- APT annual review 2021
November 30, 2021
The Global Research and Analysis Team at Kaspersky posted the summary of most interesting trends and developments of the last 12 months. This is based on Kaspersky visibility in the threat landscape and it’s important to note that no single vendor has complete visibility into the activities of all threat actors. Private sector vendors play a ...
- ScarCruft surveilling North Korean defectors and human rights activists
November 29, 2021
The ScarCruft group (also known as APT37 or Temp.Reaper) is a nation-state sponsored APT actor we first reported in 2016. ScarCruft is known to target North Korean defectors, journalists who cover North Korea-related news and government organizations related to the Korean Peninsula, between others. Recently, we were approached by a news organization with a request ...
- WIRTE’s campaign in the Middle East ‘living off the land’ since at least 2019
November 29, 2021
This February, during our hunting efforts for threat actors using VBS/VBA implants, Kaspersky researchers came across MS Excel droppers that use hidden spreadsheets and VBA macros to drop their first stage implant. The implant itself is a VBS script with functionality to collect system information and execute arbitrary code sent by the attackers on the ...
- IT threat evolution Q3 2021
November 26, 2021
Last March, Kaspersky researchers reported a WildPressure campaign targeting industrial-related entities in the Middle East. While tracking this threat actor in spring 2021, they discovered a newer version. It contains the C++ Milum Trojan, a corresponding VBScript variant and a set of modules that include an orchestrator and three plugins. This confirms Kaspersky previous assumption ...
- Sophisticated Tardigrade malware launches attacks on vaccine manufacturing infrastructure
November 25, 2021
Security researchers are warning biomanufacturing facilities around the world that they are being targeted by a sophisticated new strain of malware, known as Tardigrade. The warning comes from the non-profit Bioeconomy Information Sharing and Analysis Center (BIO-ISAC) which revealed that at least two large facilities working on manufacturing bio-drugs and vaccines have been hit by the ...
- FBI: An APT Group Exploiting a 0-day in FatPipe WARP, MPVPN, and IPVPN Software
November 17, 2021
As of November 2021, FBI forensic analysis indicated exploitation of a 0-day vulnerability in the FatPipe MPVPN® device software1 going back to at least May 2021. The vulnerability allowed APT actors to gain access to an unrestricted file upload function to drop a webshell for exploitation activity with root access, leading to elevated privileges and ...
- Iranian Government-Sponsored APT Cyber Actors Exploiting MS Exchange and Fortinet Vulnerabilities in Furtherance of Malicious Activities
November 17, 2021
This joint cybersecurity advisory is the result of an analytic effort among the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), the Australian Cyber Security Centre (ACSC), and the United Kingdom’s National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) to highlight ongoing malicious cyber activity by an advanced persistent threat (APT) group that FBI, ...
- Evolving trends in Iranian threat actor activity – MSTIC presentation at CyberWarCon 2021
November 16, 2021
Over the past year, the Microsoft Threat Intelligence Center (MSTIC) has observed a gradual evolution of the tools, techniques, and procedures employed by malicious network operators based in Iran. At CyberWarCon 2021, MSTIC analysts presented their analysis of these trends in Iranian nation state actor activity during a session titled “The Iranian evolution: Observed changes ...
- MosesStaff attacks organizations with encryption malware: No payment demand made
November 16, 2021
The MosesStaff hacking group has entered the ‘ransomware’ fray with a difference: blackmail payments are furthest from their minds. On November 15, Check Point Research (CPR) said the group began targeting organizations in Israel during September this year, joining campaigns launched by Pay2Key and BlackShadow. The focus of these operations was to deploy ransomware on their victim’s ...
- Fake end-to-end encrypted chat app distributes Android spyware
November 13, 2021
The GravityRAT remote access trojan is being distributed in the wild again, this time under the guise of an end-to-end encrypted chat application called SoSafe Chat. This particular RAT (remote access trojan) targets predominately Indian users, being distributed by Pakistani actors. The telemetry data on the most recent campaign shows that the targeting scope hasn’t changed, and ...
- Lazarus hackers target researchers with trojanized IDA Pro
November 10, 2021
A North Korean state-sponsored hacking group known as Lazarus is again trying to hack security researchers, this time with a trojanized pirated version of the popular IDA Pro reverse engineering application. IDA Pro is an application that converts an executable into assembly language, allowing security researchers and programmers to analyze how a program works and discover ...
- Meet Lyceum: Iranian hackers targeting telecoms, ISPs
November 9, 2021
Researchers have provided a deep dive into the activities of Lyceum; an Iranian threat group focused on infiltrating the networks of telecoms companies and internet service providers (ISPs). Lyceum, also known as Hexane, Siamesekitten, or Spirlin, has been active since 2017. The advanced persistent threat (APT) group has been linked to campaigns striking Middle Eastern oil ...
- Targeted Attack Campaign Against ManageEngine ADSelfService Plus Delivers Godzilla Webshells, NGLite Trojan and KdcSponge Stealer
November 7, 2021
On Sept. 16, 2021, the US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) released an alert warning that advanced persistent threat (APT) actors were actively exploiting newly identified vulnerabilities in a self-service password management and single sign-on solution known as ManageEngine ADSelfService Plus. The alert explained that malicious actors were observed deploying a specific webshell and ...
- Ukraine links members of Gamaredon hacker group to Russian FSB
November 4, 2021
SSU and the Ukrainian secret service say they have identified five members of the Gamaredon hacking group, a Russian state-sponsored operation known for targeting Ukraine since 2014. This Gamaredon hacking group, tracked as Armageddon by the SSU, is allegedly operated under the FSB (Russian Federal Security Service) and is believed to be responsible for over 5,000 ...
- Meet Balikbayan Foxes: a threat group impersonating the Philippine gov’t
October 27, 2021
Proofpoint has uncovered a new, “highly active” threat group that is impersonating the Philippine government and businesses to spread Trojan malware. On Wednesday, researchers Selena Larson and Joe Wise said the threat actors, dubbed “Balikbayan Foxes” and tracked as TA2722, are concentrated in the Philippines but are targeting the shipping, logistics, manufacturing, pharmaceutical, business, and energy ...
- Kaspersky APT trends report Q3 2021
October 26, 2021
The SolarWinds incident reported last December stood out because of the extreme carefulness of the attackers and the high-profile nature of their victims. The evidence suggests that the threat actor behind the attack, DarkHalo (aka Nobelium), had spent six months inside OrionIT’s networks to perfect their attack. In June, more than six months after DarkHalo had ...
- NOBELIUM targeting delegated administrative privileges to facilitate broader attacks
October 25, 2021
The Microsoft Threat Intelligence Center (MSTIC) has detected nation-state activity associated with the threat actor tracked as NOBELIUM, attempting to gain access to downstream customers of multiple cloud service providers (CSP), managed service providers (MSP), and other IT services organizations (referred to as “service providers” for the rest of this blog) that have been granted ...
- Twitter Suspends Accounts Used to Snare Security Researchers
October 18, 2021
Twitter has shuttered two accounts – @lagal1990 and @shiftrows13 – specifically used to trick security researchers into downloading malware in a long-running cyber-espionage campaign attributed to North Korea. The campaign was first discovered by the Google Threat Analysis Group (TAG) in January and is ongoing. On Friday, Google TAG analyst Adam Weidermann confirmed that Twitter suspended the ...
- Lyceum group reborn
October 18, 2021
This year, Kaspersky researchers presented their research into the Lyceum group (also known as Hexane), which was first exposed by Secureworks in 2019. In 2021, we have been able to identify a new cluster of the group’s activity, focused on two entities in Tunisia. According to older public accounts of the group’s activity, Lyceum conducted targeted ...
- MysterySnail attacks IT companies, defence contractors and diplomatic entities with Windows zero-day
October 12, 2021
In late August and early September 2021, Kaspersky technologies detected attacks with the use of an elevation of privilege exploit on multiple Microsoft Windows servers. The exploit had numerous debug strings from an older, publicly known exploit for vulnerability CVE-2016-3309, but closer analysis revealed that it was a zero-day. We discovered that it was using ...
