- NICKEL targeting government organizations across Latin America and Europe
December 6, 2021
The Microsoft Threat Intelligence Center (MSTIC) has observed NICKEL, a China-based threat actor, targeting governments, diplomatic entities, and non-governmental organizations (NGOs) across Central and South America, the Caribbean, Europe, and North America. MSTIC has been tracking NICKEL since 2016 and observed some common activity with other actors known in the security community as APT15, APT25, ...
- APT Expands Attack on ManageEngine With Active Campaign Against ServiceDesk Plus
December 2, 2021
Over the course of three months, a persistent and determined APT actor has launched multiple campaigns which have now resulted in compromises to at least 4 additional organizations, for a total of 13. Beginning on Sept. 16, 2021, the U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) released an alert warning that advanced persistent threat (APT) ...
- 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 ...