Hacking forums often double up as underground marketplaces where cybercriminals buy, rent, and sell all kinds of malicious illegal products, including software, trojans, stealers, exploits, and leaked credentials. Malware-as-a-service has contributed substantially to the growth of ransomware and phishing attacks (among other attack types) in the past year, as they lower the technical barrier to entry for criminals to carry out attacks.…
Tag: EMAIL
The Morphisec Labs team has conducted research on the new Mars infostealer. Mars is based on the older Oski Stealer and was first discovered in June 2021. The new Mars is available for sale on several underground forums and is reported to be under constant development.…
Geopolitical tensions often make headlines and present a golden opportunity for threat actors to exploit the situation, especially those targeting high-profile victims. In the past month while the Russian invasion of Ukraine was unfolding, Check Point Research (CPR) has observed advanced persistent threat (APT) groups around the world launching new campaigns, or quickly adapting ongoing ones to target victims with spear-phishing emails using the war as a lure.…
By Asheer Malhotra and Justin Thattil with contributions from Kendall McKay.
Cisco Talos has observed a new Transparent Tribe campaign targeting Indian government and military entities. While the actors are infecting victims with CrimsonRAT, their well-known malware of choice, they are also using new stagers and implants.…The text below is a joint work of Maria Jose Erquiaga, Onur Erdogan and Adela Jezkova from Cisco Cognitive team
Emotet (also known as Geodo and Heodo) is a banking trojan, but it is also a modular malware that can be used to download other malware as Trickbot and IcedID [8, 9, 13].…
This post describes the technical analysis of a new campaign detected by Intezer’s research team, which initiates attacks with a phishing email that uses conversation hijacking to deliver IcedID.
The underground economy is constantly evolving with threat actors specializing in specific fields. One field that has bloomed in the last few years is initial access brokers.…
Morphisec Labs has observed a new wave of JSSLoader infections this year. We’ve tracked JSSLoader activity since December 2020 and published a thorough report on the Russian criminal hacking group FIN7’s JSSLoader: The Evolution of the FIN7 JSSLoader. JSSLoader is a small, very capable .NET remote access trojan (RAT).…
Malicious email and phishing scams are usually topical and follow a pattern of current events, and they typically are crafted around calendar and/or trending issues as attackers realize that victims are interested in all things relevant to the moment. Threat actors are aware that not all recipients will bite, but some will, hence the origin of the term “phishing.”…
We recently discovered an APT campaign we are calling Operation Dragon Castling. The campaign is targeting what appears to be betting companies in South East Asia, more specifically companies located in Taiwan, the Philippines, and Hong Kong. With moderate confidence, we can attribute the campaign to a Chinese speaking APT group, but unfortunately cannot attribute the attack to a specific group and are not sure what the attackers are after.…
Key Takeaways: An in-depth analysis of Midas and trends across other Thanos ransomware variants reveals how ransomware groups shifted tactics in 2021 to:
lower sunk costs by using RaaS builders to reduce development time increase payouts with double extortion tactics by using their own data leak sites extend the length and effectiveness of campaigns to get the highest investment returns by updating payloads and/or rebranding their own ransomware groupAdvertised on the darkweb for Ransomware-as-a-Service (RaaS), Thanos ransomware was first identified in February 2020.…
The post-pandemic world has seen cryptocurrencies and blockchain products in general catapult in valuation and adoption. “Web3”, “DeFi”, and “NFT” have become household terms and the sector is growing so fast that people and businesses are pouring in with dollar signs in their eyes and high hopes to get a piece of the pie.…
A Cobalt Strike Cybercrime Syndicate and the Ransomware Hackers’ Favorite Weapon
On March 9, the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) and the U.S. Secret Service issued an updated alert about the Conti ransomware group, encouraging organizations to review their advisory and apply the recommended mitigations.…
Appending a malicious file to an unsuspecting file format is one of the tricks our adversaries use to evade detection. Recently, we came across an interesting email campaign employing this technique to deliver the info stealer Vidar malware. First, let’s examine the email delivery mechanism, then go on to take a closer look at the Vidar malware itself.…
This is the story of piecing together information and research leading to the discovery of one of the largest botnet-as-a-service cybercrime operations we’ve seen in a while. This research reveals that a cryptomining malware campaign we reported in 2018, Glupteba malware, significant DDoS attacks targeting several companies in Russia, including Yandex, as well as in New Zealand, and the United States, and presumably also the TrickBot malware were all distributed by the same C2 server.…
Information stealing malware is on the rise. Cyble Research Labs recently discovered a new malware dubbed “AvD crypto stealer” on a cybercrime forum. Upon further investigation, however, we observed that this does not function as a Crypto Stealer. This is, in fact, a disguised variant of well-known Clipper malware that can read and edit any text copied by the victim i.e.…
In December 2021, we observed an adversary exploiting the Microsoft Exchange ProxyShell vulnerabilities to gain initial access and execute code via multiple web shells. The overlap of activities and tasks was remarkably similar to that observed in our previous report, “Exchange Exploit Leads to Domain Wide Ransomware“.…
The ASEC analysis team has recently discovered the distribution of malware disguised as a Windows Help File (*.chm), specifically targeting Korean users. The CHM file is a compiled HTML Help file that is executed via the Microsoft® HTML help executable program.
The recently discovered CHM file downloads additional malicious files when run.…
One Hotel to rule them all, One Hotel to find them, One Hotel to bring them all and in the darkness bind them.
By John Fokker · March 17, 2022
This story was also written by Thibault Seret
Introduction:Our advanced threat research team has discovered a first-stage malicious campaign targeting luxury hotels in Macao, China since the latter half of November 2021.…
Key FindingsProofpoint identified a targeted attack leveraging an open-source package installer Chocolatey to deliver a backdoor.
The attack targeted French entities in the construction, real estate, and government industries.
The attacker used a resume themed subject and lure purporting to be GDPR information.
The attacker used steganography, including a cartoon image, to download and install the Serpent backdoor. …
Read More Update 05.27.22: An unknown APT group is targeting Russian government entities with at least four separate spear-phishing campaigns since the beginning of the conflict in Ukraine. Source: Security Affairs.
OverviewBlackBerry Threat Intelligence has identified a new Ransomware-as-a-Service (Raas) family, and tracked its lineage to its probable beta stage release.…