This report provides defenders and security operations center teams with the technical details they need to know should they encounter the DeimosC2 C&C framework.

IntroductionWith the rise in attention to Cobalt Strike from network defenders, attackers have been looking to alternative command-and-control (C&C) frameworks Among these, Brute Ratel and Sliver are growing in popularity, having recently been featured in a number of publications.…
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Overview

Ordinarily, attackers install malware through various methods such as spear phishing emails with a malicious attachment, malvertising, vulnerabilities, and disguising the malware as normal software and uploading them to websites. The malware that is installed include infostealers which steal information from the infected system, ransomware which encrypts files to demand ransom, and DDoS Bots which are used in DDoS attacks.…

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CVE-2021-44228 and CVE-2021-45105) to compromise the Apache Tomcat service on servers in order to install web shells. The attackers used Virtual Private Servers (VPS) hosted on Vultr and Telstra as command-and-control (C&C) servers.

Budworm’s main payload continues to be the HyperBro malware family, which is often loaded using a technique known as dynamic-link library (DLL) side-loading.…

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Recent studies show that more than 85% of financial institutions in Central and Western Africa have repeatedly been victimized in multiple, damaging cyberattacks. In a quarter of these cases, intrusions into network systems resulted in the worst possible outcomes for the financial and banking sector: information leaks, identity theft, money transfer fraud, and bank withdrawals on false checks.…

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Play is a new ransomware that takes a page out of Hive and Nokoyawa’s playbook. The many similarities among them indicate that Play, like Nokoyawa, are operated by the same people.

In July, we investigated a spate of ransomware cases in the Latin American region that targeted government entitles, which was initially attributed to a new player known as Play ransomware.…

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Earlier this year, [redacted] encountered a relatively new ransomware threat actor that called themselves BianLian. We observed the actor deploying custom malware that was written in the Go programming language, which posed some initial, but not insurmountable, reverse-engineering challenges. 

BianLian used subtle techniques to exploit, enumerate, and move laterally in victim networks to remain undetected and aggressively worked to counter Endpoint Detection & Response (EDR) protections during the encryption phase of their operations.…

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Background

Over the last year Mandiant has been tracking UNC3890, a cluster of activity targeting Israeli shipping, government, energy and healthcare organizations via social engineering lures and a potential watering hole. Mandiant assesses with moderate confidence this actor is linked to Iran, which is notable given the strong focus on shipping and the ongoing naval conflict between Iran and Israel.…

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Threat Actors Leveraging Microsoft Applications to Deliver Cobalt-Strike Beacons

DLL (Dynamic-Link Library) sideloading is a technique used by Threat Actors to infect users using legitimate applications which load malicious DLL files that spoof legitimate ones. Recently Cyble Research Labs published a blog about Qakbot malware that leverages a calculator to perform DLL Sideloading.…

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DLL (Dynamic-Link Library) sideloading is a technique used by Threat Actors to infect users using legitimate applications which load malicious DLL files that spoof legitimate ones. Recently published a blog about Qakbot malware that leverages a calculator to perform DLL Sideloading.

Similarly, we came across a Twitter post wherein researchers mentioned a document file that performs DLL Sideloading using Microsoft applications such as “Teams.exe”…

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This post is also available in: 日本語 (Japanese)

Executive Summary

HelloXD is a ransomware family performing double extortion attacks that surfaced in November 2021. During our research we observed multiple variants impacting Windows and Linux systems. Unlike other ransomware groups, this ransomware family doesn’t have an active leak site; instead it prefers to direct the impacted victim to negotiations through TOX chat and onion-based messenger instances.…

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By: Jason Reaves and Joshua Platt

SocGholish AKA FAKEUPDATES was first reported in 2017. While the initial analysis and reporting did not gain much attention, over time the actor(s) behind the activity continued to expand and develop their operations. Partnering with Evil Corp, the FAKEUPDATE / SOCGHOLISH framework has become a major corporate initial access vector.…

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