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.…

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In this intrusion (from November 2021), a threat actor gained its initial foothold in the environment through the use of Qbot (a.k.a. Quakbot/Qakbot) malware.

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.…

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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.…

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Attribution

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.…

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case study below, Antlion compromised the networks of at least two other organizations in Taiwan, including another financial organization and a manufacturing company. The activity the group carried out on those networks was largely similar to the activity that is detailed in the case study, with the xPack backdoor frequently deployed and a lot of evidence of credential dumping.…

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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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TrickBot Bolsters Layered Defenses to Prevent Injection Research

Limor Kessem and Charlotte Hammond.

The cyber crime gang that operates the TrickBot Trojan, as well as other malware and ransomware attacks, has been escalating activity. As part of that escalation, malware injections have been fitted with added protection to keep researchers out and get through security controls.…

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BlueNoroff is the name of an APT group coined by Kaspersky researchers while investigating the notorious attack on Bangladesh’s Central Bank back in 2016. A mysterious group with links to Lazarus and an unusual financial motivation for an APT. The group seems to work more like a unit within a larger formation of Lazarus attackers, with the ability to tap into its vast resources: be it malware implants, exploits, or infrastructure.…

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