We analyze an infection campaign targeting organizations in the Middle East for cyberespionage in December 2022 using a new backdoor malware. The campaign abuses legitimate but compromised email accounts to send stolen data to external mail accounts controlled by the attackers.
On December 2022, we identified a suspicious executable (detected by Trend Micro as Trojan.MSIL.REDCAP.AD)…
Resecurity® has identified a relatively new ransomware family called “Nevada Ransomware”. The actors behind this new project have an affiliate platform first introduced on the RAMP underground community, which is known for initial access brokers (IABs) and other cybercriminal actors and ransomware groups. On February 1st (2023), the operators behind the project updated and significantly improved the functionality of the locker for Windows and Linux/ESXi, and distributed new builds for their affiliates which have been analyzed by our malware intelligence team.…
By Aleksandar Milenkoski, Joey Chen, and Amitai Ben Shushan Ehrlich
Executive Summary SentinelLabs tracks a cluster of recent opportunistic attacks against organizations in East Asia as DragonSpark. SentinelLabs assesses it is highly likely that a Chinese-speaking actor is behind the DragonSpark attacks. The attacks provide evidence that Chinese-speaking threat actors are adopting the little known open source tool SparkRAT.…At the end of November 2022, experts from Bitdefender Labs started to notice an increase in attacks using ProxyNotShell/OWASSRF exploits chains to target on-premises Microsoft Exchange deployments. SSRF attacks on Microsoft Exchange servers are some of the most popular and routinely exploited vulnerabilities. We decided to release a technical advisory describing these attacks, but also documenting some of the recent attacks that we’ve detected in the wild. …
Written by Jon DiMaggio.
Table of Contents
I gotta story to tell…
The LockBit ransomware gang is one of the most notorious organized cybercrime syndicates that exists today. The gang is behind attacks targeting private-sector corporations and other high-profile industries worldwide. News and media outlets have documented many LockBit attacks, while security vendors offer technical assessments explaining how each occurred.…
Mandiant is tracking a suspected China-nexus campaign believed to have exploited a recently announced vulnerability in Fortinet’s FortiOS SSL-VPN, CVE-2022-42475, as a zero-day. Evidence suggests the exploitation was occurring as early as October 2022 and identified targets include a European government entity and a managed service provider located in Africa.…
Affected Platforms: FortiOSImpacted Users: Government & large organizationsImpact: Data loss and OS and file corruptionSeverity Level: High
Fortinet has published CVSS: Critical advisory FG-IR-22-398 / CVE-2022-42475 on Dec 12, 2022. The following writeup details our initial investigation into this malware and additional IoCs identified during our ongoing analysis.…
Major drug markets in the Dark Web are now worth around $315 million annually
The Resecurity® Hunter unit performed an extensive analysis of current trends and dynamics related to the underground economy around active DNMs leveraging technical means and human intelligence (HUMINT) sources. Some results of this research (Drug Trafficking in the Dark Web – Status Report – 2022/2023) arranged by our team are provided within this blog post and are aimed to provide awareness for international law enforcement, cybercrime investigators and intelligence professionals. Some…
As Mandiant recently wrote about in our blog post, Always Another Secret: Lifting the Haze on China-nexus Espionage in Southeast Asia, USB spreading malware continues to be a useful vector to gain initial access into organizations. In this incident, a USB infected with several strains of older malware was inserted at a Ukrainian organization in December 2021.…
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.,…
Recently, there has been a case of malware disguised as a Word document being distributed through certain paths (e.g. KakaoTalk group chats).
The ASEC analysis team has discovered during our additional monitoring process that the URL used in the fake Word document is becoming very cleverly disguised to closely resemble the normal URL, and we wish to advise caution on the part of users.…
Editor’s Note: This is an excerpt of a full report. To read the entire analysis with endnotes, click here to download the report as a PDF.
This report analyzes the threat landscape ahead of the 2022 FIFA World Cup hosted in Qatar that begins on November 20, 2022.…
We break down the cyberespionage activities of advanced persistent threat (APT) group Earth Preta, observed in large-scale attack deployments that began in March. We also show the infection routines of the malware families they use to infect multiple sectors worldwide: TONEINS, TONESHELL, and PUBLOAD.
We have been monitoring a wave of spear-phishing attacks targeting the government, academic, foundations, and research sectors around the world.…
Summary
On August 25, 2022, Chile’s government computer systems were attacked by a previously unseen ransomware variant. CSIRT of Chile’s government published a report which contained some Indicators of Compromise (IoCs) and recommendations for prevention measures.
On October 3, 2022, Invima — The Colombia National Food and Drug Surveillance Institute — reported a cyberattack that led to a temporary shutdown of the organization’s web services.…
We looked into the campaigns deployed by a new subgroup of advanced persistent threat (APT) group APT41, Earth Longzhi. This entry breaks down the technical details of the campaigns in full as presented at HITCON PEACE 2022 in August.
In early 2022, we investigated an incident that compromised a company in Taiwan.…
We have observed multiple attacks targeting government organizations in Asia, all involving DLL sideloading – historically a favorite technique of China-based APT groups — as far back as 2013 and as recently as 2020. In this article, we look at the evidence that connects five of them, showing how threat actors base their attacks on well-known, effective techniques, adding complexity and variation over time.…
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.…
Our honeypots caught malicious cryptocurrency miner samples targeting the cloud and containers, and its routines are reminiscent of the routines employed by cybercriminal group TeamTNT, which was said to have quit in November 2021. Our investigation shows that another threat actor group, WatchDog, might be mimicking TeamTNT’s arsenal.…