- Chinese malware used in attacks against Australian orgs
June 28, 2020
The Australian government released an advisory late last week about increased cyber activity from a state actor against networks belonging to its agencies and companies in the country. Behind the attack is a “sophisticated” adversary that relies on slightly modified proof-of-concept exploit code for yesteryear vulnerabilities, the government says. An unofficial blame finger points to China. The ...
- Developer of Mirai, Qbot-based DDoS botnets jailed for 13 months
June 26, 2020
A 22-year-old Washington man was sentenced to 13 months in prison for renting and developing Mirai and Qbot-based DDoS botnets used in DDoS attacks against targets from all over the world. Schuchman, also known as Nexus Zeta, pleaded guilty to the charges of being involved in the creation and operation of the Satori , Okiru, Masuta, and Tsunami/Fbot botnets and was released to the ...
- DarkCrewFriends Returns with Botnet Strategy
June 26, 2020
The hackers-for-hire group DarkCrewFriends has resurfaced and is targeting content management systems to build a botnet. The botnet can be marshalled into service to carry out a variety of criminal activities, including distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks, command execution, information exfiltration or sabotage of an infected system. Researchers said they observed DarkCrewFriends exploiting an unrestricted file upload ...
- Threat Assessment: EKANS Ransomware
June 26, 2020
Unit 42 researchers have observed recent EKANS (Snake backward) ransomware activity affecting multiple industries in the U.S and Europe. As a result, we’ve created this threat assessment report for the activities of this ransomware. Identified techniques and campaigns can be visualized using the Unit 42 Playbook Viewer. EKANS, which was first observed in January 2020, has relatively ...
- Lucifer: New Cryptojacking and DDoS Hybrid Malware Exploiting High and Critical Vulnerabilities to Infect Windows Devices
June 24, 2020
On May 29, 2020, Unit 42 researchers discovered a new variant of a hybrid cryptojacking malware from numerous incidents of CVE-2019-9081 exploitation in the wild. A closer look revealed the malware, which we’ve dubbed “Lucifer”, is capable of conducting DDoS attacks and well-equipped with all kinds of exploits against vulnerable Windows hosts. The first wave of the ...
- Magnitude exploit kit – evolution
June 24, 2020
Exploit kits are not as widespread as they used to be. In the past, they relied on the use of already patched vulnerabilities. Newer and more secure web browsers with automatic updates simply do not allow known vulnerabilities to be exploited. It was very different back in the heyday of Adobe Flash because it’s just ...
- New WastedLocker ransomware demands payments of millions of USD
June 23, 2020
Evil Corp, one of the biggest malware operations on the internet, has slowly returned to life after several of its members were charged by the US Department of Justice in December 2019. In a report shared with ZDNet today, Fox-IT, a division within the NCC Group, has detailed the group’s latest activities following the DOJ charges. The Evil Corp group, also known ...
- Sodinokibi Ransomware Now Scans Networks For PoS Systems
June 23, 2020
Cybercriminals behind recent Sodinokibi ransomware attacks are now upping their ante and scanning their victims’ networks for credit card or point of sale (PoS) software. Researchers believe this is a new tactic designed to allow attackers to get the biggest bang for their buck – ransom payments and credit card data. The compromise of PoS software ...
- Oh, what a boot-iful mornin’
June 23, 2020
In mid-April, Kaspersky threat monitoring systems detected malicious files being distributed under the name “on the new initiative of the World Bank in connection with the coronavirus pandemic” (in Russian) with the extension EXE or RAR. Inside the files was the well-known Rovnix bootkit. There is nothing new about cybercriminals exploiting the coronavirus topic; the ...
- XORDDoS, Kaiji Botnet Malware Variants Target Exposed Docker Servers
June 22, 2020
Researchers at Trend Micro have recently detected variants of two existing Linux botnet malware types targeting exposed Docker servers; these are XORDDoS malware (detected by Trend Micro as Backdoor.Linux.XORDDOS.AE) and Kaiji DDoS malware (detected by Trend Micro as DDoS.Linux.KAIJI.A). Having Docker servers as their target is a new development for both XORDDoS and Kaiji; XORDDoS was known ...

