- Oil-and-Gas APT Pivots to U.S. Power Plants
January 10, 2020
A known APT group with ties to the Iran-linked APT33, dubbed Magnallium, has expanded its targeting from the global oil-and-gas industry to specifically include electric companies in North America. That’s according to a report from Dragos, released Thursday, which noted that the discovery is part of a broader trend in which cybercriminals focused on critical infrastructure are branching ...
- Operation AppleJeus Sequel
January 10, 2020
The Lazarus group is currently one of the most active and prolific APT actors. In 2018, Kaspersky published a report on one of their campaigns, named Operation AppleJeus. Notably, this operation marked the first time Lazarus had targeted macOS users, with the group inventing a fake company in order to deliver their manipulated application and exploit ...
- Exploit Fully Breaks SHA-1, Lowers the Attack Bar
January 9, 2020
A proof-of-concept attack has been pioneered that “fully and practically” breaks the Secure Hash Algorithm 1 (SHA-1) code-signing encryption, used by legacy computers to sign the certificates that authenticate software downloads and prevent man-in-the-middle tampering. The exploit was developed by Gaëtan Leurent and Thomas Peyrin, academic researchers at Inria France and Nanyang Technological University/Temasek Laboratories in Singapore. They ...
- TrickBot Adds Custom, Stealthy Backdoor to its Arsenal
January 9, 2020
The Russian-speaking cybercriminals behind the TrickBot malware have developed a stealthy backdoor dubbed “PowerTrick,” in order to infiltrate high-value targets. According to research from SentinelLabs, released on Thursday, PowerTrick is designed to execute commands and return the results in Base64 format. It’s deployed as a module after the initial TrickBot infection has already taken hold on ...
- Threat Spotlight: Amadey Bot Targets Non-Russian Users
January 8, 2020
Amadey is a simple Trojan bot first discovered in October of 2018. It is primarily used for collecting information on a victim’s environment, though it can also deliver other malware. A major infection vector for Amadey are exploit kits such as RigEK and Fallout EK. During our monitoring, we also observed this Trojan being delivered via AZORult Infostealer on ...
- Travelex UK Website Still Down After Cyberattack
January 3, 2020
The British website of foreign currency seller Travelex remains offline as of Friday 3 January, after being taken down following a cyber-attack on Monday 30 December (New Years Eve). The good news is that an investigation has shown there is no indication the virus has compromised any personal or customer data. But the fact that nearly a ...
- FBI Warns of Maze Ransomware Focusing on U.S. Companies
January 3, 2020
Organizations in the private sector received an alert from the F.B.I. about operators of the Maze ransomware focusing on companies in the U.S. to encrypt information on their systems after stealing it first. The warning came less than a week after the Bureau warned about the LockerGoga and MegaCortex ransomware threats infecting corporate systems. Maze has been operating since ...
- US Coast Guard discloses Ryuk ransomware infection at maritime facility
December 30, 2019
An infection with the Ryuk ransomware took down a maritime facility for more than 30 hours; the US Coast Guard said in a security bulletin it published before Christmas. The agency did not reveal the name or the location of the port authority; however, it described the incident as recent. “Forensic analysis is currently ongoing but the virus, ...
- FIN7 Hackers’ BIOLOAD Malware Drops Fresher Carbanak Backdoor
December 27, 2019
Malware researchers have uncovered a new tool used by the financially-motivated cybercriminal group known as FIN7 to load fresher builds of the Carbanak backdoor. Dubbed BIOLOAD, the malware loader has a low detection rate and shares similarities with BOOSTWRITE, another loader recently identified to be part of FIN7’s arsenal. The malware relies on a technique called binary planting that ...
- Ransomware Hits Maastricht University, All Systems Taken Down
December 27, 2019
Maastricht University (UM) announced that almost all of its Windows systems have been encrypted by ransomware following a cyber-attack that took place on Monday, December 23. UM is a university from the Netherlands with over 18,000 students, 4,400 employees, and 70,000 alumni, UM being placed in the top 500 universities in the world by five ranking tables in the last two ...