- An American Company Fears Its Windows Hacks Helped India Spy On China And Pakistan
September 17, 2021
Earlier this year, researchers at Russian cybersecurity firm Kaspersky witnessed a cyberespionage campaign targeting Microsoft Windows PCs at government and telecom entities in China and Pakistan. They began in June 2020 and continued through to April 2021. What piqued the researchers’ interest was the hacking software used by the digital spies, whom Kaspersky had dubbed ...
- APT Actors Exploiting Newly Identified Vulnerability in ManageEngine ADSelfService Plus
September 16, 2021
This joint advisory is the result of analytic efforts between the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), United States Coast Guard Cyber Command (CGCYBER), and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) to highlight the cyber threat associated with active exploitation of a newly identified vulnerability (CVE-2021-40539) in ManageEngine ADSelfService Plus—a self-service password management and single ...
- APT-C-36 Updates Its Spam Campaign Against South American Entities With Commodity RATs
September 13, 2021
In 2019, Trend Micro researchers wrote a blog entry about a threat actor, likely based in Colombia, targeting entities in Colombia and other South American countries with spam emails. This threat actor is sometimes referred to as APT-C-36 or Blind Eagle. Since then, we have continued tracking this threat actor. In this blog entry, we ...
- US Media, Retailers Targeted by New SparklingGoblin APT
August 25, 2021
An emerging international cybergang is broadening its targets to include North American media firms, universities and one computer retailer. The advanced persistent threat (APT) group is new, according to researchers who dubbed it SparklingGoblin. Also new is a novel backdoor technique, called SideWalk, used by the APT to penetrate cybersecurity defenses. SparklingGoblin, according to ESET researchers ...
- APT41 Resurfaces as Earth Baku With New Cyberespionage Campaign
August 24, 2021
Trend Micro researchers have uncovered a cyberespionage campaign being perpetrated by Earth Baku, an advanced persistent threat (APT) group with a known history of carrying out cyberattacks under the alias APT41. This is not the group’s first foray into cyberespionage, and its long list of past cybercrimes also includes ransomware and cryptocurrency mining attacks. Earth Baku ...
- The Next Disruptive ICS Attacker: An Advanced Persistent Threat (APT)?
August 18, 2021
No discussion on ICS attacks could be complete without talking about what some would call, ‘the elephant in the room.’ Critical infrastructure has always been a target for warfare, and modern ICS are no exception. Several high-profile ICS disruptions have in fact been attributed to malicious hackers working at the behest of a military or intelligence ...
- Govt hackers impersonate HR employees to hit Israeli targets
August 17, 2021
Hackers associated with the Iranian government have focused attack efforts on IT and communication companies in Israel, likely in an attempt to pivot to their real targets. The campaigns have been attributed to the Iranian APT group known as Lyceum, Hexane, and Siamesekitten, running espionage campaigns since at least 2018. In multiple attacks detected in May and ...
- Confucius Uses Pegasus Spyware-related Lures to Target Pakistani Military
August 17, 2021
While investigating the Confucius threat actor, we found a recent spear phishing campaign that utilizes Pegasus spyware-related lures to entice victims into opening a malicious document downloading a file stealer. The NSO Group’s spyware spurred a collaborative investigation that found that it was being used to target high-ranking individuals in 11 different countries. In this blog ...
- ‘DeadRinger’ Targeted Exchange Servers Long Before Discovery
August 4, 2021
Threat actors linked to China exploited the notorious Microsoft Exchange ProxyLogon vulnerabilities long before they were publicly disclosed, in attacks against telecommunications companies aimed at stealing sensitive customer data and maintaining network persistence, researchers have found. Researchers from Cybereason have been tracking multiple cyberespionage campaigns – collectively dubbed “DeadRinger” – since 2017, reporting initially on findings ...
- Here’s 30 servers Russian intelligence uses to fling malware at the West, beams RiskIQ
July 30, 2021
Details of 30 servers thought to be used by Russia’s SVR spy agency (aka APT29) as part of its ongoing campaigns to steal Western intellectual property were made public today by RiskIQ. Russia’s Foreign Intelligence Service “is actively serving malware (WellMess, WellMail) previously used in espionage campaigns targeting COVID-19 research in the UK, US, and Canada,” ...
- DOJ: SolarWinds hackers breached emails from 27 US Attorneys’ offices
July 30, 2021
The US Department of Justice says that the Microsoft Office 365 email accounts of employees at 27 US Attorneys’ offices were breached by the Russian Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR) during the SolarWinds global hacking spree. “The APT is believed to have access to compromised accounts from approximately May 7 to December 27, 2020,” the DOJ said ...
- APT trends report Q2 2021
July 29, 2021
Investigating the recent Microsoft Exchange vulnerabilities Kaspersky and their colleagues from AMR found an attacker deploying a previously unknown backdoor, “FourteenHi”, in a campaign that we dubbed ExCone, active since mid-March. During our investigation we revealed multiple tools and variants of FourteenHi, configured with infrastructure that FireEye reported as being related to the UNC2643 activity ...
- TA456 hackers built an elaborate online profile to fool their targets into downloading malware
July 28, 2021
Iranian hackers spent 18 months masquerading as an aerobics instructor in a cyber-espionage campaign designed to infect employees and contractors working in defence and aerospace with malware in order to steal usernames, passwords and other information which could be exploited. Active since at least 2019, the campaign used Facebook, Instagram and emails to pose as the ...
- ‘Praying Mantis’ threat actor targeting Windows internet-facing servers with malware
July 27, 2021
Windows internet-facing servers are being targeted by a new threat actor operating “almost completely in-memory,” according to a new report from the Sygnia Incident Response team. The report said that the advanced and persistent threat actor — which they have named “Praying Mantis” or “TG1021” — mostly used deserialization attacks to load a completely volatile, custom ...
- France warns of APT31 cyberspies targeting French organizations
July 21, 2021
Today, the French national cyber-security agency warned of an ongoing series of attacks against a large number of French organizations coordinated by the Chinese-backed APT31 hacking group. “It appears from our investigations that the threat actor uses a network of compromised home routers as operational relay boxes in order to perform stealth reconnaissance as well as ...
- StrongPity APT Group Deploys Android Malware for the First Time
July 21, 2021
We recently conducted an investigation into a malicious Android malware sample, which we believe can be attributed to the StrongPity APT group, that was posted on the Syrian e-Gov website. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first time that the group has been publicly observed using malicious Android applications as part of ...
- Safeguarding Critical Infrastructure Against Threats From The People’s Republic Of China
July 19, 2021
As today’s announcement from the White House indicates, the cyber threat from the People’s Republic of China (PRC) continues to evolve and poses a real risk to the nation’s critical infrastructure, as well as businesses and organization of all sizes at home and around the world. CISA regularly shares actionable information to help security professionals ...
- CISA: Chinese State-Sponsored Cyber Operations – Observed TTPs
July 19, 2021
The National Security Agency, Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), and Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) assess that People’s Republic of China state-sponsored malicious cyber activity is a major threat to U.S. and Allied cyberspace assets. Chinese state-sponsored cyber actors aggressively target U.S. and allied political, economic, military, educational, and critical infrastructure (CI) personnel and ...
- UK and White House blame China for Microsoft Exchange Server hack
July 19, 2021
The UK government has formally laid the blame for the Microsoft Exchange Server cyberattack at the feet of China. On Monday, the government joined others — including the victim company itself, Microsoft — in claiming the cyberattack was the work of Chinese state-sponsored hackers, namely Hafnium, an advanced persistent threat (APT) group. The United States, NATO, and ...
- LuminousMoth APT: Sweeping attacks for the chosen few
July 14, 2021
handpick a set of targets that in turn are handled with almost surgical precision, with infection vectors, malicious implants and payloads being tailored to the victims’ identities or environment. It’s not often we observe a large-scale attack conducted by actors fitting this profile, usually due to such attacks being noisy, and thus putting the underlying ...
