Researchers at Lookout have discovered a new Android surveillance tool which we attribute with moderate confidence to the Law Enforcement Command of the Islamic Republic of Iran (FARAJA). Named BouldSpy for the “BoulderApplication” class which configures the tool’s command and control (C2), we have been tracking the spyware since March 2020.…
Tag: PERSISTENCE
Two pillars in sleight of hand magic are User Initiated Action, where the target needs to believe their actions are their own, and Hidden Action, the trick needs to be concealed behind something ordinary and nonthreatening. Mandiant became aware of a chain of adversary methodologies that leverage these two pillars to achieve persistence.…
The Increasing Menace of Small Ransomware Syndicates
Read More In recent years, ransomware operations have emerged as highly profitable cybercrime schemes. Numerous companies have suffered immense financial, data, and reputation losses due to such attacks. Typically, cybersecurity researchers tend to concentrate on prominent ransomware groups that run extensive Ransomware-as-a-Service (RaaS) operations.…
Recent weeks have seen a number of macOS-specific infostealers appear for sale in crimeware forums, including Pureland, MacStealer and Amos Atomic Stealer. Of these, Atomic Stealer has offered by far the most complete package, promising cybercriminals a full-featured if not particularly sophisticated infostealer. Atomic can grab account passwords, browser data, session cookies, and crypto wallets, and in the version being advertised on Telegram, threat actors can manage their campaigns through a web interface rented out from the developer for $1000 per month.…
After months of dormancy, Earth Longzhi, a subgroup of advanced persistent threat (APT) group APT41, has reemerged using new techniques in its infection routine. This blog entry forewarns readers of Earth Longzhi’s resilience as a noteworthy threat.
We discovered a new campaign by Earth Longzhi (a subgroup of APT41) that targets organizations based in Taiwan, Thailand, the Philippines, and Fiji.…
Key findingsCheck Point Research (CPR) continues to track the evolution of ROKRAT and its delivery methods.
ROKRAT has not changed significantly over the years, but its deployment methods have evolved, now utilizing archives containing LNK files that initiate multi-stage infection chains. This is another representation of a major trend in the threat landscape, where APTs and cybercriminals alike attempt to overcome the blocking of macros from untrusted sources.…
Read More Ransomware has been one of the most glaring threats against organizations in recent years. Since 2021 SOCRadar has detected around 5,600 ransomware attacks. There was a rise from 2021 to 2022 in the number of attacks detected. This trend seems to continue in 2023 because even though it is not half of the year, there is already half the number of attacks detected compared to 2021.…
AhnLab Security Emergency response Center (ASEC) has recently discovered XMRig CoinMiner being installed on poorly managed Linux SSH servers. The attacks have been happening with a distinct pattern since 2022: they involve the usage of malware developed with Shell Script Compiler (SHC) when installing the XMRig, as well as the creation of a backdoor SSH account.…
Key takeawaysAdversaries continue to abuse and increase reach through malvertising such as Google Ads by impersonating legitimate software
Elastic Security Labs is shedding light on an undiscovered hVNC malware that has been quietly collecting a large install base
This malware we are calling LOBSHOT appears to be leveraged for financial purposes employing banking trojan and info-stealing capabilitiesPreamble
Read More Elastic Security Labs along with the research community noticed a large spike in the adoption of malvertising earlier this year.…
By Pham Duy Phuc and Max Kersten · February 08, 2023
Threat actors often rely on the same techniques until their hand is forced, usually due to defensive changes or chance-based opportunities, to leverage a new technique. Malicious macros in Microsoft Office have long been the “industry standard” to initially compromise devices.…
ESET researchers have discovered a campaign that we attribute to the APT group known as Evasive Panda, where update channels of legitimate applications were mysteriously hijacked to deliver the installer for the MgBot malware, Evasive Panda’s flagship backdoor.
Key points of the report:
Users in mainland China were targeted with malware delivered through updates for software developed by Chinese companies.…We have recently discovered the first-ever evidence that attackers are exploiting Kubernetes (K8s) Role-Based Access Control (RBAC) in the wild to create backdoors. The attackers also deployed DaemonSets to take over and hijack resources of the K8s clusters they attack. Our research suggests that this campaign is actively targeting at least 60 clusters in the wild.…
With recent reports that Charming Kitten group (aka Mint Sandstorm) is actively targeting critical infrastructure in the US and other countries, we would like to share the most recent insights from Bitdefender Labs about modernization of Charming Kitten’s tactics, techniques, and procedures, including a new, previously unseen malware.…
This post is also available in: 日本語 (Japanese)
Executive SummaryUnit 42 researchers recently identified a new variant of PingPull malware used by Alloy Taurus actors designed to target Linux systems. While following the infrastructure leveraged by the actor for this PingPull variant, we also identified their use of another backdoor we track as Sword2033.…
Key Findings:In this report we reveal new findings related to Educated Manticore, an activity cluster with strong overlap with Phosphorus, an Iranian-aligned threat actor operating in the Middle East and North America.
Like many other actors, Educated Manticore has adopted recent trends and started using ISO images and possibly other archive files to initiate infection chains.…
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Introduction
Read More We introduced Tomiris to the world in September 2021, following our investigation of a DNS-hijack against a government organization in the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS). Our initial report described links between a Tomiris Golang implant and SUNSHUTTLE (which has been associated to NOBELIUM/APT29/TheDukes) as well as Kazuar (which has been associated to Turla); however, interpreting these connections proved difficult.…
Found in Environments Protected By: Proofpoint
By Nathaniel Raymond, Cofense Intelligence
Gh0st RAT, a decades-old open-source remote administration tool (RAT), recently appeared in phishing campaigns targeting a healthcare organization. Gh0st Remote Administration Tool was created by a Chinese hacking group named C. Rufus Security Team that released it publicly in 2008.…
The X_Trader software supply chain attack affected more organizations than 3CX. Initial investigation by Symantec’s Threat Hunter Team has, to date, found that among the victims are two critical infrastructure organizations in the energy sector, one in the U.S. and the other in Europe. In addition to this, two other organizations involved in financial trading were also breached.…
By Securonix Threat Labs, Threat Research: Den Iuzvyk, Tim Peck, Oleg Kolesnikov
TL;DRThe Securonix Threat Research team (STR) has recently observed a new attack campaign tracked by Securonix as OCX#HARVESTER. Some of the malicious payloads leveraged as part of the attack campaign observed appear to be related to the More_eggs malicious payloads reported earlier [1].…
ESET researchers have discovered a new Lazarus Operation DreamJob campaign targeting Linux users. Operation DreamJob is the name for a series of campaigns where the group uses social engineering techniques to compromise its targets, with fake job offers as the lure. In this case, we were able to reconstruct the full chain, from the ZIP file that delivers a fake HSBC job offer as a decoy, up until the final payload: the SimplexTea Linux backdoor distributed through an OpenDrive cloud storage account.…