- From Fileless Techniques to Using Steganography: Examining Powload’s Evolution
March 12, 2019
Powload’s staying power in the threat landscape shows how far it has come. In fact, the uptick of macro malware in the first half of 2018 was due to Powload, which was distributed via spam emails. Powload was also one of the most pervasive threats in the North American region in 2018, using various techniques to deliver payloads such ...
- New SLUB Backdoor Uses GitHub, Communicates via Slack
March 11, 2019
In mid-February, Kaspersky Lab received a request for incident response from one of its clients. The individual who initially reported the issue to our client refused to disclose the origin of the indicator that they shared. What we do know is that it was a screenshot from one of the client’s internal computers taken on ...
- Georgia county pays a whopping $400,000 to get rid of a ransomware infection
March 9, 2019
Officials in Jackson County, Georgia, paid $400,000 to cyber-criminals this week to get rid of a ransomware infection and regain access to their IT systems. The ransomware hit the county’s internal network last week, on Friday, March 1, 11Alive reported on Wednesday. The infection forced most of the local government’s IT systems offline, with the exception of its website and 911 ...
- NSA releases Ghidra, a free software reverse engineering toolkit
March 6, 2019
At the RSA security conference today, the National Security Agency, released Ghidra, a free software reverse engineering tool that the agency had been using internally for well over a decade. The tool is ideal for software engineers, but will be especially useful for malware analysts first and foremost. The NSA’s general plan was to release Ghidra so ...
- Data-Wiping Cyberattacks Plague Financial Firms
March 6, 2019
Over a quarter of surveyed financial institutions reported that they were targeted by destructive cyberattacks over the past year, bent on completely destroying data. That’s according to a new Carbon Black report unveiled at RSA this year. The report, “Modern Bank Heists: The Bank Robbery Shifts to Cyberspace,” outlines the top attacks that financial firms are facing ...
- Fileless Banking Trojan Targeting Brazilian Banks Downloads Possible Botnet Capability, Info Stealers
March 4, 2019
Trend Micro analyzed a fileless malware with multiple .BAT attachments and a batch file from IoCs reported by researchers online that was capable of opening an IP address, downloading a PowerShell with a banking trojan payload, and installing a hack tool and an information stealer. Looking further, we observed it stealing machine information and user ...
- Necurs Botnet Evolves to Hide in the Shadows, with New Payloads
March 1, 2019
Necurs, the prolific and globally dispersed spam and malware distribution botnet, has been spotted using a fresh hiding technique to avoid detection while quietly adding more bots to its web. According to research from Black Lotus Labs, which is telecom and ISP provider CenturyLink’s network security arm, Necurs last year began implementing regular, sustained downtime segments ...
- Russian national, author of NeverQuest banking trojan, pleads guilty
February 23, 2019
A Russian national pleaded guilty today in a New York court of creating, running, and infecting users with the NeverQuest banking trojan –also known as Snifula and Vawtrack. The man’s name is Stanislav Vitaliyevich Lisov, a Russian national who went online under the names of “Black” and “Blackf,” and who, according to a Department of Justice press ...
- Ransomware encrypts Australian cardiac clinic’s patient files
February 21, 2019
Employees of Melbourne Heart Group in Malvern, Australia, have been unable to access patients’ medical records following a January ransomware attack that encrypted the health care provider’s files. The cardiology clinic disclosed the incident today on its website’s home page. “We have been assured that no patient’s privacy has been compromised in any way,” the statement reads. ...
- New Astaroth Trojan Variant Exploits Anti-Malware Software to Steal Info
February 13, 2019
A new Astaroth Trojan campaign targeting Brazil and European countries is currently exploiting the Avast antivirus and security software developed by GAS Tecnologia to steal information and load malicious modules. According to Cybereason’s Nocturnus team which discovered the new Astaroth strain, just like previous instalments, the malware uses “legitimate, built-in Windows OS processes to perform malicious activities and deliver a payload without being ...

