Mandiant has observed a new ALPHV (aka BlackCat ransomware) ransomware affiliate, tracked as UNC4466, target publicly exposed Veritas Backup Exec installations, vulnerable to CVE-2021-27876, CVE-2021-27877 and CVE-2021-27878, for initial access to victim environments. A commercial Internet scanning service identified over 8,500 installations of Veritas Backup Exec instances that are currently exposed to the internet, some of which may still be unpatched and vulnerable.…
Author: Mandiant
Web application vulnerabilities are like doorways: you never know who or what will walk through. Between December 2021 and July 2022, the Mandiant Managed Defense and Incident Response teams responded to three UNC961 intrusions at different organizations that each started in similar fashion. Two of these victims were under the protection of Managed Defense who identified and responded to the threat before significant impact occurred.…
Cyber espionage threat actors continue to target technologies that do not support endpoint detection and response (EDR) solutions such as firewalls, IoT devices, hypervisors and VPN technologies (e.g. Fortinet, SonicWall, Pulse Secure, and others). Mandiant has investigated dozens of intrusions at defense industrial base (DIB), government, technology, and telecommunications organizations over the years where suspected China-nexus groups have exploited zero-day vulnerabilities and deployed custom malware to steal user credentials and maintain long-term access to the victim environments.…
In part one on North Korea’s UNC2970, we covered UNC2970’s tactics, techniques and procedures (TTPs) and tooling that they used over the course of multiple intrusions. In this installment, we will focus on how UNC2970 utilized Bring Your Own Vulnerable Device (BYOVD) to further enable their operations.…
Since June 2022, Mandiant has been tracking a campaign targeting Western Media and Technology companies from a suspected North Korean espionage group tracked as UNC2970. In June 2022, Mandiant Managed Defense detected and responded to an UNC2970 phishing campaign targeting a U.S.-based technology company. During this operation, Mandiant observed UNC2970 leverage three new code families: TOUCHMOVE, SIDESHOW, and TOUCHSHIFT.…
Executive Summary
Mandiant identified an operation focused on the Ukrainian government via trojanized Windows 10 Operating System installers. These were distributed via torrent sites in a supply chain attack.
Threat activity tracked as UNC4166 likely trojanized and distributed malicious Windows Operating system installers which drop malware that conducts reconnaissance and deploys additional capability on some victims to conduct data theft.…
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Mandiant Managed Defense recently identified cyber espionage activity that heavily leverages USB devices as an initial infection vector and concentrates on the Philippines. Mandiant tracks this activity as UNC4191 and we assess it has a China nexus.
UNC4191 operations have affected a range of public and private sector entities primarily in Southeast Asia and extending to the U.S.,…
There’s a common saying in cyber security, “you can’t protect what you don’t know,” and this applies perfectly to the attack surface of any given organization.
Many organizations have hidden risks throughout their extended IT and security infrastructure. Whether the risk is introduced by organic cloud growth, adoption of IoT devices, or through mergers and acquisitions, the hidden risk lies dormant.…
In 2021, the global median dwell time—the number of days an attacker is on a victim system before being detected—was 21 days. While security teams have come a long way in reducing dwell time, there are still opportunities for improvement.
One key aspect of any effective security operations program is actionable, current, and relevant threat intelligence.…
As endpoint detection and response (EDR) solutions improve malware detection efficacy on Windows systems, certain state-sponsored threat actors have shifted to developing and deploying malware on systems that do not generally support EDR such as network appliances, SAN arrays, and VMware ESXi servers.
Earlier this year, Mandiant identified a novel malware ecosystem impacting VMware ESXi, Linux vCenter servers, and Windows virtual machines that enables a threat actor to take the following actions:
Maintain persistent administrative access to the hypervisor Send commands to the hypervisor that will be routed to the guest VM for execution Transfer files between the ESXi hypervisor and guest machines running beneath it Tamper with logging services on the hypervisor Execute arbitrary commands from one guest VM to another guest VM running on the same hypervisorThis malware ecosystem was initially detected when Mandiant Managed Defense identified attacker commands sourced from the legitimate VMware Tools process, vmtoolsd.exe,…
In July 2022, during proactive threat hunting activities at a company in the media industry, Mandiant Managed Defense identified a novel spear phish methodology employed by the threat cluster tracked as UNC4034. Mandiant has identified several overlaps between this group and those we suspect have a North Korea nexus.…
Beginning with macOS 10.12 (Sierra), Apple introduced a key change to how logging was done on their systems. This new logging system replaced common Unix logs with macOS Unified Logs. These logs can provide forensic investigators a valuable artifact to aid in investigating macOS systems or other Apple devices.…