This is the story of piecing together information and research leading to the discovery of one of the largest botnet-as-a-service cybercrime operations we’ve seen in a while. This research reveals that a cryptomining malware campaign we reported in 2018, Glupteba malware, significant DDoS attacks targeting several companies in Russia, including Yandex, as well as in New Zealand, and the United States, and presumably also the TrickBot malware were all distributed by the same C2 server.…

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Information stealing malware is on the rise. Cyble Research Labs recently discovered a new malware dubbed “AvD crypto stealer” on a cybercrime forum. Upon further investigation, however, we observed that this does not function as a Crypto Stealer. This is, in fact, a disguised variant of well-known Clipper malware that can read and edit any text copied by the victim i.e.…

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Key FindingsProofpoint identified a targeted attack leveraging an open-source package installer Chocolatey to deliver a backdoor. The attack targeted French entities in the construction, real estate, and government industries.  The attacker used a resume themed subject and lure purporting to be GDPR information. The attacker used steganography, including a cartoon image, to download and install the Serpent backdoor. …
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Executive Summary

Cobalt Strike is commercial threat emulation software that emulates a quiet, long-term embedded actor in a network. This actor, known as Beacon, communicates with an external team server to emulate command and control (C2) traffic. Due to its versatility, Cobalt Strike is commonly used as a legitimate tool by red teams – but is also widely used by threat actors for real-world attacks.…

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BlackCat is a recent and growing ransomware-as-a-service (RaaS) group that targeted several organizations worldwide over the past few months. There are rumors of a relationship between BlackCat and the BlackMatter/DarkSide ransomware groups, infamous for attacking the Colonial Pipeline last year. According to a BlackCat representative, BlackCat is not a rebranding of BlackMatter, but its team is made from affiliates of other RaaS groups (including BlackMatter).…
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The ASEC analysis team is constantly monitoring malware distributed to vulnerable database servers (MS-SQL, MySQL servers). This blog will explain the RAT malware named Gh0stCringe[1].

Gh0stCringe, also known as CirenegRAT, is one of the malware variants based on the code of Gh0st RAT. It was first discovered in December 2018, and it is known to have been distributed via SMB vulnerability (using the SMB vulnerability tool of ZombieBoy).[2]…

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Summary

Multifactor Authentication (MFA): A Cybersecurity Essential• MFA is one of the most important cybersecurity practices to reduce the risk of intrusions—according to industry research, users who enable MFA are up to 99 percent less likely to have an account compromised.• Every organization should enforce MFA for all employees and customers, and every user should sign up for MFA when available.•…

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Summary

I came across a fairly interesting VBS-based DanaBot downloader the other day, and I figured it was worth doing a quick write-up on the obfuscation scheme and a few of the other TPPs I observed. The social engineering pretext used in this campaign was interesting as it leveraged an “unclaimed property” themed lure and required user interaction to deliver the first stage payload.…

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Cisco Talos has observed new cyber attacks targeting Turkey and other Asian countries we believe with high confidence are from groups operating under the MuddyWater umbrella of APT groups. U.S. Cyber Command recently connected MuddyWater to Iran’s Ministry of Intelligence and Security (MOIS). These campaigns primarily utilize malicious documents (maldocs) to deploy downloaders and RATs implemented in a variety of languages, such as PowerShell, Visual Basic and JavaScript.…
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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.…

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Українська (Ukrainian)

Update March 17, 2022: Cisco Talos has updated the IOC section with additional hashes and ClamAV coverage.

Executive summaryOpportunistic cybercriminals are attempting to exploit Ukrainian sympathizers by offering malware purporting to be offensive cyber tools to target Russian entities.…
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For additional information regarding deserialization exploits and our new hunting rule generation tool ‘HeySerial’, read our blog post, Now You Serial, Now You Don’t — Systematically Hunting for Deserialization Exploits.

USAHerds (CVE-2021-44207) Zero-Day

In three investigations from 2021, APT41 exploited a zero-day vulnerability in the USAHerds web application.…

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