Back in October 2022, Kaspersky GReAT was looking into a peculiar advertisement on a hacking forum. A cybercriminal had been advertising a UEFI bootkit, dubbed BlackLotus, that could bypass Secure Boot, for $5,000. Given the low price for such powerful capabilities, the cybersecurity community initially took this advertisement with a grain of salt. As no BlackLotus samples were found in the wild, no one could at the time verify the claims made in the forum post.
However, about half a year later, in March 2023, ESET confirmed that the BlackLotus advertisement was genuine. The researchers tracked down samples of this bootkit and confirmed that it can indeed bypass Secure Boot through a vulnerability called Baton Drop (CVE-2022-21894). As this vulnerability was still exploitable in 2023, Microsoft had to release multiple security updates to address it.
Read more…
Source: Kaspersky
Sign up for the Cyber Security Review Newsletter
The latest cyber security news and insights delivered right to your inbox
Related:
- Microsoft Caught Up in SolarWinds Spy Effort, Joining Federal Agencies
December 18, 2020
Microsoft has become the latest victim of the ever-widening SolarWinds-driven cyberattack that has impacted rafts of federal agencies and tech targets. Its president, Brad Smith, warned late Thursday to expect many more victims to come to light as investigations continue. Adversaries were able to use SolarWinds’ Orion network management platform to infect users with a stealth ...
- Negasteal Uses Hastebin for Fileless Delivery of Crysis Ransomware
December 18, 2020
Trend Micro researchers have recently encountered a Negasteal (also known as Agent Tesla) variant that used hastebin for the fileless delivery of the Crysis (also known as Dharma) ransomware. This is the first time that we have observed Negasteal with a ransomware payload. Only a few months ago, Deep Instinct published the first reported case of ...
- SUPERNOVA: SolarStorm’s Novel .NET Webshell
December 17, 2020
The SolarStorm actors behind the supply chain attack on SolarWinds’ Orion software have demonstrated a high degree of technical sophistication and attention to operational security, as well as a novel combination of techniques in the potential compromise of approximately 18,000 SolarWinds customers. As published in the original disclosure, the attackers were observed removing their initial ...
- FireEye, Microsoft create kill switch for SolarWinds backdoor
December 17, 2020
Microsoft, FireEye, and GoDaddy have collaborated to create a kill switch for the SolarWinds Sunburst backdoor that forces the malware to terminate itself. This past weekend it was revealed that Russian state-sponsored hackers breached SolarWinds and added malicious code to a Windows DLL file used by their Orion IT monitoring platform. This malicious DLL is a backdoor ...
- This ‘off the shelf’ Tor backdoor malware is now a firm favorite with ransomware operators
December 17, 2020
A Remote Access Trojan (RAT) on sale in underground forums has evolved to abuse Tor when maintaining persistence on infected machines. On Thursday, Sophos Labs’ Sivagnanam Gn and Sean Gallagher revealed ongoing research into the malware, which has been in the wild since 2019. Dubbed SystemBC, the RAT has evolved from acting as a virtual private network ...
- New Goontact spyware discovered targeting Android and iOS users
December 16, 2020
Security researchers have discovered a new malware strain with spying and surveillance capabilities —also known as spyware— that is currently available in both Android and iOS versions. Named Goontact, this malware has the ability to collect from infected victims data such as phone identifiers, contacts, SMS messages, photos, and location information. Detected by mobile security firm Lookout, ...