- APT41 Resurfaces as Earth Baku With New Cyberespionage Campaign
August 24, 2021
Trend Micro researchers have uncovered a cyberespionage campaign being perpetrated by Earth Baku, an advanced persistent threat (APT) group with a known history of carrying out cyberattacks under the alias APT41. This is not the group’s first foray into cyberespionage, and its long list of past cybercrimes also includes ransomware and cryptocurrency mining attacks. Earth Baku ...
- IT threat evolution Q2 2021
August 12, 2021
It is quite common for Chinese-speaking threat actors to share tools and methodologies: one such example is the infamous “DLL side-loading triad”: a legitimate executable, a malicious DLL to be side-loaded by it and an encoded payload, generally dropped from a self-extracting archive. This was first thought to be a signature of LuckyMouse, but we ...
- New AdLoad malware variant slips through Apple’s XProtect defenses
August 11, 2021
A new AdLoad malware variant is slipping through Apple’s YARA signature-based XProtect built-in antivirus to infect Macs as part of multiple campaigns tracked by cybersecurity firm SentinelOne. AdLoad is a widespread trojan targeting the macOS platform since at least since late 2017 and used to deploy various malicious payloads, including adware and Potentially Unwanted Applications (PUAs), Read ...
- Cinobi Banking Trojan Targets Cryptocurrency Exchange Users via Malvertising
August 9, 2021
In a previous blog entry, we reported on a campaign, which we labeled “Operation Overtrap,” that targeted Japan with a new banking trojan called Cinobi. The campaign, which was perpetrated by a group we named “Water Kappa,” delivered Cinobi via spam. It also delivered the trojan using the Bottle exploit kit, which included newer Internet ...
- Security team finds Crimea manifesto buried in VBA Rat using double attack vectors
July 29, 2021
Hossein Jazi and Malwarebytes’ Threat Intelligence team released a report on Thursday highlighting a new threat actor potentially targeting Russian and pro-Russian individuals. The attackers included a manifesto about Crimea, indicating the attack may have been politically motivated. The attacks feature a suspicious document named “Manifest.docx” that uniquely downloads and executes double attack vectors: remote template ...
- APT trends report Q2 2021
July 29, 2021
Investigating the recent Microsoft Exchange vulnerabilities Kaspersky and their colleagues from AMR found an attacker deploying a previously unknown backdoor, “FourteenHi”, in a campaign that we dubbed ExCone, active since mid-March. During our investigation we revealed multiple tools and variants of FourteenHi, configured with infrastructure that FireEye reported as being related to the UNC2643 activity ...
- TA456 hackers built an elaborate online profile to fool their targets into downloading malware
July 28, 2021
Iranian hackers spent 18 months masquerading as an aerobics instructor in a cyber-espionage campaign designed to infect employees and contractors working in defence and aerospace with malware in order to steal usernames, passwords and other information which could be exploited. Active since at least 2019, the campaign used Facebook, Instagram and emails to pose as the ...
- ‘Praying Mantis’ threat actor targeting Windows internet-facing servers with malware
July 27, 2021
Windows internet-facing servers are being targeted by a new threat actor operating “almost completely in-memory,” according to a new report from the Sygnia Incident Response team. The report said that the advanced and persistent threat actor — which they have named “Praying Mantis” or “TG1021” — mostly used deserialization attacks to load a completely volatile, custom ...
- Unhacked: 121 Tools Against Ransomware On A Single Website
July 26, 2021
In its five years of existence, No More Ransom has helped prevent almost a billion euros from ending up in criminals’ pockets Working from home, the beach or a café is a reality for many people today. Everything we need is stored in our digital devices, such as personal computers, laptops and mobile phones, which contain ...
- Malware Makers Using ‘Exotic’ Programming Languages
July 26, 2021
Malware authors are increasingly using rarely spotted programming languages such as Go, Rust, Nim and DLang in order to create new tools and to hinder analysis, researchers have found. Use of those four languages is escalating in the number of malware families being identified, according to a report published on Monday by BlackBerry Research and Intelligence ...

