BlackCat is a recent and growing ransomware-as-a-service (RaaS) group that targeted several organizations worldwide over the past few months. There are rumors of a relationship between BlackCat and the BlackMatter/DarkSide ransomware groups, infamous for attacking the Colonial Pipeline last year. According to a BlackCat representative, BlackCat is not a rebranding of BlackMatter, but its team is made from affiliates of other RaaS groups (including BlackMatter).…
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Background

Since the Log4J vulnerability was exposed, we see more and more malware jumped on the wagon, Elknot, Gafgyt, Mirai are all too familiar, on February 9, 2022, 360Netlab’s honeypot system captured an unknown ELF file propagating through the Log4J vulnerability. What stands out is that the network traffic generated by this sample triggered a DNS Tunnel alert in our system, We decided to take a close look, and indeed, it is a new botnet family, which we named B1txor20 based on its propagation using the file name “b1t”, the XOR encryption algorithm, and the RC4 algorithm key length of 20 bytes.…

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For additional information regarding deserialization exploits and our new hunting rule generation tool ‘HeySerial’, read our blog post, Now You Serial, Now You Don’t — Systematically Hunting for Deserialization Exploits.

USAHerds (CVE-2021-44207) Zero-Day

In three investigations from 2021, APT41 exploited a zero-day vulnerability in the USAHerds web application.…

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Over the past months, the Cybereason Nocturnus Team observed an uptick in the activity of the Iranian attributed group dubbed Phosphorus (AKA Charming Kitten, APT35), known for previously attacking medical research organizations in the US and Israel in late 2020, and for targeting academic researchers from the US, France, and the Middle East region back in 2019.…

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StellarParticle is a campaign tracked by CrowdStrike as related to the SUNSPOT implant from the SolarWinds intrusion in December 2020 and associated with COZY BEAR (aka APT29, “The Dukes”).  The StellarParticle campaign has continued against multiple organizations, with COZY BEAR using novel tools and techniques to complete their objectives, as identified by CrowdStrike incident responders and the CrowdStrike Intelligence team.…
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The BlackBerry Research & Intelligence and Incident Response (IR) teams have found evidence correlating attacks by the Initial Access Broker (IAB) group Prophet Spider with exploitation of the Log4j vulnerability in VMware Horizon. This article highlights the recent indicators of compromise (IoCs) that we’ve observed.

Defenders concerned that they may have been a victim of these attacks can make use of these IoCs and detection methods to identify evidence of compromise within their environment.…

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Key Findings Proofpoint identified a malware packer which researchers have dubbed DTPacker.  The payload decoding uses a fixed password containing former U.S. president Donald Trump’s name.   For several weeks the downloader variant used Liverpool Football Club themed download locations.  The malware is typically used to pack remote access trojans that can be used to steal information and load follow-on payloads such as ransomware.  …
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