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.…
After FortiGuard Labs reported on RapperBot in our previous article titled So RapperBot, What Ya Bruting For? in August 2022, there was a significant drop in the number of samples collected in the wild. But in early October 2022, new samples with the same distinctive C2 protocol used by RapperBot were detected.…
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.…
LNK files are based on the Shell Link Binary file format, also known as Windows shortcuts. But what seems a relatively simple ability to execute other binaries on the system can inflict great harm when abused by threat actors.
Microsoft’s decision to block macros by default for files downloaded from the internet in Office applications provoked malware developers to shift to other techniques.…
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.…
FormBook stealer is an infostealer trojan available as a malware-as-service. This malware is often used by attackers with low technical literacy and little programming knowledge. FormBook can be used to steal various information from infected machines.
Despite how easy it is to set up and use, the malware has advanced stealing and evasion functions including the ability to pull stored and recorded user input.…
During a routine threat-hunting exercise, Cyble Research and Intelligence Labs (CRIL) encountered data-destructive ransomware linked to the pro-Russian Threat Actors (TA) group named “Killnet”. The ransomware is a modified version of notorious Chaos Ransomware. Upon execution, the Killnet Ransomware drops a note which contains a link to a pro-Russian Telegram channel containing propaganda posts related to the conflict in Ukraine.…
Raccoon is an information stealer malware — a virus that threat actors use to retrieve sensitive data from infected machines. Also known as Mohazo and Racealer, this is a modern malware that was first sighted in 2019.
Although some consider this a relatively basic malware, excellent service from creators, who distribute it as malware as a service and a user-friendly, simplistic dashboard, helped make Raccoon quite popular.…
11/07: Updated article to provide clarity around hunting techniques
Key points from our research:
Following our reporting on Robin Banks in July, Cloudflare disassociated Robin Banks phishing infrastructure from its services, causing a multi-day disruption to operations. In response, Robin Banks administrators made several changes, including relocating its infrastructure to a notorious Russian provider and changing features of its kits to be more evasive.…This report describes several interesting incidents observed by the Kaspersky Managed Detection and Response (MDR) team. The goal of the report is to inform our customers about techniques used by attackers. We hope that learning about the attacks that took place in the wild helps you to stay up to date on the modern threat landscape and to be better prepared for attacks.…
In early June 2022, we observed an intrusion where a threat actor gained initial access by exploiting the CVE-2022-30190 (Follina) vulnerability which triggered a Qbot infection chain.
Qbot, also known as Qakbot or Pinksliplot is actively developed and capable of a number of functions from reconnaissance, lateral movement, data exfiltration, to delivering other payloads acting as an initial access broker.…
BlackCat
Known for its unconventional methods and use of advanced extortion techniques, BlackCat has quickly risen to prominence in the cybercrime community. As this ransomware group forges its way to gain more clout, we examine its operations and discuss how organizations can shore up their defenses against it.…
A new adversary simulation tool is steadily growing in the ranks of popularity among red teamers and most recently adversaries. Brute Ratel states on its website that it “is the most advanced Red Team & Adversary Simulation Software in the current C2 Market.” Many of these products are marketed to assist blue teams in validating detection, prevention, and gaps of coverage.…
Checkmarx discovered ~200 malicious NPM packages with thousands of installations linked to an attack group called “LofyGang”.
This attack group has been operating for over a year with multiple hacking objectives:
Credit card information Discord “Nitro” (premium) upgrades Streaming services accounts (e.g. Disney+), Minecraft accounts, and more.…While an extensive, comprehensive analysis of every utility and component within the Caffeine platform is well beyond the scope of this blog post, several key components of its operation can be used to generate a solid set of high efficacy threat detections when used in concert with one another.…
While performing regular threat hunting activities, we identified multiple downloads of previously unclustered malicious Tor Browser installers. According to our telemetry, all the victims targeted by these installers are located in China. As the Tor Browser website is blocked in China, individuals from this country often resort to downloading Tor from third-party websites.…
ESET researchers uncovered and analyzed a set of malicious tools that were used by the infamous Lazarus APT group in attacks during the autumn of 2021. The campaign started with spearphishing emails containing malicious Amazon-themed documents and targeted an employee of an aerospace company in the Netherlands, and a political journalist in Belgium.…
Earlier this year, we started hunting for possible new DeftTorero (aka Lebanese Cedar, Volatile Cedar) artifacts. This threat actor is believed to originate from the Middle East and was publicly disclosed to the cybersecurity community as early as 2015. Notably, no other intelligence was shared until 2021, which led us to speculate on a possible shift by the threat actor to more fileless/LOLBINS techniques, and the use of known/common offensive tools publicly available on the internet that allows them to blend in.…
Sygnia recently investigated a Cheerscrypt ransomware attack which utilized Night Sky ransomware TTPs. Further analysis revealed that Cheerscrypt and Night Sky are both rebrands of the same threat group, dubbed ‘Emperor Dragonfly’ by Sygnia.
‘Emperor Dragonfly’ (A.K.A. DEV-0401 / BRONZE STARLIGHT) deployed open-source tools that were written by Chinese developers for Chinese users.…