- Analysis: New Remcos RAT Arrives Via Phishing Email
August 15, 2019
In July, we came across a phishing email purporting to be a new order notification, which contains a malicious attachment that leads to the remote access tool Remcos RAT (detected by Trend Micro as BKDR_SOCMER.SM). This attack delivers Remcos using an AutoIt wrapper that incorporates various obfuscation and anti-debugging techniques to evade detection, which is ...
- Back-to-Back Campaigns: Neko, Mirai, and Bashlite Malware Variants Use Various Exploits to Target Several Routers, Devices
August 13, 2019
Within a span of three weeks, our telemetry uncovered three notable malware variants of Neko, Mirai, and Bashlite. On July 22, 2019, we saw and started analyzing a Neko botnet sample, then observed another sample with additional exploits the following week. A Mirai variant that calls itself “Asher” surfaced on July 30, then a Bashlite ...
- How Threat Intelligence Helps the Energy Sector Fight Cyberespionage
August 13, 2019
When it comes to cyber threats, some industries have it harder than others. Few are as heavily targeted by sophisticated cyberattacks as the energy sector. Over the last decade, state-sponsored hacking groups have routinely targeted utility networks and other energy providers for the purposes of espionage and disruption. And according to the latest research, advanced persistent threat (APT) ...
- Man jailed for cyber attacks against police websites in revenge for bomb hoax conviction
August 12, 2019
A 20-year-old man has been jailed for 16 months after launching cyber attacks against police websites. Liam Reece Watts used specialist software to overload the Greater Manchester Police and Cheshire Police websites in separate attacks which temporarily brought down the sites. He said the attack on Cheshire Police was in retaliation for a previous conviction over a ...
- Hunting the Public Cloud for Exposed Hosts and Misconfigurations
August 12, 2019
This research explores the security landscape of the Internet-facing services hosted in Amazon AWS, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud Platform. Public cloud is becoming increasingly popular and the reported total spending on cloud infrastructure grew 45.6% in 2018. Amazon AWS maintained its lead with a 31.3% share of the Cloud Service Provider (CSP) market, followed by Microsoft ...
- IT threat evolution Q2 2019: Targeted attacks and malware campaigns
August 12, 2019
In March, we published the results of our investigation into a sophisticated supply-chain attack involving the ASUS Live Update Utility, used to deliver BIOS, UEFI and software updates to ASUS laptops and desktops. The attackers added a backdoor to the utility and then distributed it to users through official channels. ASUS was not the only company used ...
- New ‘warshipping’ technique gives hackers access to enterprise offices
August 7, 2019
Researchers have described a new technique which could be used by cyberattackers to infiltrate corporate setups — with a little help from your friendly neighborhood delivery workers. On Wednesday, Charles Henderson, Global Managing Partner of IBM X- Force Red documented the theoretical method known as warshipping. The technique builds upon wardialing — in which numbers are called en masse ...
- LokiBot Gains New Persistence Mechanism, Uses Steganography to Hide Its Tracks
August 6, 2019
First advertised as an information stealer and keylogger when it first appeared in underground forums, LokiBot has added various capabilities over the years. Recent activity has seen the malware family abusing Windows Installer for its installation and introducing a new delivery method that involves spam mails containing malicious ISO file attachments. Our analysis of a new LokiBot variant shows that ...
- Cyberattacks against industrial targets have doubled over the last 6 months
August 5, 2019
Cyberattacks designed to cause damage have doubled in the past six months and 50 percent of organizations affected are in the manufacturing sector, researchers say. On Monday, IBM’s X-Force IRIS incident response team published new research based on recent cyberattacks they have been called in to assist with, and the main trend the group is witnessing is the ...
- Latest Trickbot Campaign Delivered via Highly Obfuscated JS File
August 5, 2019
We have been tracking Trickbot banking trojan activity and recently discovered a variant of the malware (detected by Trend Micro as TrojanSpy.Win32.TRICKBOT.TIGOCDC) from distributed spam emails that contain a Microsoft Word document with enabled macro. Once the document is clicked, it drops a heavily obfuscated JS file (JavaScript) that downloads Trickbot as its payload. This malware ...