- APT trends report Q3 2020
November 3, 2020
For more than three years, the Global Research and Analysis Team (GReAT) at Kaspersky has been publishing quarterly summaries of advanced persistent threat (APT) activity. The summaries are based on our threat intelligence research and provide a representative snapshot of what we have published and discussed in greater detail in our private APT reports. They ...
- SMS Phishing Attempts Are Riding the Presidential Election Wave
October 30, 2020
SMS-based outreach has become a standard in the political playbook, with candidates and their supporters soliciting financial support, opinions, and votes through texting with increasing frequency and sophistication. In the course of protecting enterprise endpoints, Symantec, a division of Broadcom, has turned up evidence of an increasingly prevalent scam tactic in the run-up to the ...
- CISA, FBI, and CNMF Identify a New Malware Variant: ComRAT
October 29, 2020
The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), and the Department of Defense Cyber National Mission Force (CNMF) have identified a malware variant—referred to as ComRAT—used by the Russian-sponsored advanced persistent threat (APT) actor Turla. In addition, U.S. Cyber Command has released the malware sample to the malware aggregation tool and ...
- North Korea-Backed Spy Group Poses as Reporters in Spearphishing Attacks, Feds Warn
October 28, 2020
The North Korean advanced persistent threat (APT) group known as Kimsuky is actively attacking commercial-sector businesses, often by posing as South Korean reporters, according to an alert from the U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA). Kimsuky (a.k.a. Hidden Cobra) has been operating as a cyberespionage group since 2012 under the auspices of the regime in ...
- APT groups aren’t all from Russia, China, and North Korea
October 28, 2020
Advance persistent threat (APT) hacker groups are often assumed to be state-supported organisations such as China’s APT10 aka Stone Panda, Russia’s APT28 aka Fancy Bear, or Vietnam’s APT32 aka Ocean Lotus. However, these and other groups are often identified and named by cyber intelligence firms with strong links to their national government. FireEye and Crowdstrike in ...
- US Treasury sanctions Russian research institute behind Triton malware
October 23, 2020
The US Treasury Department announced sanctions today against a Russian research institute for its role in developing Triton, a malware strain designed to attack industrial equipment. Sanctions were levied today against the State Research Center of the Russian Federation FGUP Central Scientific Research Institute of Chemistry and Mechanics (also known as CNIIHM or TsNIIKhM). A FireEye report ...
- EU sanctions Russian hackers over 2015 German parliament attack
October 22, 2020
The Council of the European Union today announced sanctions imposed on Russian military intelligence officers part of the 85th Main Centre for Special Services (GTsSS) for their involvement in a 2015 hack of the German Federal Parliament (Deutscher Bundestag). EU’s sanctions include both travel bans and asset freezes and also block EU organizations and individuals from ...
- Russian state hackers stole data from US government networks
October 22, 2020
DHS Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) and the FBI today warned that a Russian state-sponsored APT threat group known as Energetic Bear has hacked and stolen data from US government networks during the last two months. Energetic Bear (also tracked as Berserk Bear, TeamSpy, Dragonfly, Havex, Crouching Yeti, and Koala), a hacking group active since ...
- Seedworm: Iran-Linked Group Continues to Target Organizations in the Middle East
October 21, 2020
The Iran-linked espionage group Seedworm (aka MuddyWater) has been highly active in recent months, attacking a wide range of targets, including a large number of government organizations in the Middle East. Many of the organizations attacked by Seedworm in recent months have also been targeted by a recently discovered tool called PowGoop (Downloader.Covic), suggesting that it ...
- Phishing for secrets: Russian cyber experts believe defense industry is being attacked by North Korea
October 19, 2020
A hacker group from North Korea has been attacking Russian military and industrial organizations by sending fraudulent emails, according to cybersecurity experts, who believe that Pyongyang is beginning to cast its net wider. This may come as a surprise to some, as Russia is one of very few countries with no hostility towards Pyongyang, which has ...
- NSA: Top 25 vulnerabilities actively abused by Chinese hackers
October 19, 2020
The U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) warns that Chinese state-sponsored hackers exploit 25 different vulnerabilities in attacks against U.S. organizations and interests. In an advisory issued today, the NSA said that it is aware of targeted attacks by Chinese state-sponsored hackers against National Security Systems (NSS), the U.S. Defense Industrial Base (DIB), and the Department of ...
- US charges Russian hackers behind NotPetya, KillDisk, OlympicDestroyer attacks
October 19, 2020
The US Department of Justice has unsealed charges today against six Russian nationals believed to be members of one of Russia’s elite hacking and cyberwar units — known as Sandworm. In court documents today, US officials said all six suspects are officers in Unit 74455 of the Russian Main Intelligence Directorate (GRU), a military intelligence agency ...
- MontysThree: Industrial espionage with steganography and a Russian accent on both sides
October 8, 2020
In summer 2020 we uncovered a previously unknown multi-module C++ toolset used in highly targeted industrial espionage attacks dating back to 2018. Initially the reason for our interest in this malware was its rarity, the obviously targeted nature of the campaign and the fact that there are no obvious similarities with already known campaigns at ...
- BAHAMUT Spies-for-Hire Linked to Extensive Nation-State Activity
October 7, 2020
A cyberespionage group known as BAHAMUT has been linked to a “staggering” number of ongoing attacks against government officials and private-sector VIPs in the Middle East and South Asia, while also engaging in wide-ranging disinformation campaigns. That’s according to BlackBerry researchers, who said that the highly resourced group is probably operating on a mercenary basis, offering ...
- XDSpy cyber-espionage group operated discretely for nine years
October 2, 2020
Researchers at ESET today published details about a threat actor that has been operating for at least nine years, yet their activity attracted almost no public attention. Going largely unnoticed for this long is a rare occurrence these days as malicious campaigns from long-standing adversaries overlap at one point or give sufficient clues for researchers to ...
- APT-C-23 Android Spyware Variant Snoops on WhatsApp, Telegram Messages
September 30, 2020
Researchers say they have uncovered a new Android spyware variant with an updated command-and-control communication strategy and extended surveillance capabilities that snoops on social media apps WhatsApp and Telegram. The malware, Android/SpyC32.A, is currently being used in active campaigns targeting victims in the Middle East. It is a new variant of an existing malware operated by ...
- Microsoft disrupts nation-state hacker op using Azure Cloud service
September 25, 2020
In a report this week, Microsoft said that it disrupted operations of a nation-state threat group that was using its Azure cloud infrastructure for cyber attacks. Microsoft refers to the actor by the name Gadolinium and says that it’s been active for about a decade targeting organizations in the maritime and health industry; more recently, the ...
- Threat landscape for industrial automation systems. H1 2020
September 24, 2020
Beginning in H2 2019 we have observed a tendency for decreases in the percentages of attacked computers, both in the ICS and in the corporate and personal environments. In H1 2020 the percentage of ICS computers on which malicious objects were blocked has decreased by 6.6 percentage points to 32.6%. The number was highest in Algeria (58.1%), ...
- Cyber Competition And Nonstate Actors In A Data-Rich World
September 21, 2020
Last year I got a parking ticket for lingering too long in a limited zone. Parking tickets are not sufficient reason to declare war on a city’s thinly veiled vehicular taxation scheme for the absentminded. And yet I wanted to. So instead of dutifully filling out the online payment form, I started searching for ways to ...
- Latest U.S. Indictments Target Iranian Espionage Actors
September 18, 2020
The U.S. government has indicted three Iranian nationals on charges related to cyber attacks against aerospace and satellite technology companies. Said Pourkarim Arabi, Mohammad Reza Espargham, and Mohammad Bayati are alleged to have carried out a string of attacks between 2015 and 2019 which resulted in the theft of sensitive commercial information, intellectual property, and ...
