- APT trends report Q3 2019
October 16, 2019
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 ...
- Report: Nation state hackers and cyber criminals are spoofing each other
October 4, 2019
Nation-state hackers and cyber criminals are increasingly impersonating each other to try and hide their tracks as part of advanced attack techniques says Optiv Security in its 2019 Cyber Threat Intelligence Estimate report. The top industries being targeted are retail, healthcare, government and financial institutions. Cryptojacking and ransomware are new exploits that join the traditional list of computer ...
- PKPLUG: Chinese Cyber Espionage Group Attacking Asia
October 3, 2019
For three years, Unit 42 has tracked a set of cyber espionage attack campaigns across Asia, which used a mix of publicly available and custom malware. Unit 42 created the moniker “PKPLUG” for the threat actor group, or groups, behind these and other documented attacks referenced later in this report. We say group or groups ...
- 17 US utility firms targeted by mysterious state-sponsored group
September 24, 2019
A mysterious state-sponsored hacking group has targeted at least 17 US utility firms with phishing emails for a five-month period between April 5 and August 29, Proofpoint reported today. The purpose of these attacks was to infect employees at US utility firms with LookBack, a remote access trojan with an extensive set of features. While no formal ...
- Russian state hackers rarely share code with one another
September 24, 2019
Russia’s state-sponsored hacking groups rarely share code with one another, and when they do, it’s usually within groups managed by the same intelligence service, a new joint report published today reveals. This report, co-authored by Check Point and Intezer Labs, is a first of its kind in its field. The two companies looked at nearly 2,000 ...
- Thrip: Ambitious Attacks Against High Level Targets Continue
September 9, 2019
Symantec’s Targeted Attack Analytics uncovers new attack campaigns in South East Asia. Since Symantec first exposed the Thrip group in 2018, the stealthy China-based espionage group has continued to mount attacks in South East Asia, hitting military organizations, satellite communications operators, and a diverse range of other targets in the region. Many of its recent attacks have involved ...
- Newly discovered cyber-espionage malware abuses Windows BITS service
September 9, 2019
Security researchers have found another instance of a malware strain abusing the Windows Background Intelligent Transfer Service (BITS). The malware appears to be the work of a state-sponsored cyber-espionage group that researchers have been tracking for years under the name of Stealth Falcon. The first and only report on this hacking group has been published in 2016 by ...
- China’s APT3 Pilfers Cyberweapons from the NSA
September 6, 2019
Large portions of APT3’s remote code-execution package were likely reverse-engineered from prior attack artifacts. The advanced persistent threat (APT) group known as APT3, which researchers across the board link to the Chinese government, has built a full in-house battery of exploits and cybertools collectively dubbed “UPSynergy.” An analysis of the toolkit has uncovered a geopolitical cat-and-mouse spy ...
- Malware Classification with ‘Graph Hash,’ Applied to the Orca Cyberespionage Campaign
September 6, 2019
In malware research, threat hunting and sharing of threat intelligence, such as exchanging indicators of compromise (IoCs) in the form of hashes (e.g., MD5s, SHA256s), are common industry practices and helpful for information security professionals. Researchers, for instance, would typically search for malware samples on VirusTotal using hashes. However, hashes have some characteristics that could ...
- A Chinese APT is now going after Pulse Secure and Fortinet VPN servers
September 5, 2019
A group of Chinese state-sponsored hackers is targeting enterprise VPN servers from Fortinet and Pulse Secure after details about security flaws in both products became public knowledge last month. The attacks are being carried out by a group known as APT5 (also known as Manganese), ZDNet has learned from sources familiar with the attacks. According to a ...