending Truth: How to Spot a Facebook Phishing Scam Before It's Too Late

The Unfriending Truth: How to Spot a Facebook Phishing Scam Before It's Too Late By Mark Joseph Marti · January 12, 2026 Introduction As one of the world's largest social media platforms, with over 3 billion active users, Facebook is a frequent target for phishing scams. Hackers aim to hijack use...

The Bug Report – September 2025 Edition

The Bug Report – September 2025 Edition By Jonathan Omakun · October 7, 2025 Why am I here? Ah, September. When the leaves change colors, so do the threat landscapes! As summer fades into autumn, cybersecurity professionals are harvesting a bumper crop of vulnerabilities that would make any pumpk...

Rhysida Ransomware

Rhysida Ransomware By Alexandre Mundo, Max Kersten, and Leandro Velasco · October 9, 2023 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 anonymised version of an attack by...

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...

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...

5G: The Final Frontier

5G: The Final Frontier This story was written by Kevin Mcgrath · April 7th, 2022 Today Trellix Threat Labs is excited to announce the release of a whitepaper dedicated to 5G and its potential security concerns. As we look at the potential of 5G, we foresee it impacting nearly every facet of digit...

Update on WhisperGate, Destructive Malware Targeting Ukraine – Threat Intelligence & Protections Update

Update on WhisperGate, Destructive Malware Targeting Ukraine – Threat Intelligence & Protections Update By Taylor Mullins, Mo Cashman and Raj Samani · January 20, 2022 Recent news reports of a “ransomware” campaign targeting Ukraine has resulted in significant press coverage regarding not only...

CSI Evidence Indicators for Targeted Ransomware Attacks

ARCHIVED STORY CSI: Evidence Indicators for Targeted Ransomware Attacks – Part I By Trellix · Febraury 12, 2020 For many years now I have been working and teaching in the field of digital forensics, malware analysis and threat intelligence. During one of the classes we always talk about Lockard’s...

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...

Hiding in Plain Sight: Multi-Actor ahost.exe Attacks

Hiding in Plain Sight: Deconstructing the Multi-Actor DLL Sideloading Campaign abusing ahost.exe By Mallikarjun Wali and Mohideen Abdul Khader · January 14, 2026 Executive summary The Trellix Advanced Research Center has uncovered an active malware campaign that exploits a DLL sideloading...

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,...

The Ongoing Saga of Job-Themed Attacks

The Ongoing Saga of Job-Themed Attacks By Daksh Kapur and Alfred Alvarado · January 23, 2024 Figure 1 - Job Themed Cyberattacks Attribution at the Bottom In late 2023, Trellix Security Researchers identified an ongoing trend where cybercriminals exploit job-themed attack vectors to target both jo...

Uncover the Hidden Story of Ransomware Victims – They’re Not Who You Think

Uncover the Hidden Story of Ransomware Victims – They’re Not Who You Think By Trellix Advanced Research Center · July 31, 2023 Ransomware attacks against large corporations often dominate headlines. High-profile attacks against organizations like Kaseya, Colonial Pipeline, and MOVEit might make y...

Trellix HAX 2023 Capture the Flag Results!

Trellix HAX 2023 Capture the Flag Results! By Mark Bereza · March 17, 2023 This story was also written by Jesse Chick. All good things must come to an end, and our annual CTF is unfortunately no exception. When this competition began, we asked each of you to try your hand at 12 new challenges –...

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...

Suspected DarkHotel APT Activity Update

Suspected DarkHotel APT activity update One Hotel to rule them all, One Hotel to find them, One Hotel to bring them all and in the darkness bind them. By John Fokker · March 17, 2022 This story was also written by Thibault Seret Introduction: Our advanced threat research team has discovered a...

Tales From the Trenches; a Lockbit Ransomware Story

ARCHIVED STORY Tales From the Trenches; a Lockbit Ransomware Story By ATR Operational Intelligence Team · APR 30, 2020 Co-authored by Marc RiveroLopez. In collaboration with Northwave As we highlighted previously across two blogs, targeted ransomware attacks have increased massively over the past...

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...

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...

McAfee ATR Aids Police in Arrest of Rubella & Dryad Office Macro Builder

ARCHIVED STORY McAfee ATR Aids Police in Arrest of Rubella & Dryad Office Macro Builder By John Fokker · July 16, 2019 Everyday thousands of people receive emails with malicious attachments in their email inbox. Disguised as a missed payment or an invoice, a cybercriminal sender tries to entice a...

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...