- OPERA1ER APT in Africa
November 3, 2022
In 2019, Group-IB Threat Intelligence team detected a series of targeted attacks on financial organizations in Africa. Later in 2020, our professionals in collaboration with Orange, managed to piece together the seemingly disparate attacks into a single timeline and successfully attribute them to the threat actor codenamed OPERA1ER (also known as DESKTOP-GROUP, Common Raven, NXSMS). In ...
- US Treasury thwarts DDoS attack from Russian Killnet group
November 2, 2022
The US Treasury Department has thwarted a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack that officials attributed to Russian hacktivist group Killnet. These are the same pro-Kremlin miscreants that claimed responsibility for knocking more than a dozen US airports’ websites offline on October 10 in similar network-traffic flooding incidents. The large-scale DDoS attack didn’t disrupt air travel ...
- Ransomware cost US banks $1.2 billion last year
November 2, 2022
Banks in the US paid out nearly $1.2 billion in 2021 as a result of ransomware attacks, a marked rise over the year before though it may simply be due to more financial institutions being asked to report incidents. The figures come from the most recent Financial Trend Analysis report on ransomware from the US ...
- Banking Trojan Techniques: How Financially Motivated Malware Became Infrastructure
October 31, 2022
While advanced persistent threats get the most breathless coverage in the news, many threat actors have money on their mind rather than espionage. You can learn a lot about the innovations used by these financially motivated groups by watching banking Trojans. Because attackers constantly create new techniques to evade detection and perform malicious acts, studying monetarily ...
- From RM3 to LDR4: URSNIF Leaves Banking Fraud Behind
October 20, 2022
A new variant of the URSNIF malware, first observed in June 2022, marks an important milestone for the tool. Unlike previous iterations of URSNIF, this new variant, dubbed LDR4, is not a banker, but a generic backdoor (similar to the short-lived SAIGON variant), which may have been purposely built to enable operations like ransomware and ...
- Cyber attack on Bulgarian government websites traced to Russia
October 16, 2022
The head of Bulgaria’s National Investigation Service, Borislav Sarafov, said on October 16 that the perpetrator of a cyber attack the previous day on several Bulgarian state, government and private websites had been identified, and the attack had come from a city in Russia. Sarafov told Bulgarian media that the name and address of the perpetrator ...
- How Wi-Fi spy drones snooped on financial firm
October 12, 2022
Modified off-the-shelf drones have been found carrying wireless network-intrusion kit in a very unlikely place. The idea of using consumer-oriented drones for hacking has been explored over the past decade at security conferences like Black Hat 2016, in both the US and in Europe. Naomi Wu, a DIY tech enthusiast, demonstrated a related project called Screaming ...
- Upgraded Prilex Point-of-Sale malware bypasses credit card security
September 29, 2022
Security analysts have observed three new versions of Prilex PoS-targeting malware this year, indicating that its authors and operators are back in action. Prilex started as ATM-focused malware in 2014 and it pivoted to PoS (point of sale) devices in 2016. While development and distribution peaked in 2020, the malware disappeared in 2021. Kaspersky analysts now report ...
- Prilex: the pricey prickle credit card complex
September 28, 2022
Prilex is a Brazilian threat actor that has evolved out of ATM-focused malware into modular point-of-sale malware. The group was behind one of the largest attacks on ATMs in the country, infecting and jackpotting more than 1,000 machines, while also cloning in excess of 28,000 credit cards that were used in these ATMs before the ...
- Ukrainian hackers attacked the Mir payment system
September 24, 2022
Hackers staged a powerful and large-scale DDoS attack on the national payment system “Mir” against the backdrop of news about the possible refusal of a number of countries to work with it. How informs “Kommersant”, the goal is to overload the system so that malfunctions in the work of “Mir” begin. The publication refers to ...
- Rewards plus: Fake mobile banking rewards apps lure users to install info-stealing RAT on Android devices
September 21, 2022
Microsoft analysis of a recent version of a previously reported info-stealing Android malware, delivered through an ongoing SMS campaign, demonstrates the continuous evolution of mobile threats. Masquerading as a banking rewards app, this new version has additional remote access trojan (RAT) capabilities, is more obfuscated, and is currently being used to target customers of Indian ...
- FBI: Cyber Criminals Targeting Healthcare Payment Processors, Costing Victims Millions in Losses
September 14, 2022
The FBI has received multiple reports of cyber criminals increasingly targeting healthcare payment processors to redirect victim payments. In each of these reports, unknown cyber criminals used employees’ publicly-available Personally Identifiable Information (PII) and social engineering techniques to impersonate victims and obtain access to files, healthcare portals, payment information, and websites. In one case, the attacker ...
- New Wave of Espionage Activity Targets Asian Governments
September 13, 2022
A distinct group of espionage attackers who were formerly associated with the ShadowPad remote access Trojan (RAT) has adopted a new, diverse toolset to mount an ongoing campaign against a range of government and state-owned organizations in a number of Asian countries. The attacks, which have been underway since at least early 2021, appear to ...
- KeyBank: Hackers of third-party provider stole customer data
September 3, 2022
Hackers stole personal data including Social Security numbers, addresses and account numbers of home mortgage holders at KeyBank, the bank reports, in the breach of a third-party vendor that serves multiple corporate clients. The hackers obtained the information on July 5 after breaking into computers at the insurance services provider Overby-Seawell Company, according to a letter ...
- Nelnet Servicing breach exposes data of 2.5M student loan accounts
August 29, 2022
Data for over 2.5 million individuals with student loans from Oklahoma Student Loan Authority (OSLA) and EdFinancial was exposed after hackers breached the systems of technology services provider Nelnet Servicing. Technology services from Nelnet Servicing, including a web portal, are used by OSLA and EdFinancial to give online access students taking out a loan access to ...
- Grandoreiro banking malware targets manufacturers in Spain, Mexico
August 19, 2022
The notorious ‘Grandoreiro’ banking trojan was spotted in recent attacks targeting employees of a chemicals manufacturer in Spain and workers of automotive and machinery makers in Mexico. The malware has been active in the wild since at least 2017 and remains one of the most significant threats of its kind for Spanish-speaking users. The recent campaign, spotted ...
- Examining New DawDropper Banking Dropper and DaaS on the Dark Web
August 2, 2022
Malicious actors have been surreptitiously adding a growing number of banking trojans to Google Play Store via malicious droppers this year, proving that such a technique is effective in evading detection. Additionally, because there is a high demand for novel ways to distribute mobile malware, several malicious actors claim that their droppers could help other ...
- Huge network of 11,000 fake investment sites targets Europe
July 31, 2022
Researchers have uncovered a gigantic network of more than 11,000 domains used to promote numerous fake investment schemes to users in Europe. The platforms show fabricated evidence of enrichment and falsified celebrity endorsements to create an image of legitimacy and lure in a larger number of victims. The goal of the operation is to trick users into ...
- Weak data protection helped China attack US Federal Reserve, report says
July 27, 2022
China’s cyber espionage activities are extensive and sophisticated but when the Middle Kingdom tried to steal sensitive economic data from the US Fed, poor security meant its operatives didn’t have to dip too far into their bags of tricks. Or at least that’s according to the findings of an investigation by the Senate’s Committee on Homeland ...
- Evilnum hackers return in new operation targeting migration orgs
June 28, 2022
The Evilnum hacking group is showing renewed signs of malicious activity, targeting European organizations that are involved in international migration. Evilnum is an APT (advanced persistent threat) that has been active since at least 2018 and had its campaign and tools exposed only recently, in 2020. At that time, ESET published a technical report describing the threat ...