- Raindrop Backdoor: New Malware Discovered in SolarWinds Investigation
January 20, 2021
Symantec, a division of Broadcom, has uncovered an additional piece of malware used in the SolarWinds attacks which was used against a select number of victims that were of interest to the attackers. Raindrop (Backdoor.Raindrop) is a loader which delivers a payload of Cobalt Strike. Raindrop is very similar to the already documented Teardrop tool, but ...
- XDR investigation uncovers PlugX, unique technique in APT attack
January 20, 2021
Advanced persistent threats (APT) are known — and are universally dreaded — for their stealth. Actors behind such attacks actively innovate their techniques to evade detection and ensure that they maintain a foothold inside an environment as long as possible. Through the Apex One with Endpoint Sensor (iES), we discovered one such incident wherein an ...
- VPNFilter Two Years Later: Routers Still Compromised
January 19, 2021
With the internet of things (IoT) gaining more popularity, common IoT devices such as routers, printers, cameras, and network-attached storage (NAS) devices, are becoming more frequent targets for cybercriminals. Unlike typical operating systems such as Windows and macOS, users are less likely to patch IoT devices. This is because users find the task more difficult and ...
- Ransomware attacks now to blame for half of healthcare data breaches
January 15, 2021
Almost half of all data breaches in hospitals and the wider healthcare sector are as a result of ransomware attacks according to new research. Ransomware gangs are increasingly adding an extra layer of extortion to attacks by not only encrypting networks and demanding hundreds of thousands or even millions of dollars in bitcoin to restore them, ...
- Sophisticated Hacks Against Android, Windows Reveal Zero-Day Trove
January 13, 2021
Google researchers have detailed a major hacking campaign that was detected in early 2020, which mounted a series of sophisticated attacks, some using zero-day flaws, against Windows and Android platforms. Working together, researchers from Google Project Zero and the Google Threat Analysis Group (TAG) uncovered the attacks, which were “performed by a highly sophisticated actor,” Ryan ...
- macOS malware used run-only AppleScripts to avoid detection for five years
January 12, 2021
For more than five years, macOS users have been the targets of a sneaky malware operation that used a clever trick to avoid detection and hijacked the hardware resources of infected users to mine cryptocurrency behind their backs. Named OSAMiner, the malware has been distributed in the wild since at least 2015 disguised in pirated (cracked) ...
- New Sunspot malware found while investigating SolarWinds hack
January 12, 2021
Cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike has discovered the malware used by the SolarWinds hackers to inject backdoors in Orion platform builds during the supply-chain attack that led to the compromise of several companies and government agencies. Sunspot, as it was dubbed by CrowdStrike, was dropped by the attackers in the development environment of SolarWinds’ Orion IT management software. After ...
- Sunburst backdoor – code overlaps with Kazuar
January 11, 2021
On December 13, 2020, FireEye published a blog post detailing a supply chain attack leveraging Orion IT, an infrastructure monitoring and management platform by SolarWinds. In parallel, Volexity published an article with their analysis of related attacks, attributed to an actor named “Dark Halo”. FireEye did not link this activity to any known actor; instead, ...
- Adversary Infrastructure Report 2020: A Defender’s View
January 8, 2021
Recorded Future tracks the creation and modification of new malicious infrastructure for a multitude of post-exploitation toolkits, custom malware frameworks, and open-source remote access trojans. The effort has been ongoing since 2017, when Insikt Group created methodologies to identify the deployments of open-source remote access trojans (RATs). Recorded Future collected over 10,000 unique command and control ...
- TA551: Email Attack Campaign Switches from Valak to IcedID
January 7, 2021
TA551 (also known as Shathak) is an email-based malware distribution campaign that often targets English-speaking victims. The campaign discussed in this blog has targeted German, Italian and Japanese speakers. TA551 has historically pushed different families of information-stealing malware like Ursnif and Valak. After mid-July 2020, this campaign has exclusively pushed IcedID malware, another information stealer. This ...
- North Korean hackers launch RokRat Trojan in campaigns against the South
January 7, 2021
A North Korean hacking group is utilizing the RokRat Trojan in a fresh wave of campaigns against the South Korean government. The Remote Access Trojan (RAT) has been connected to attacks based on the exploit of a Korean language word processor commonly used in South Korea for several years; specifically, the compromise of Hangul Office documents ...
- Expanding Range and Improving Speed: A RansomExx Approach
January 6, 2021
RansomExx, a ransomware variant responsible for several high-profile attacks in 2020, has shown signs of further development and unhampered activity. The most recently reported development involves the use of newer variants adapted for Linux servers that effectively expanded its range to more than Windows servers. Own monitoring efforts found RansomExx compromising companies in the United States, ...
- Australian cybersecurity agency used as cover in malware campaign
January 5, 2021
The Australian government warns of an ongoing campaign impersonating the Australian Cyber Security Centre (ACSC) to infect targets with malware. Scammers coordinating these attacks are also actively attempting to convince potential victims to install remote administration and desktop sharing software with the end goal of stealing the targets’ banking information. “The Australian Cyber Security Centre (ACSC) warns ...
- Babuk Locker is the first new enterprise ransomware of 2021
January 5, 2021
t’s a new year, and with it comes a new ransomware called Babuk Locker that targets corporate victims in human-operated attacks. Babuk Locker is a new ransomware operation that launched at the beginning of 2021 and has since amassed a small list of victims from around the world. From ransom negotiations with victims seen by BleepingComputer, demands ...
- ElectroRAT Drains Cryptocurrency Wallet Funds of Thousands
January 5, 2021
A new remote access tool (RAT) has been discovered being used in an extensive campaign. The attack has targeted cryptocurrency users in an attempt to collect their private keys and ultimately to drain their wallets. The never-before-seen RAT at the center of the campaign, which researchers dub ElectroRAT, is written in the Go programming language and ...
- Malware uses WiFi BSSID for victim identification
January 4, 2021
Malware operators who want to know the location of the victims they infect usually rely on a simple technique where they grab the victim’s IP address and check it against an IP-to-geo database like MaxMind’s GeoIP to get a victim’s approximate geographical location. While the technique isn’t very accurate, it is still the most reliable method ...
- Emotet malware hits Lithuania’s National Public Health Center
December 30, 2020
The internal networks of Lithuania’s National Center for Public Health (NVSC) and several municipalities have been infected with Emotet malware following a large campaign targeting the country’s state institutions. “When infected recipients opened infected messages, the virus entered the internal networks of the institutions,” NVSC officials said in a statement published today. “Infected computers, after downloading additional ...
- Zero-click iOS zero-day found deployed against Al Jazeera employees
December 20, 2020
At least 36 Al Jazeera journalists, producers, anchors, and executives, along with a journalist at London-based Al Araby TV, had their iPhones hacked using a no-user-interaction zero-day vulnerability in the iOS iMessage app, an academic research group said today. Citizen Lab, a cybersecurity and human rights abuse research group at the University of Toronto, said the ...
- Stealthy Magecart malware mistakenly leaks list of hacked stores
December 19, 2020
A list of dozens of online stores hacked by a web skimming group was inadvertently leaked by a dropper used to deploy a stealthy remote access trojan (RAT) on compromised e-commerce sites. The threat actors use this RAT for maintaining persistence and for regaining access to the servers of hacked online shops. Once they connect to the ...
- 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 ...
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