Rootkits are malware implants which burrow themselves in the deepest corners of the operating system. Although on paper they may seem attractive to attackers, creating them poses significant technical challenges and the slightest programming error has the potential to completely crash the victim machine. In our APT predictions for 2022, we noted that despite these risks, we expected more attackers to reach the sophistication level required to develop such tools.…
Tag: PRIVILEGE
Our X-Ops teams – SophosLabs, SecOps (Sophos Managed Threat Response [MTR] and Sophos Rapid Response), and Sophos AI – operate in a virtuous Observe-Orient-Decide-Act loop, building on each teams’ work to improve customer protections. A recent set of investigations illustrates our OODA-loop process: Attacks against a pair of vulnerabilities in Microsoft SQL were researched, documented, and addressed proactively.…
By Securonix Threat Labs, Threat Research: D. Iuzvyk, T. Peck, O. Kolesnikov
Last Updated: July 20, 2022
IntroductionThe Securonix Threat Research (STR) team has been observing and investigating a new attack campaign exploiting high-value targets, including Czech Republic, Poland, and other countries. The attack campaign has been tracked by STR as STIFF#BIZON.…
In April 2022, ESET researchers discovered a previously unknown macOS backdoor that spies on users of the compromised Mac and exclusively uses public cloud storage services to communicate back and forth with its operators. Following analysis, we named it CloudMensis. Its capabilities clearly show that the intent of its operators is to gather information from the victims’ Macs by exfiltrating documents, keystrokes, and screen captures.…
Amadey Bot, a malware that was first discovered in 2018, is capable of stealing information and installing additional malware by receiving commands from the attacker. Like other malware strains, it has been sold in illegal forums and used by various attackers.
The ASEC analysis team previously revealed cases where Amadey was used on attacks in the ASEC blog posted in 2019 (English version unavailable).…
Summary
Actions to take today:
• Install fixed builds, updating all affected VMware Horizon and UAG systems to the latest versions. If updates or workarounds were not promptly applied following VMware’s release of updates for Log4Shell in December 2021, treat all affected VMware systems as compromised.…
Summary
The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), and the Department of the Treasury (Treasury) are releasing this joint Cybersecurity Advisory (CSA) to provide information on Maui ransomware, which has been used by North Korean state-sponsored cyber actors since at least May 2021 to target Healthcare and Public Health (HPH) Sector organizations.…
Key Findings
The SECUINFRA Falcon Team identified a recent attack consitent with the campaign targeting Bangladesh conducted by the advanced persistent threat group “Bitter”, also known as T-APT-17.
Bitter employs malicious document files as lures containing different implementations of the so-called “Equation Editor exploits” to download following malware stages.…
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MS-SQL servers are mainly the attack targets for Windows systems. Attackers scan vulnerable MS-SQL servers that are poorly managed and install malware upon gaining control. Malware strains installed by attackers include CoinMiner, ransomware, backdoor, etc., and may vary depending on the purpose of the attack.
Figure 1.…By Flavio Costa,
In a recent customer engagement, we observed a month-long AvosLocker campaign. The attackers utilized several different tools, including Cobalt Strike, Sliver and multiple commercial network scanners. The initial ingress point in this incident was a pair of VMWare Horizon Unified Access Gateways that were vulnerable to Log4Shell.…QakBot, also known as QBot, QuackBot, or Pinkslipbot, is a banking trojan malware that has existed for over a decade. In recent years, QakBot has become one of the leading banking trojans around the globe. Its main purpose is to steal banking credentials (e.g., logins, passwords, etc.)…
June 15, 2022
Volexity frequently works with individuals and organizations heavily targeted by sophisticated, motivated, and well-equipped threat actors from around the world. Some of these individuals or organizations are attacked infrequently or on an irregular basis, while others see a barrage of attacks nearly every week.…
Using a methodology first seen in 2020, an unknown threat actor has been exploiting a three-year-old bug in the Telerik UI web application framework to take control of web servers, installing Cobalt Strike beacons and other malware in the process.
In the weeks following the initial, 2019 disclosure of the vulnerability, attackers scanned the internet for vulnerable applications.…
Purple Fox malware was first discovered in 2018 and was delivered by RIG EK (Exploit Kit). However, it has now become an independent malware with its own exploit kit framework. Like many other exploit kits, Purple Fox is regularly updating its capabilities by using different exploits that are available in the wild to obtain remote code execution and privilege escalation on vulnerable machines as well as installing backdoors and propagating to other machines.…
Rootkits are dangerous pieces of malware. Once in place, they are usually really hard to detect. Their code is typically more challenging to write than other malware, so developers resort to code reuse from open source projects. As rootkits are very interesting to analyze, we are always looking out for these kinds of samples in the wild.…
Executive Summary
Aoqin Dragon, a threat actor SentinelLabs has been extensively tracking, has operated since 2013 targeting government, education, and telecommunication organizations in Southeast Asia and Australia.
Aoqin Dragon seeks initial access primarily through document exploits and the use of fake removable devices.
Other techniques the attacker has been observed using include DLL hijacking, Themida-packed files, and DNS tunneling to evade post-compromise detection.…
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In this multi-day intrusion, we observed a threat actor gain initial access to an organization by exploiting a vulnerability in ManageEngine SupportCenter Plus. The threat actor, discovered files on the server and dumped credentials using a web shell, moved laterally to key servers using Plink and RDP and exfiltrated sensitive information using the web shell and RDP.…
UNC2165 Overlaps with Evil Corp Activity
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OFAC sanctions against Evil Corp in December 2019 were announced in conjunction with the Department of Justice’s (DOJ) unsealing of indictments against individuals for their roles in the Bugat malware operation, updated versions of which were later called DRIDEX. DRIDEX was believed to operate under an affiliate model with multiple actors involved in the distribution of the malware.…
Fortinet’s FortiGuard Labs captured a phishing campaign that delivers three fileless malware onto a victim’s device. Once executed, they are able to control and steal sensitive information from that device to perform other actions according to the control commands from their server.
In Part I of this analysis, I introduced how these three fileless malware are delivered to the victim’s device via a phishing campaign, and what mechanism it uses to load, deploy, and execute these fileless malware in the target process.…
Summary
Update June 2, 2022:
This Cybersecurity Advisory (CSA) has been updated with additional indicators of compromise (IOCs) and detection signatures, as well as tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs) from trusted third parties.
Update End
The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) is releasing this CSA to warn organizations that malicious cyber actors, likely advanced persistent threat (APT) actors, are exploiting CVE-2022-22954 and CVE-2022-22960 separately and in combination.…