By Edmund Brumaghin, with contributions from Jonathan Byrne, Perceo Lemos and Vasileios Koutsoumpogeras.
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Executive Summary Since the beginning of the war in Ukraine, we have observed threat actors using email lures with themes related to the conflict, including humanitarian assistance and various types of fundraising.…In July of 2021, we identified an infection campaign targeting important European entities. During this investigation we could identify the threat actor behind these attacks as LazyScripter, an emerging APT group pointed by MalwareBytes in February 2021.
Through our analysis, we could track their activity with precise dates in 2021 based on their samples.…
Since the dawn of phishing, fraudulent invoicing and purchasing schemes have been one of the most common lures. The usual modus operandi involves appealing to the recipient’s desire to avoid incurring a debt, especially where a business may be involved.
FortiGuard Labs recently came across an interesting phishing e-mail masquerading as a purchase order addressed to a Ukrainian manufacturing organization that deals with raw materials and chemicals.…
Recently, Fortinet’s FortiGuard Labs captured more than 500 Microsoft Excel files that were involved in a campaign to deliver a fresh Emotet Trojan onto the victim’s device.
Emotet, known as a modular Trojan, was first discovered in the middle of 2014. Since then, it has become very active, continually updating itself.…
8/24 Editor’s Note: Since the publication, SMTP2Go has updated its security measures.
Key Takeaways Proofpoint researchers have identified ongoing activity by the China-aligned APT actor TA416 in which the group is targeting European diplomatic entities, including an individual involved in refugee and migrant services. This targeting is consistent with other activity reported by Proofpoint, showing an interest in refugee policies and logistics across the APT actor landscape which coincides with increased tensions and now armed conflict between Russia and Ukraine.…Soon after execution of the Qbot payload, the malware established C2 connectivity and created persistence on the beachhead. Successful exploitation of the Zerologon vulnerability (CVE-2020-1472) allowed the threat actors to obtain domain admin privileges.…
In the past few months, a new wave of cyberattacks has been flooding Iran. These attacks are far from minor website defacements – the recent wave is hitting national infrastructure and causing major disruptions to public services.
This article provides an in-depth technical analysis of one of the attacks against the Iranian national media corporation, Islamic Republic of Iran Broadcasting (IRIB) which occurred in late January 2022.…
Over the past year, FortiEDR has prevented multiple attacks that attempted to exploit various Microsoft Exchange server vulnerabilities, some of which we have previously covered.
Among these attacks, we identified a campaign operated by Moses Staff, a geo-political motivated threat group believed to be sponsored by the Iranian government.…
The ShadowPad advanced modular remote access trojan (RAT) has been deployed by the Chinese government-sponsored BRONZE ATLAS threat group since at least 2017. A growing list of other Chinese threat groups have deployed it globally since 2019 in attacks against organizations in various industry verticals.…
On February 4th, 2022, the FBI issued a flash report on LockBit 2.0 ransomware and its indicators of compromise (IOCs). Although Picus Labs updated the Picus Threat Library with attack simulations for LockBit 2.0 back in August 2021, the increasing number of attacks led us to write this blog post.…
Despite being around for many years, blockchain captured the zeitgeist of the digital movement with the advent of Bitcoin. Digital currencies, however, are not the only application of this technology. Non-fungible tokens (NFT) entered the popular lexicon in 2021. An NFT is a digital token that uses blockchain to verify the authenticity of digital content and ownership, such as art, music, collectibles, and in-video-game items.…
Over the past seven months, SophosLabs has monitored a series of new efforts to distribute SolarMarker, an information stealer and backdoor (also known as Jupyter or Polazert). First detected in 2020, the .NET malware usually delivered by a PowerShell installer has information harvesting and backdoor capabilities.…
These websites host Smokeloader payloads as part of three categories named “pab1”, “pab2” and “pab3”. These are not necessarily linked to the analogous “pub*” affiliate IDs, since we have seen some “pab2” payloads with the “555” affiliate ID. While tracking PrivateLoader, we only received links to download the “pab2” payloads from these websites.…
In August 2021, a disgruntled CONTI affiliate leaked training documents, playbooks, and tools used to assist in CONTI ransomware operations. Mandiant has determined that some of the activity listed above overlaps with techniques in the playbooks disclosed in August.
At this time, due to the public release of this information, other unaffiliated actors may be replicating the techniques for their own motives and objectives.…
Qbot (aka QakBot, Quakbot, Pinkslipbot ) has been around for a long time having first been observed back in 2007. More info on Qbot can be found at the following links: Microsoft & Red Canary
In this case, from October 2021, we will break down how Qbot quickly spread across all workstations in an environment, while stealing browser information and emails.…
Cisco Talos has observed a new wave of Delphi malware called Micropsia developed and operated by the Arid Viper APT group since 2017.
This campaign targets Palestinian entities and activists using politically themed lures. The latest iteration of the implant contains multiple RAT and information-gathering capabilities.…