Malware

December 2, 2019

The availability of “commodity malware” – malware offered for sale – empowers a large population of criminals, who make up for their lack of technical sophistication with an abundance of malicious intent. Rather than looking just at the malware samples and functionality themselves, we’ve taken an interest in the commodity malware ecosystem; especially into the malware ...

December 2, 2019

BlackBerry Cylance researchers have recently discovered a previously unnamed Python RAT we’re calling PyXie. PyXie has been observed in the wild since at least 2018 without much attention from the cybersecurity industry. PyXie has been deployed in an ongoing campaign that targets a wide range of industries. It has been seen in conjunction with Cobalt Strike ...

November 29, 2019

While we have been following cyberespionage group TICK (a.k.a. “BRONZE BUTLER” or “REDBALDKNIGHT”) since 2008, we noticed an unusual increase in malware development and deployments towards November 2018. We already know that the group uses previously deployed malware and modified tools for obfuscation, but we also found TICK developing new malware families capable of detection ...

November 29, 2019

A website which sold a hacking tool purchased by cyber criminals in 124 countries and gave full remote control of victims’ computers has been taken down following an international investigation. 14,500 people across the world purchased the Imminent Monitor Remote Access Trojan (IM RAT) from https://imminentmethods.net for as little as US$25. Once covertly installed on a victim’s computer, IM ...

November 29, 2019

Ransomware will continue to plague organisations in 2020 because there’s little risk of the cyber criminals behind the network-encrypting malware attacks getting caught; so for them there’s only a small amount of risk, but a potentially large reward. During the last year, there’s been many examples of ransomware attacks where victims have given into the extortion demands of ...

November 25, 2019

Trickbot first arrived on the scene in 2016, its initial iteration being a banking trojan that infected computers to steal email passwords and address books to spread malicious emails from compromised accounts. A few years and multiple transformations later, what was a simple banking trojan has since mutated into a constantly evolving malware family that includes information ...

November 21, 2019

A malware downloader has been spotted using novel “Port Monitor” methods that have not been detected before in active campaigns. Dubbed DePriMon, the malicious downloader is used to deploy malware used by Lambert — also known as the Longhorn advanced persistent threat (APT) group — which specializes in attacks against European and Middle Eastern companies. Kaspersky estimates ...

November 21, 2019

A new Trojan, SectopRAT, has appeared in the wild which is able to launch a hidden secondary desktop to control browser sessions on infected machines. The new malware was first spotted by MalwareHunterTeam. In a tweet on 15 November, MalwareHunterTeam said the C# malware, compiled on 13 November, was able to “create hidden desktop and run ...

November 20, 2019

The modern world is dependent on electricity, and the United States is no exception. I remember the notorious blackouts that affected the eastern U.S. and Canada in August 2003. The duration of the mass power outage lasted anywhere between several hours and a week depending on where you were. I was in Hamilton, Canada, and ...

November 19, 2019

A ransomware infection today took down IT systems and websites managed by the Louisiana state government, Governor John Bel Edwards revealed in a series of tweets. “Today, we activated the state’s cybersecurity team in response to an attempted ransomware attack that is affecting some state servers. The Office of Technology Services identified a cybersecurity threat that ...