On August 29, 2023, U.S. law enforcement announced a multinational operation that disrupted the Qakbot botnet (also known as Qbot) and associated infrastructure. Secureworks® Counter Threat Unit™ (CTU) researchers have long maintained active monitoring of the botnet and detected the disruption activity on August 25.

During the takedown, law enforcement identified over 700,000 infected computers and seized more than $8.6 million USD in illicit profits.…

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On the morning of August 24, Phylum’s automated risk detection system identified a suspicious package published to npm called “emails-helper.” A deeper investigation revealed that this package was part of an intricate attack involving Base64-encoded and encrypted binaries. The scheme fetches encryption keys from a DNS TXT record hosted on a remote server.…

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AhnLab Security Emergency response Center (ASEC) has recently discovered cases of proxyjacking targeting poorly managed MS-SQL servers. Publicly accessible MS-SQL servers with simple passwords are one of the main attack vectors used when targeting Windows systems. Typically, threat actors target poorly managed MS-SQL servers and attempt to gain access through brute force or dictionary attacks.…

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We’ve previously reported on a Nokoyawa ransomware case in which the initial access was via an Excel macro and IcedID malware. This case, which also ended in Nokoyawa Ransomware, involved the threat actor deploying the final ransomware only 12 hours after the initial compromise.

This threat actor delivered a password protected ZIP file via HTML smuggling to organizations back in late October, early November 2022.…

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This article is not an in-depth reverse-engineering analysis of a ransomware variant. Rather, it discusses the methods and different techniques used to uncover previous ransomware campaigns. 

When a ransomware is successful out in the wild, it is a common to see cybercriminals use the same ransomware samples — slightly tweaking their codebase — to pilot other projects.…

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The Monti ransomware collective has restarted their operations, focusing on institutions in the legal and governmental fields. Simultaneously, a new variant of Monti, based on the Linux platform, has surfaced, demonstrating notable differences from its previous Linux-based versions.

Introduction

The Monti ransomware, which has both Windows and Linux-based variants, gained attention from cybersecurity organizations and researchers when it was first discovered in June 2022 because of its striking resemblance to the infamous Conti ransom ware — not just in name but also the tactics that the threat actors used.…

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In the Lazarus Group’s latest campaign, which we detailed in a recent blog, the North Korean state-sponsored actor is exploiting CVE-2022-47966, a ManageEngine ServiceDesk vulnerability to deploy multiple threats. In addition to their “QuiteRAT” malware, which we covered in the blog, we also discovered Lazarus Group using a new threat called “CollectionRAT.”…
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Executive Summary  

 In March 2023, Lumen Black Lotus Labs reported on a complex campaign called “HiatusRAT” that infected over 100 edge networking devices globally. The campaign leveraged edge routers, or “living on the edge” access, to passively collect traffic and functioned as a covert network of command and control (C2) infrastructure. …

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Note: The following is a redacted version of a larger report. For full and comprehensive details of this attack, please enquire about our CTI-on-demand service.

Summary

BlackBerry has discovered and documented new tools used by the Cuba ransomware threat group.

Cuba ransomware is currently into the fourth year of its operation and shows no sign of slowing down.…

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Starting from May 2023, researchers from Cofense discovered a large-scale phishing campaign using QR codes in attacks aimed at stealing the Microsoft credentials of users from multiple industries

One of the organizations targeted by hackers is a notable energy company in the US.

“Beginning in May 2023, Cofense has observed a large phishing campaign utilizing QR codes targeting the Microsoft credentials of users from a wide array of industries.”…

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