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Since its reemergence on Nov. 14, 2021, Black Lotus Labs has once again been tracking Emotet, one of the world’s most prolific malware distribution families which previously infected more than 1.6M devices and caused hundreds of millions of dollars in damage across critical infrastructure, healthcare, government organizations and enterprises around the world.…
In March 2022, we came across evidence that another, relatively unknown, ransomware known as Nokoyawa is likely connected with Hive, as the two families share some striking similarities in their attack chain, from the tools used to the order in which they execute various steps.
Hive, which is one of the more notable ransomware families of 2021, made waves in the latter half of the year after breaching over 300 organizations in just four months — allowing the group to earn what could potentially be millions of US dollars in profit.…
Recently, Fortinet’s FortiGuard Labs captured more than 500 Microsoft Excel files that were involved in a campaign to deliver a fresh Emotet Trojan onto the victim’s device.
Emotet, known as a modular Trojan, was first discovered in the middle of 2014. Since then, it has become very active, continually updating itself.…
8/24 Editor’s Note: Since the publication, SMTP2Go has updated its security measures.
Key TakeawaysProofpoint researchers have identified ongoing activity by the China-aligned APT actor TA416 in which the group is targeting European diplomatic entities, including an individual involved in refugee and migrant services. This targeting is consistent with other activity reported by Proofpoint, showing an interest in refugee policies and logistics across the APT actor landscape which coincides with increased tensions and now armed conflict between Russia and Ukraine.…By Jake Longden, Cofense Phishing Defense Center
Microsoft Power BI, a popular data-visualization tool, is designed to help users wrangle their data in multiple and more human-friendly formats. As a recognizable application from a commonly used and trusted vendor, Power BI is also a prime target for threat actors to spoof and abuse it for phishing attacks.…
The ASEC analysis team has discovered that PseudoManuscrypt malware was being distributed in Korea since May 2021. Introduced in the previous ASEC blog, PseudoManuscrypt is disguised as an installer that is similar to a form of Cryptbot, and is being distributed. Not only is its file form similar to Cryptbot, but it is also distributed via malicious sites exposed on the top search page when users search commercial software-related illegal programs such as Crack and Keygen.…
Soon after execution of the Qbot payload, the malware established C2 connectivity and created persistence on the beachhead. Successful exploitation of the Zerologon vulnerability (CVE-2020-1472) allowed the threat actors to obtain domain admin privileges.…
One of our readers shared an interesting sample received via email. Like him, if you get access to interesting/suspicious data, please share it with us (if you’re authorized of course). We are always looking for fresh meat!
The file was received as an attachment to a mail that pretended to be related to a purchase order.…
Over the past year, FortiEDR has prevented multiple attacks that attempted to exploit various Microsoft Exchange server vulnerabilities, some of which we have previously covered.
Among these attacks, we identified a campaign operated by Moses Staff, a geo-political motivated threat group believed to be sponsored by the Iranian government.…
This post is also available in: 日本語 (Japanese)
Executive SummaryAs early as Dec. 21, 2021, Unit 42 observed a new infection method for the highly prevalent malware family Emotet. Emotet is high-volume malware that often changes and modifies its attack patterns. This latest modification of the Emotet attack follows suit.…
In recent months, there has been continuous media coverage of the geopolitical tensions in Eastern Europe around the threats of a Russian invasion of Ukraine. As one may expect, there has been an observable uptick in cyberattacks on related government networks and personnel. One notable case is the so-called “#WhisperGate” malware which is destructive to the systems which it infects.…
Research by: Aliaksandr Trafimchuk, Raman Ladutska
This research comes as a follow-up to our previous article on Trickbot, “When Old Friends Meet Again: Why Emotet Chose Trickbot For Rebirth” where we provided an overview of the Trickbot infrastructure after its takedown. Check Point Research (CPR) now sheds some light on the technical details of key Trickbot modules.…
Lorenz is a ransomware strain observed first in February of 2021, and is believed to be a rebranding of the “.sZ40” ransomware that was discovered in October 2020. Lorenz targets organizations worldwide with customized attacks demanding hundreds of thousands of dollars, and even millions in ransom fee. …
Recently, we’ve been researching several threat actors operating in South Asia: Transparent Tribe, SideCopy, etc., that deploy a range of remote access trojans (RATs). After a hunting session in our malware sample repositories and VirusTotal while looking into these actors, we gathered a small collection of VBA code samples that eventually allowed us to connect certain IOCs to individual threat actors based on the final payload, victimology and submission locations.…
In August 2021, a disgruntled CONTI affiliate leaked training documents, playbooks, and tools used to assist in CONTI ransomware operations. Mandiant has determined that some of the activity listed above overlaps with techniques in the playbooks disclosed in August.
At this time, due to the public release of this information, other unaffiliated actors may be replicating the techniques for their own motives and objectives.…
Qbot (aka QakBot, Quakbot, Pinkslipbot ) has been around for a long time having first been observed back in 2007. More info on Qbot can be found at the following links: Microsoft & Red Canary
In this case, from October 2021, we will break down how Qbot quickly spread across all workstations in an environment, while stealing browser information and emails.…
February 3, 2022
by Steven Adair, Thomas Lancaster
[UPDATE] On February 4, 2022, Zimbra provided an update regarding this zero-day exploit vulnerability and reported that a hotfix for 8.8.15 P30 would be available on February 5, 2022. This vulnerability was later assigned CVE-2022-24682 and was fixed in version 8.8.15P30 Update 2 of Zimbra Collaboration Suite.…