Malware

January 13, 2021

Google researchers have detailed a major hacking campaign that was detected in early 2020, which mounted a series of sophisticated attacks, some using zero-day flaws, against Windows and Android platforms. Working together, researchers from Google Project Zero and the Google Threat Analysis Group (TAG) uncovered the attacks, which were “performed by a highly sophisticated actor,” Ryan ...

January 12, 2021

For more than five years, macOS users have been the targets of a sneaky malware operation that used a clever trick to avoid detection and hijacked the hardware resources of infected users to mine cryptocurrency behind their backs. Named OSAMiner, the malware has been distributed in the wild since at least 2015 disguised in pirated (cracked) ...

January 12, 2021

Cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike has discovered the malware used by the SolarWinds hackers to inject backdoors in Orion platform builds during the supply-chain attack that led to the compromise of several companies and government agencies. Sunspot, as it was dubbed by CrowdStrike, was dropped by the attackers in the development environment of SolarWinds’ Orion IT management software. After ...

January 11, 2021

On December 13, 2020, FireEye published a blog post detailing a supply chain attack leveraging Orion IT, an infrastructure monitoring and management platform by SolarWinds. In parallel, Volexity published an article with their analysis of related attacks, attributed to an actor named “Dark Halo”. FireEye did not link this activity to any known actor; instead, ...

January 8, 2021

Recorded Future tracks the creation and modification of new malicious infrastructure for a multitude of post-exploitation toolkits, custom malware frameworks, and open-source remote access trojans. The effort has been ongoing since 2017, when Insikt Group created methodologies to identify the deployments of open-source remote access trojans (RATs). Recorded Future collected over 10,000 unique command and control ...

January 7, 2021

TA551 (also known as Shathak) is an email-based malware distribution campaign that often targets English-speaking victims. The campaign discussed in this blog has targeted German, Italian and Japanese speakers. TA551 has historically pushed different families of information-stealing malware like Ursnif and Valak. After mid-July 2020, this campaign has exclusively pushed IcedID malware, another information stealer. This ...

January 7, 2021

A North Korean hacking group is utilizing the RokRat Trojan in a fresh wave of campaigns against the South Korean government. The Remote Access Trojan (RAT) has been connected to attacks based on the exploit of a Korean language word processor commonly used in South Korea for several years; specifically, the compromise of Hangul Office documents ...

January 6, 2021

RansomExx, a ransomware variant responsible for several high-profile attacks in 2020, has shown signs of further development and unhampered activity. The most recently reported development involves the use of newer variants adapted for Linux servers that effectively expanded its range to more than Windows servers. Own monitoring efforts found RansomExx compromising companies in the United States, ...

January 5, 2021

The Australian government warns of an ongoing campaign impersonating the Australian Cyber Security Centre (ACSC) to infect targets with malware. Scammers coordinating these attacks are also actively attempting to convince potential victims to install remote administration and desktop sharing software with the end goal of stealing the targets’ banking information. “The Australian Cyber Security Centre (ACSC) warns ...

January 5, 2021

t’s a new year, and with it comes a new ransomware called Babuk Locker that targets corporate victims in human-operated attacks. Babuk Locker is a new ransomware operation that launched at the beginning of 2021 and has since amassed a small list of victims from around the world. From ransom negotiations with victims seen by BleepingComputer, demands ...