- Vyveva: Lazarus hacking group’s latest weapon strikes South African freight
April 8, 2021
Researchers have discovered a new backdoor employed by the Lazarus hacking group in targeted attacks against the freight industry. On Thursday, ESET said the new backdoor malware, dubbed Vyveva, was traced in an attack against a South African freight and logistics firm. While the initial attack vector for deploying the malware is not yet known, examining machines ...
- The leap of a Cycldek-related threat actor
April 5, 2021
In the nebula of Chinese-speaking threat actors, it is quite common to see tools and methodologies being shared. One such example of this is the infamous “DLL side-loading triad”: a legitimate executable, a malicious DLL to be sideloaded by it, and an encoded payload, generally dropped from a self-extracting archive. Initially considered to be the ...
- FBI: APTs Actively Exploiting Fortinet VPN Security Holes
April 3, 2021
The FBI and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency are warning that advanced persistent threat (APT) nation-state actors are actively exploiting known security vulnerabilities in the Fortinet FortiOS cybersecurity operating system, affecting the company’s SSL VPN products. According to an alert issued Friday by the FBI and CISA, cyberattackers are scanning devices on ports 4443, 8443 ...
- Google: North Korean hackers target security researchers again
March 31, 2021
Google’s Threat Analysis Group (TAG) says that North Korean government-sponsored hackers are once again targeting security researchers using fake Twitter and LinkedIn social media accounts. The hackers also created a website for a fake company named SecuriElite (located in Turkey) and supposedly offering offensive security services as the Google security team focused on hunting down state-backed ...
- Financial Cyberthreats in 2020
March 31, 2021
2020 was challenging for everyone: companies, regulators, individuals. Due to the limitations imposed by the epidemiological situation, particular categories of users and businesses were increasingly targeted by cybercriminals. While we were adjusting to remote work and the rest of the new conditions, so were scammers. As a result, 2020 was extremely eventful in terms of ...
- APT Charming Kitten Pounces on Medical Researchers
March 31, 2021
Security researchers have linked a late-2020 phishing campaign aimed at stealing credentials from 25 senior professionals at medical research organizations in the United States and Israel to an advanced persistent threat group with links to Iran called Charming Kitten. The campaign—dubbed BadBlood because of its medical focus and the history of tensions between Iran and Israel–aimed ...
- APT10: sophisticated multi-layered loader Ecipekac discovered in A41APT campaign
March 30, 2021
In 2019, we observed an APT campaign targeting multiple industries, including the Japanese manufacturing industry and its overseas operations, that was designed to steal information. We named the campaign A41APT (not APT41) which is derived from the host name “DESKTOP-A41UVJV” from the attacker’s system used in the initial infection. The actor leveraged vulnerabilities in Pulse ...
- Hades Ransomware Gang Exhibits Connections to Hafnium
March 29, 2021
The Hades ransomware gang has several unique characteristics that set it apart from the rest of the pack, according to researchers – including potentially having more than extortion on the to-do list. The group appears to use multiple nation-state tools and techniques. The researchers said that its investigations into the group’s cyberattacks at the end of ...
- CISA: Detecting Post-Compromise Threat Activity Using the CHIRP IOC Detection Tool
March 18, 2021
This Alert announces the CISA Hunt and Incident Response Program (CHIRP) tool. CHIRP is a forensics collection tool that CISA developed to help network defenders find indicators of compromise (IOCs) associated with activity detailed in the following CISA Alerts: AA20-352A: Advanced Persistent Threat Compromise of Government Agencies, Critical Infrastructure, and Private Sector Organizations, which primarily focuses ...
- SolarWinds-linked hacking group SilverFish abuses enterprise victims for sandbox tests
March 18, 2021
Cyberattackers involved in worldwide hacking campaigns are using the compromised systems of high-profile victims as playgrounds to test out malicious tool detection rates. On Thursday, Swiss cybersecurity firm Prodaft said that SilverFish (.PDF), an “extremely skilled” threat group, has been responsible for intrusions at over 4,720 private and government organizations including “Fortune 500 companies, ministries, airlines, ...
- China-linked TA428 Continues to Target Russia and Mongolia IT Companies
March 17, 2021
Recorded Future’s Insikt Group recently identified renewed activity attributed to the suspected Chinese threat activity group TA428. The identified activity overlaps with a TA428 campaign previously reported by Proofpoint as “Operation LagTime IT”, which targeted Russian and East Asian government information technology agencies in 2019. Based on the infrastructure, tactics, and victim organization identified, we ...
- Hackers are targeting telecoms companies to steal 5G secrets
March 16, 2021
A cyber-espionage campaign is targeting telecoms companies around the world with attacks using malicious downloads in an effort to steal sensitive data – including information about 5G technology – from compromised victims. Uncovered by cybersecurity researchers at McAfee, the campaign is targeting telecommunications providers in Southeast Asia, Europe and the United States. Dubbed Operation Diànxùn, researchers ...
- COVID-19: Examining the threat landscape a year later
March 15, 2021
A year ago — everything changed. In an effort to stem the tide of a rapidly spreading pandemic, the world shut down. Shops were forced to shut their doors, and whole countries were placed on stringent lockdowns. Schools were closed around the world, with more than one billion children affected, and the vast majority of ...
- Hafnium’s China Chopper: a ‘slick’ and tiny web shell for creating server backdoors
March 11, 2021
Researchers have provided insight into China Chopper, a web shell used by the state-sponsored Hafnium hacking group. Hafnium is a group of cyberattackers originating from China. The collective recently came into the spotlight due to Microsoft linking them to recent attacks exploiting four zero-day vulnerabilities — CVE-2021-26855, CVE-2021-26857, CVE-2021-26858, and CVE-2021-27065 — in Microsoft Exchange Server. Microsoft ...
- Microsoft Exchange Servers Face APT Attack Tsunami
March 11, 2021
Recently patched Microsoft Exchange vulnerabilities are under fire from at least 10 different advanced persistent threat (APT) groups, all bent on compromising email servers around the world. Overall exploitation activity is snowballing, according to researchers. Microsoft said in early March that it had spotted multiple zero-day exploits in the wild being used to attack on-premises versions ...
- Supernova malware clues link Chinese threat group Spiral to SolarWinds server hacks
March 8, 2021
A possible link to China has been noted by researchers examining the exploit of SolarWinds servers to deploy malware. On Monday, Secureworks’ counter threat unit (CTU) said that during late 2020, a compromised Internet-facing SolarWinds server was used as a springboard to deploy Supernova, a .NET web shell. Similar intrusions on the same network suggest that the ...
- New Sunshuttle Second-Stage Backdoor Uncovered Targeting U.S.-Based Entity; Possible Connection to UNC2452
March 4, 2021
Mandiant Threat Intelligence discovered a new backdoor uploaded by a U.S.-based entity to a public malware repository in August 2020 that we have named SUNSHUTTLE. SUNSHUTTLE is written in GO, and reads an embedded or local configuration file, communicates with a hard-coded command and control (C2) server over HTTPS, and supports commands including remotely uploading ...
- Go malware is now common, having been adopted by both APTs and e-crime groups
February 26, 2021
The number of malware strains coded in the Go programming language has seen a sharp increase of around 2,000% over the last few years, since 2017, cybersecurity firm Intezer said in a report published this week. The company’s findings highlight and confirm a general trend in the malware ecosystem, where malware authors have slowly moved away ...
- Lazarus targets defense industry with ThreatNeedle
February 25, 2021
We named Lazarus the most active group of 2020. We’ve observed numerous activities by this notorious APT group targeting various industries. The group has changed target depending on the primary objective. Google TAG has recently published a post about a campaign by Lazarus targeting security researchers. After taking a closer look, we identified the malware ...
- APT32 state hackers target human rights defenders with spyware
February 23, 2021
Vietnam-backed hacking group APT32 has coordinated several spyware attacks targeting Vietnamese human rights defenders (HRDs) between February 2018 and November 2020. The state hackers also pointed their attacks at a nonprofit (NPO) human rights organization from Vietnam, as Amnesty International’s Security Lab revealed (full report here). The spyware used by the APT32 hackers allowed them to read ...
