Advanced Persistent Threat


NEWS 
  • Iran-Backed APTs Collaborate on 3-Year ‘Fox Kitten’ Global Spy Campaign

    February 18, 2020

    Two Iran-backed APTs could be working together on a sprawling, three-year campaign to compromise high-value organizations from the IT, telecom, oil and gas, aviation, government and security sectors in Israel and around the world, according to a report by researchers at ClearSky. They maintain, APT34/OilRig and APT33/Elfin appear to be linked to the campaign (which they ...

  • US Cyber Command, DHS, and FBI expose new North Korean malware

    February 14, 2020

    US Cyber Command, the Department of Homeland Security, and the Federal Bureau of Investigations have exposed today a new North Korean hacking operation. Authorities have published security advisories detailing six new malware families that are currently being used by North Korean hackers. According to the Twitter account of the Cyber National Mission Force (CNMF), a subordinate unit ...

  • New Cyber Espionage Campaigns Targeting Palestinians: The Spark and Pierogi Campaigns

    February 13, 2020

    Over the last several months, the Cybereason Nocturnus team has been tracking recent espionage campaigns targeting the Middle East. These campaigns are specifically directed at entities and individuals in the Palestinian territories. This investigation shows multiple similarities to previous attacks attributed to a group called MoleRATs (aka The Gaza Cybergang), an Arabic-speaking, politically motivated group that has operated ...

  • U.S. Charges Chinese Military Officers in 2017 Equifax Hacking

    February 10, 2020

    Four members of China’s military were charged on Monday with hacking into Equifax, one of the nation’s largest credit reporting agencies, and stealing trade secrets and the personal data of about 145 million Americans in 2017. The charges underscored China’s quest to obtain Americans’ data and its willingness to flout a 2015 agreement with the United States to refrain from ...

  • Gamaredon APT Improves Toolset to Target Ukraine Government, Military

    February 5, 2020

    The Gamaredon advanced persistent threat (APT) group has been supercharging its operations lately, improving its toolset and ramping up attacks on Ukrainian national security targets. Vitali Kremez, head of SentinelLabs, said in research released on Wednesday that he has been tracking an uptick in Gamaredon cyberattacks on Ukrainian military and security institutions that started in December. ...

  • Threat Actors Still Exploiting SharePoint Vulnerability to Attack Middle East Government Organizations

    February 3, 2020

    On September 10, 2019, we observed unknown threat actors exploiting a vulnerability in SharePoint described in CVE-2019-0604 to install several webshells on the website of a Middle East government organization. One of these webshells is the open source AntSword webshell freely available on Github, which is remarkably similar to the infamous China Chopper webshell. On January 10, 2020, we ...

  • U.S. Government Agency Targeted With Malware-Laced Emails

    January 23, 2020

    A U.S. government agency was targeted with spear phishing emails harboring several malware strains – including a never-before-seen malware downloader that researchers call “Carrotball.” The campaign, which researchers observed occurring from July to October and code-named “Fractured Statue,” involved six unique malicious document lures being sent as attachments from four different Russian email addresses to 10 ...

  • European Energy Sector Organization Targeted by PupyRAT Malware in Late 2019

    January 23, 2020

    Over the course of the last year, Recorded Future research has demonstrated that Iran-nexus groups, possibly including APT33 (also called Elfin), have been prolific in amassing operational network infrastructure throughout 2019. Additionally, in November 2019, Microsoft disclosed that APT33 had shifted focus from targeting IT networks to physical control systems used in electric utilities, manufacturing, and oil refineries. We ...

  • Mitsubishi Electric discloses security breach, China is main suspect

    January 20, 2020

    In a short statement published today on its website, Mitsubishi Electric, one of the world’s largest electronics and electrical equipment manufacturing firms, disclosed a major security breach. Although the breach occurred last year, on June 28, and an official internal investigation began in September, the Tokyo-based corporation disclosed the security incident today, only after two local newspapers, the Asahi ...

  • Microsoft Releases Advisory on Zero-Day Vulnerability CVE-2020-0674, Workaround Provided

    January 17, 2020

    On January 17, Microsoft published an advisory (ADV200001) warning users about CVE-2020-0674, a remote code execution (RCE) vulnerability involving Microsoft’s Internet Explorer (IE) web browser. A patch has not yet been released as of the time of writing — however, Microsoft has acknowledged that it is aware of limited targeted attacks exploiting the flaw. All ...