Do government sanctions against ransomware groups work?

Earlier this year, the U.S. government imposed sanctions against Russian national Mikhail Matveev, an FBI most-wanted cybercriminal, who authorities accuse of being a “prolific ransomware affiliate” involved in cyberattacks in the United States and overseas. Authorities say Matveev played a Read More …

Ransomware gang HelloKitty exploits critical Apache ActiveMQ bug CVE-2023-46604

Beginning Friday, October 27, Rapid7 Managed Detection and Response (MDR) identified suspected exploitation of Apache ActiveMQ CVE-2023-46604 in two different customer environments. In both instances, the adversary attempted to deploy ransomware binaries on target systems in an effort to ransom Read More …

Investigation of Session Hijacking via Citrix NetScaler ADC and Gateway Vulnerability (CVE-2023-4966)

On Oct. 10, 2023, Citrix released a security bulletin for a sensitive information disclosure vulnerability (CVE-2023-4966) impacting NetScaler ADC and NetScaler Gateway appliances. Mandiant has identified zero-day exploitation of this vulnerability in the wild beginning in late August 2023 as Read More …

Over the Kazuar’s nest: Cracking down on a freshly hatched backdoor used by Pensive Ursa

While tracking the evolution of Pensive Ursa (aka Turla, Uroburos), Unit 42 researchers came across a new, upgraded variant of Kazuar. Not only is Kazuar another name for the enormous and dangerous cassowary bird, Kazuar is an advanced and stealthy Read More …

From Albania to the Middle East: The Scarred Manticore is listening

Check Point Research, in collaboration with Sygnia’s Incident Response Team, has been tracking and responding to the activities of Scarred Manticore, an Iranian nation-state threat actor that primarily targets government and telecommunication sectors in the Middle East. Scarred Manticore, linked Read More …

Canada bans Chinese app WeChat from government devices

Canada has announced it will ban WeChat on government devices. The Chinese-owned app is sometimes referred to as the “everything app” – like WhatsApp, Facebook, Amazon and Tinder all in one. However Western governments have security concerns about it, mainly Read More …

CloudKeys in the Air: Tracking Malicious Operations of Exposed IAM Keys

Unit 42 researchers have identified an active campaign we are calling EleKtra-Leak, which performs automated targeting of exposed identity and access management (IAM) credentials within public GitHub repositories. As a result of this, the threat actor associated with the campaign Read More …