- North Korean hackers infect real 2FA app to compromise Macs
May 9, 2020
Hackers have hidden malware in a legitimate two-factor authentication (2FA) app for macOS to distribute Dacls, a remote access trojan associated with the North Korean Lazarus group. Dacls has been used to target Windows and Linux platforms and the recently discovered RAT variant for macOS borrows from them much of the functionality and code. The threat actor planted the ...
- Naikon’s Aria
May 8, 2020
Our colleagues at Checkpoint put together a fine research writeup on some Naikon resources and activity related to “aria-body” that we detected in 2017 and similarly reported in 2018. To supplement their research findings, we are summarizing and publishing portions of the findings reported in our June 2018 “Naikon’s New AR Backdoor Deployment to Southeast Asia”. This ...
- APT trends report Q1 2020
April 30, 2020
For more than two 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 ...
- APT32 Targeting Wuhan Government and Chinese Ministry of Emergency Management
April 22, 2020
From at least January to April 2020, suspected Vietnamese actors APT32 carried out intrusion campaigns against Chinese targets that Mandiant Threat Intelligence believes was designed to collect intelligence on the COVID-19 crisis. Spear phishing messages were sent by the actor to China’s Ministry of Emergency Management as well as the government of Wuhan province, where COVID-19 ...
- Gamaredon APT Group Use Covid-19 Lure in Campaigns
April 17, 2020
Gamaredon is an advanced persistent threat (APT) group that has been active since 2013. Their campaigns are generally known for targeting Ukrainian government institutions. From late 2019 to February of this year, researchers published several reports on Gamaredon, tracking the group’s activities. In March, we came across an email with a malware attachment that used the ...
- APT41 Using New Speculoos Backdoor to Target Organizations Globally
April 13, 2020
On March 25, 2020, FireEye published a research blog regarding a global attack campaign operated by an espionage motivated adversary group known as APT41. This attack campaign was thought to have operated between January 20 and March 11, specifically targeting Citrix, Cisco, and Zoho network appliances via exploitation of recently disclosed vulnerabilities. Based on WildFire and AutoFocus ...
- DarkHotel hackers use VPN zero-day to breach Chinese government agencies
April 6, 2020
Foreign state-sponsored hackers have launched a massive hacking operation aimed at Chinese government agencies and their employees. Attacks began last month, in March, and are believed to be related to the current coronavirus (COVID-19) outbreak. Chinese security-firm Qihoo 360, which detected the intrusions, said the hackers used a zero-day vulnerability in Sangfor SSL VPN servers, used to provide ...
- Zero-Day Exploitation Increasingly Demonstrates Access to Money, Rather than Skill — Intelligence for Vulnerability Management, Part One
April 6, 2020
FireEye Mandiant Threat Intelligence documented more zero-days exploited in 2019 than any of the previous three years. While not every instance of zero-day exploitation can be attributed to a tracked group, we noted that a wider range of tracked actors appear to have gained access to these capabilities. Furthermore, we noted a significant increase over ...
- Loncom packer: from backdoors to Cobalt Strike
April 2, 2020
The previous story described an unusual way of distributing malware under disguise of an update for an expired security certificate. After the story went out, we conducted a detailed analysis of the samples we had obtained, with some interesting findings. All of the malware we examined from the campaign was packed with the same packer, which we ...
- Holy water: ongoing targeted water-holing attack in Asia
March 31, 2020
On December 4, 2019, we discovered watering hole websites that were compromised to selectively trigger a drive-by download attack with fake Adobe Flash update warnings. This campaign has been active since at least May 2019, and targets an Asian religious and ethnic group. The threat actor’s unsophisticated but creative toolset has been evolving a lot since ...

