Without doubt, one of the hottest and most stressful regions on the planet currently is Eastern Europe. The military conflict that has been ongoing for more than 4 months has unfortunately claimed many victims and is fueling an economic and food crisis in several nations spanning across the globe.…
Tag: GOVERNMENT
Following on from our earlier Owowa discovery, we continued to hunt for more backdoors potentially set up as malicious modules within IIS, a popular web server edited by Microsoft. And we didn’t come back empty-handed…
In 2021, we noticed a trend among several threat actors for deploying a backdoor within IIS after exploiting one of the ProxyLogon-type vulnerabilities within Microsoft Exchange servers.…
Since the last quarter of 2020 MuddyWater has maintained a “long-term” infection campaign targeting Middle East countries. We have gathered samples from November 2020 to January 2022, and due to the recent samples found, it seems that this campaign might still be currently active. The latest campaigns of the Muddy Water threat group, allegedly sponsored by the Iranian government and linked to the Iranian revolutionary guard (the main armed forces of the Iranian government), could be framed within the dynamics of maintaining Iran’s regional sovereignty.…
ToddyCat is a relatively new APT actor that we have not been able to relate to other known actors, responsible for multiple sets of attacks detected since December 2020 against high-profile entities in Europe and Asia. We still have little information about this actor, but we know that its main distinctive signs are two formerly unknown tools that we call ‘Samurai backdoor’ and ‘Ninja Trojan’.…
Resecurity, Inc. (USA) has identified a spike in phishing content delivered via Azure Front Door (AFD), a cloud CDN service provided by Microsoft. The identified resources in one of the malicious campaigns impersonates various services appearing to be legitimately created on the “azurefd.net” domain – This allows the bad actors to trick users and spread phishing content to intercept credentials from business applications and e-mail accounts.…
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Read More A new remote code execution vulnerability called “Follina” has been found lurking in most Microsoft products. In this blog, we examine a potential attack vector as well as technical details of Follina, and chart the ability to detect this new vulnerability using both Qualys Multi-Vector EDR and Qualys Context XDR.…
Saitama is a backdoor that uses the DNS protocol to encapsulate its command and control (C2) messages – a technique known as DNS Tunneling (MITRE ATT&CK T1071). Spotted and documented by MalwareBytes in two articles posted last month (How the Saitama backdoor uses DNS tunneling and APT34 targets Jordan Government using new Saitama backdoor), Saitama was used in a phishing e-mail targeted to a government official from Jordan’s foreign ministry on an attack attributed to the Iranian group APT34.…
This post is also available in: 日本語 (Japanese)
Executive SummaryUnit 42 recently identified a new, difficult-to-detect remote access trojan named PingPull being used by GALLIUM, an advanced persistent threat (APT) group.
Unit 42 actively monitors infrastructure associated with several APT groups. One group in particular, GALLIUM (also known as Softcell), established its reputation by targeting telecommunications companies operating in Southeast Asia, Europe and Africa.…
Executive SummaryAoqin Dragon, a threat actor SentinelLabs has been extensively tracking, has operated since 2013 targeting government, education, and telecommunication organizations in Southeast Asia and Australia.
Aoqin Dragon seeks initial access primarily through document exploits and the use of fake removable devices.
Other techniques the attacker has been observed using include DLL hijacking, Themida-packed files, and DNS tunneling to evade post-compromise detection.…
Read More Sitting on a sunny beach full of sparkling sand. Exploring the jungle looking for exotic animals and plants. Diving into a deep blue sea where sunlight has a difficult time reaching. Partying all night at clubs in a city you have never been to. Holding hands with friends around a campfire singing Kumbaya.…
UNC2165 Overlaps with Evil Corp Activity
Read More OFAC sanctions against Evil Corp in December 2019 were announced in conjunction with the Department of Justice’s (DOJ) unsealing of indictments against individuals for their roles in the Bugat malware operation, updated versions of which were later called DRIDEX. DRIDEX was believed to operate under an affiliate model with multiple actors involved in the distribution of the malware.…
Phishing has been a prominent cyber threat for decades, stealing the spotlight as the most prevalent attack vector for years, but the latest breed of attacks is more sophisticated and complicated to protect against than ever before. Attackers are always looking for new techniques to bypass security measures and remain undetected by victims.…
Users of WSO2 products are advised to update their respective products and platforms or to apply the temporary mitigation steps immediately.
We observed vulnerability CVE-2022-29464 being exploited in the wild since April, allowing unrestricted file uploads resulting to arbitrary remote code execution (RCE). Disclosed and patched in April, the security gap was ranked Critical at 9.8 and affects a number of WSO2 products.…
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Read More This blog post on TURLA was originally published as a FLINT report (SEKOIA.IO Flash Intelligence) sent to our clients on May 11, 2022.
Executive SummarySEKOIA.IO Threat & Detection Research (TDR) Team have expanded the search on Russian-linked TURLA’s infrastructures from a Google’s TAG blog post.…
An unknown Advanced Persistent Threat (APT) group has targeted Russian government entities with at least four separate spear phishing campaigns since late February, 2022.
The campaigns, discovered by the Malwarebytes Threat Intelligence team, are designed to implant a Remote Access Trojan (RAT) that can be used to surveil the computers it infects, and run commands on them remotely.…
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 Ukraine conflict. Source: Security Affairs.
It’s not often that we get to observe the behind-the-scenes drama that can accompany the creation of new malware, but when we do, it gives us a fascinating glimpse into how threat actors operate.…
In the past two months, we observed multiple APT groups attempting to leverage the Russia and Ukraine war as a lure for espionage operations. It comes as no surprise that Russian entities themselves became an attractive target for spear-phishing campaigns that are exploiting the sanctions imposed on Russia by western countries.…
ITG23 Crypters Highlight Cooperation Between Cybercriminal Groups
cybercriminal group ITG23, also known as Wizard Spider, DEV-0193, or simply the “Trickbot Group”. The results of this research, along with evidence gained from the disclosure of internal ITG23 chat logs (“Contileaks”), provide new insight into the connections and cooperation between prominent cybercriminal groups whose attacks often lead to ransomware.…
Secureworks® Counter Threat Unit™ (CTU) researchers are investigating attacks by the Iranian COBALT MIRAGE threat group, which has been operating since at least June 2020. COBALT MIRAGE is linked to the Iranian COBALT ILLUSION threat group, which predominantly uses persistent phishing campaigns to obtain initial access.…
On April 26th, we identified a suspicious email that targeted a government official from Jordan’s foreign ministry. The email contained a malicious Excel document that drops a new backdoor named Saitama. Following our investigation, we were able to attribute this attack to the known Iranian Actor APT34.…