Since March 2024, the BI.ZONE Threat Intelligence team has been tracking the cluster of activity dubbed Sapphire Werewolf.
The threat actor targets Russia’s industries, such as education, manufacturing, IT, defense, and aerospace engineering. Over 300 attacks were carried out using Amethyst, an offshoot of the popular open‑source SapphireStealer. The attackers disguise the malware as an enforcement order, a Central Election Committee leaflet, and even as a decree from the President of Russia.
Read more…
Source: BI.ZONE
Related:
- Squid Werewolf cyber spies masquerade as recruiters
March 12, 2025
Espionage activity clusters may pose as recruiters to distribute phishing emails, targeting key employees in organizations of interest. In December 2024, the BI.ZONE Threat Intelligence team uncovered a peculiar phishing campaign aimed at luring victims with fake job opportunities at an industrial organization. A detailed analysis revealed that the attack had been carried out by Squid Werewolf ...
- DCRat backdoor returns
March 11, 2025
Since the beginning of the year, Kaspersky researchers have been tracking in their telemetry a new wave of DCRat distribution, with paid access to the backdoor provided under the Malware-as-a-Service (MaaS) model. The cybercriminal group behind it also offers support for the malware and infrastructure setup for hosting the C2 servers. Distribution The DCRat backdoor is ...
- Trojans disguised as AI: cybercriminals exploit DeepSeek’s popularity
March 6, 2025
Among the most significant events in the AI world in early 2025 was the release of DeepSeek-R1 – a powerful reasoning large language model (LLM) with open weights. It’s available both for local use and as a free service. Since DeepSeek was the first service to offer access to a reasoning LLM to a wide ...
- YouTube cracks down on gambling videos trying to lure viewers to unapproved sites
March 4, 2025
YouTube is cracking down on content related to gambling as sports betting and other online prediction markets have taken off in the United States. The platform announced Tuesday it will no longer allow content that directs users to “unapproved” gambling websites through links, images, text, logos or verbal references. YouTube defines unapproved gambling sites as those ...
- The evolution of Dark Caracal tools: analysis of a campaign featuring Poco RAT
February 28, 2025
In early 2024, analysts at the Positive Technologies Expert Security Center (PT ESC) discovered a malicious sample. The cybersecurity community named it Poco RAT after the POCO libraries in its C++ codebase. At the time of its discovery, the sample had not been linked to any known threat group. The malware came loaded with a full ...
- JavaGhost’s Persistent Phishing Attacks From the Cloud
February 28, 2025
Unit 42 researchers have observed phishing activity that we track as TGR-UNK-0011. They assess with high confidence that this cluster overlaps with the threat actor group JavaGhost. The threat actor group JavaGhost has been active for over five years and continues to target cloud environments to send out phishing campaigns to unsuspecting targets. According to website ...