- 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 ...