There is a big incentive for both espionage motivated actors and financially motivated actors to set up proxy botnets. These can serve as an anonymization layer, which can provide plausibly geolocated IP addresses to scrape contents of websites, access stolen or compromised online assets, and launch cyber-attacks.
Examples of proxy botnets set up by advanced persistent threat (APT) actors are the VPNFilter botnet and Cyclops Blink, both deployed by Sandworm and disrupted by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) in 2018 and 2022, respectively. Another example is the SOHO botnet alleged to be operated by a Chinese company called the Beijing Integrity Technology Group; this botnet was disrupted in September 2024 by the FBI.
Read more…
Source: Trend Micro
Related:
- FCC Commissioner urges Google and Apple to ban TikTok
June 29, 2022
“TikTok is not just another video app. That’s the sheep’s clothing.” That’s what Brendan Carr wrote in his tweet along with a copy of the letter he sent Apple and Google, asking the companies to remove TikTok from their app stores. The agency’s senior Republican commissioner references a recent BuzzFeed News report that examined leaked ...
- Bumblebee: New Loader Rapidly Assuming Central Position in Cyber-crime Ecosystem
June 28, 2022
Bumblebee, a recently developed malware loader, has quickly become a key component in a wide range of cyber-crime attacks and appears to have replaced a number of older loaders, which suggests that it is the work of established actors and that the transition to Bumblebee was pre-planned. By analysis of three other tools used in recent ...
- Log4Shell Vulnerability in VMware Leads to Data Exfiltration and Ransomware
June 28, 2022
Trend Micro Research recently analyzed several cases of a Log4Shell vulnerability being exploited in certain versions of the software VMware Horizon. After investigating the chain of events, they found that many of these attacks resulted in data being exfiltrated from the infected systems. However, the researchers also found that some of the victims were infected ...
- 2022 CWE Top 25 Most Dangerous Software Weaknesses
June 28, 2022
The Homeland Security Systems Engineering and Development Institute, sponsored by CISA and operated by MITRE, has released the 2022 Common Weakness Enumeration (CWE) Top 25 Most Dangerous Software Weaknesses list. The list uses data from the National Vulnerability Database to compile the most frequent and critical errors that can lead to serious vulnerabilities in software. An ...
- De-anonymizing ransomware domains on the dark web
June 28, 2022
Ransomware operators typically constrain their activities to the dark web to conceal their illegal activities. Their public leak sites and victim communication portals are accessible only on The Onion Router (TOR) network via a specific URL that is only available via direct disclosure. This limits access to fellow operators, victims and security researchers who track ...
- 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 ...