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:
- Oh, what a boot-iful mornin’
June 23, 2020
In mid-April, Kaspersky threat monitoring systems detected malicious files being distributed under the name “on the new initiative of the World Bank in connection with the coronavirus pandemic” (in Russian) with the extension EXE or RAR. Inside the files was the well-known Rovnix bootkit. There is nothing new about cybercriminals exploiting the coronavirus topic; the ...
- Ripple20 Vulnerability Mitigation Best Practices
June 22, 2020
On June 16th, the Department of Homeland Security and CISA ICS-CERT issued a critical security advisory warning covering multiple newly discovered vulnerabilities affecting Internet-connected devices manufactured by multiple vendors. This set of 19 vulnerabilities in a low-level TCP/IP software library developed by Treck has been dubbed “Ripple20” by researchers from JSOF. A networking stack is a software component that provides ...
- XORDDoS, Kaiji Botnet Malware Variants Target Exposed Docker Servers
June 22, 2020
Researchers at Trend Micro have recently detected variants of two existing Linux botnet malware types targeting exposed Docker servers; these are XORDDoS malware (detected by Trend Micro as Backdoor.Linux.XORDDOS.AE) and Kaiji DDoS malware (detected by Trend Micro as DDoS.Linux.KAIJI.A). Having Docker servers as their target is a new development for both XORDDoS and Kaiji; XORDDoS was known ...
- BlueLeaks: Data from 200 US police departments & fusion centers published online
June 22, 2020
The files, dubbed BlueLeaks, have been published by Distributed Denial of Secrets (DDoSecrets), a group that describes itself as a “transparency collective.” The data has been made available online on a searchable portal. According to the BlueLeaks portal, the leaked data contains more than one million files, such as scanned documents, videos, emails, audio files, and more. DDoSecrets ...
- Microcin is here
June 19, 2020
In February 2020, we observed a Trojan injected into the system process memory on a particular host. The target turned out to be a diplomatic entity. What initially attracted our attention was the enterprise-grade API-like (application programming interface) programming style. Such an approach is not that common in the malware world and is mostly used ...
- Hackers use fake Windows error logs to hide malicious payload
June 19, 2020
Hackers have been using fake error logs to store ASCII characters disguised as hexadecimal values that decode to a malicious payload designed to prepare the ground for script-based attacks. The trick is part of a longer chain with intermediary PowerShell commands that ultimately delivers a script for reconnaissance purposes. MSP threat detection provider Huntress Labs discovered an attack scenario ...