Hunting high-impact, advanced malware is a difficult task. It becomes even harder and more time-consuming when defenders focus on low-detection or zero-detection samples. Every day, a huge number of files are sent to platforms like VirusTotal, and the relevant ones often get lost in all that noise. Identifying malware with low or no detections is a particularly challenging process, especially when the malware is new, undocumented, and built largely from scratch.
When threat actors avoid publicly available libraries, known GitHub code, or code borrowed from other malware families, they create previously unseen samples that can evade detection and make hunting them significantly harder. In these cases, the threat actors carefully craft both the code and the network communication to minimize noise and keep the malware as inconspicuous as possible.
Read more…
Source: Trend Micro
Sign up for the Cyber Security Review Newsletter
The latest cyber security news and insights delivered right to your inbox
Related:
- Mysterious hacker has been selling Windows 0-days to APT groups for three years
May 1, 2019
For the past three years, a mysterious hacker has been selling Windows zero-days to at least three cyber-espionage groups, as well as cyber-crime gangs, researchers from Kaspersky Lab have told ZDNet. The hacker’s activity reinforces recent assessments that some government-backed cyber-espionage groups –also known as APTs (advanced persistent threats)– will regularly buy zero-day exploits from third-party entities, ...
- Dell laptops and computers vulnerable to remote hijacks
May 1, 2019
A vulnerability in the Dell SupportAssist utility exposes Dell laptops and personal computers to a remote attack that can allow hackers to execute code with admin privileges on devices using an older version of this tool and take over users’ systems. Dell has released a patch for this security flaw on April 23; however, many users are likely ...
- APT trends report Q1 2019
April 30, 2019
For just under two years, the Global Research and Analysis Team (GReAT) at Kaspersky Lab 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. ...
- Dispelling Myths Around SGX Malware
April 29, 2019
A group of security researchers from Graz University of Technology recently disclosed detailed methods of deploying attacks from inside Intel’s SGX Security Enclave. The research paper received decent media attention probably due to recently discovered architecture vulnerabilities, such as Meltdown and Spectre. Researchers also released proof of concept (PoC) code for Linux that successfully escapes the securely ...
- I know what you did last summer, MuddyWater blending in the crowd
April 29, 2019
MuddyWater is an APT with a focus on governmental and telco targets in the Middle East (Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Jordan, Turkey and Lebanon) and also a few other countries in nearby regions (Azerbaijan, Pakistan and Afghanistan). MuddyWater first surfaced in 2017 and has been active continuously, targeting a large number of organizations. First stage infections ...
- ‘Karkoff’ Is the New ‘DNSpionage’ With Selective Targeting Strategy
April 24, 2019
The cybercriminal group behind the infamous DNSpionage malware campaign has been found running a new sophisticated operation that infects selected victims with a new variant of the DNSpionage malware. First uncovered in November last year, the DNSpionage attacks used compromised sites and crafted malicious documents to infect victims’ computers with DNSpionage—a custom remote administrative tool that uses ...