APT Trends Report Q2 2018

These summaries are a representative snapshot of what has been discussed in greater detail in our private reports during Q2 2018. They aim to highlight the significant events and findings that we feel people should be aware of.

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Research

Delving deep into VBScript

Boris Larin

In late April we found and wrote a description of CVE-2018-8174, a new zero-day vulnerability for Internet Explorer that uses a well-known technique from the PoC exploit CVE-2014-6332. But whereas CVE-2014-6332 was aimed at integer overflow exploitation for writing to arbitrary memory locations, my interest lay in how this technique was adapted to exploit the use-after-free vulnerability. Read Full Article

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Research

Pbot: evolving adware

Anton V. Ivanov

It was more than a year ago that we detected the first member of Pbot family. Since then, we have encountered several modifications of the program, one of which went beyond adware by installing and running a hidden miner on victim computers. Read Full Article

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Research

A MitM extension for Chrome

Vyacheslav Bogdanov

Browser extensions make our lives easier: they hide obtrusive advertising, translate text, help us choose in online stores, etc. There are also less desirable extensions, including those that bombard us with advertising or collect information about our activities. These pale into insignificance, however, when compared to extensions whose main aim is to steal money. Read Full Article

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Publications

Netkids

Anna Larkina

Children today are completely at home in the digital space. They use digital diaries and textbooks at school, communicate via instant messaging, play games on mobile devices (not to mention PCs and consoles), and create mini masterpieces on tablets and laptops. This total immersion in the digital universe is a concern for many parents, but if they want their child to spend time online safely and usefully, they must not only understand the basic concepts of digital security and have a grasp of the threats, but also be able to explain them to their kid. Read Full Article

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Research

Trojan watch

Sergey Lurye, Boris Stepanov

We continue to research how proliferation of IoT devices affects the daily lives of users and their information security. In our previous study, we touched upon ways of intercepting authentication data using single-board microcomputers. This time, we turned out attention to wearable devices: smartwatches and fitness trackers. Or more precisely, the accelerometers and gyroscopes inside them. Read Full Article

Archive