Malware

December 4, 2019

Unit42 has been researching the xHunt attack campaign on Kuwaiti organizations for several months. Recently, we found evidence that the developers who created the Sakabota tool, which was previously discussed in the xHunt campaign, had carried out two sets of testing activities in July and August 2018 on Sakabota in an attempt to evade detection. These testing ...

December 4, 2019

Discovered in 2014, Emotet is one of the most prolific malware families, infecting computer systems globally through its mass campaigns of spam email that delivers malware (AKA malspam). These campaigns have been widely documented by many organizations, including how Emotet evolved from being a banking Trojan, to a malware loader with modular functionalities. The modular functionality ...

December 4, 2019

What were the most interesting developments in terms of APT activity during the year and what can we learn from them? This is not an easy question to answer, because researchers have only partial visibility and it´s impossible to fully understand the motivation for some attacks or the developments behind them. However, let´s try to approach ...

December 4, 2019

In November 2019, Trend Micro published a blog analyzing an exploit kit we named Capesand that exploited Adobe Flash and Microsoft Internet Explorer flaws. During our analysis of the indicators of compromise (IoCs) in the deployed samples that were infecting the victim’s machines, we noticed some interesting characteristics: notably that these samples were making use of ...

December 4, 2019

For several years, Proofpoint researchers have been tracking the use of first-stage downloaders, which are used by threat actors to install other forms of malware during and after their malicious email campaigns. In particular, over the last two years, these downloaders have become increasingly robust, providing advanced profiling and targeting capabilities. More importantly, downloaders and other ...

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 ...