- Newly Discovered Iranian APT Group Brings State-sponsored Cyber Espionage into Focus
October 17, 2017
State-sponsored cyber espionage has been rising steadily in recent years. Whether it’s high-profile attacks such as North Korea’s hack of Sony in 2014, China’s alleged hack of the US’s Office of Personnel Management in 2015, or Russia’s alleged hack of the Democratic National Committee in 2016, the stories are mounting. Iran has also been in the cyber espionage news, with major ...
- Hackers Use New Flash Zero-Day Exploit to Distribute FinFisher Spyware
October 16, 2017
FinSpy—the infamous surveillance malware is back and infecting high-profile targets using a new Adobe Flash zero-day exploit delivered through Microsoft Office documents. Security researchers from Kaspersky Labs have discovered a new zero-day remote code execution vulnerability in Adobe Flash, which was being actively exploited in the wild by a group of advanced persistent threat actors, known as BlackOasis. The critical ...
- Cyberespionage Group Steps Up Campaigns Against Japanese Firms
October 14, 2017
Researchers are learning more about the cyberespionage group Bronze Butler. While the gang has been targeting Japanese heavy industry since 2012, not much is known about the group’s current modus operandi. In a report released Thursday by the Counter Threat Unit at SecureWorks, a subsidiary of Dell Technologies, researchers paint the most complete picture yet of ...
- Spy vs spy vs hacker vs… who is THAT? Everyone’s hacking each other
October 5, 2017
VB2017 Intel agencies and top-tier hackers are actively hacking other hackers in order to steal victim data, borrow tools and techniques, and reuse each other’s infrastructure, attendees at Virus Bulletin Con, Madrid, were told yesterday. The increasing amount of spy-vs-spy type activity is making accurate threat intel increasingly difficult for security researchers, according to Kaspersky Lab. Threat intelligence ...
- Security experts: Iran-backed hackers targeting U.S. and Saudi Arabia
September 21, 2017
Cybersecurity firm FireEye has identified a new group of hackers, known as APT33, that it says has been working on behalf of the Iranian government since 2013. The group has “potential destructive capabilities,” FireEye warned. “The campaigns that were laid out were not just aligned with the Iranian government but with the Iranian military,” said Stuart ...
- Dragonfly 2.0: Hacking Group Infiltrated European and US Power Facilities
September 7, 2017
The notorious hacking group that has been in operation since at least 2011 has re-emerged and is still interested in targeting the United States and European companies in the energy sector. Yes, I am talking about the ‘Dragonfly,’ a well-resourced, Eastern European hacking group responsible for sophisticated cyber-espionage campaigns against the critical infrastructure of energy companies in different ...
- Updates to Sofacy, Turla Highlight 2017 Q2 APT Activity
August 8, 2017
Attackers behind advanced persistent threat campaigns have kept busy over the past several months, adding new ways to bypass detection, crafting new payloads to drop, and identifying new zero days and backdoors to help them infect users and maintain persistence on machines. Juan Andres Guerrero-Saade and Brian Bartholomew, members of Kaspersky Lab’s Global Research and Analysis Team, described ...
- APT Group Uses Catfish Technique To Ensnare Victims
July 27, 2017
Meet Mia Ash, a 20-something London-based photographer, amateur model, social media butterfly with a keen interest in tech-savvy guys with ties to the oil and gas industry. You guessed it. Mia Ash doesn’t exist. Ash, according to Dell SecureWorks Counter Threat Unit, is a virtual persona stitched together by the APT known as Cobalt Gypsy, OilRig, ...
- Motivation Mystery Behind WannaCry, ExPetr
July 21, 2017
If two is a coincidence and three is a trend, maybe we’re not quite there yet in officially calling WannaCry and ExPetr a new movement among APT attacks. But for now, it’s close enough. Researchers are starting to examine the real motivations behind each global outbreak and whether these attacks truly signal a shift of direction ...
- Researchers Find BlackEnergy APT Links in ExPetr Code
July 3, 2017
Researchers have found links between the BlackEnergy APT group and threat actors behind the ExPetr malware used in last month’s global attacks. According to researchers at Kaspersky Lab, there are strong similarities between older versions of BlackEnergy’s KillDisk ransomware compared to ExPetr code. Parallels were first identified in targeted extensions used by both BlackEnergy and ExPetr, ...