The state of stalkerware in 2020
The 2020 data shows that the stalkerware situation has not improved much: the number of affected people is still high. A total of 53,870 unique users were affected globally by stalkerware in 2020.
Threats
APT annual review: What the world’s threat actors got up to in 2020
We track the ongoing activities of more than 900 advanced threat actors. Here we try to focus on what we consider to be the most interesting trends and developments of the last 12 months.
Reports
Lazarus targets defense industry with ThreatNeedle
In mid-2020, we realized that Lazarus was launching attacks on the defense industry using the ThreatNeedle cluster, an advanced malware cluster of Manuscrypt (a.k.a. NukeSped). While investigating this activity, we were able to observe the complete life cycle of an attack, uncovering more technical details and links to the group’s other campaigns.
Sunburst backdoor – code overlaps with Kazuar
While looking at the Sunburst backdoor, we discovered several features that overlap with a previously identified backdoor known as Kazuar. Our observations shows that Kazuar was used together with Turla tools during multiple breaches in past years.
Lazarus covets COVID-19-related intelligence
As the COVID-19 crisis grinds on, some threat actors are trying to speed up vaccine development by any means available. We have found evidence that the Lazarus group is going after intelligence that could help these efforts by attacking entities related to COVID-19 research.
Sunburst: connecting the dots in the DNS requests
We matched private and public DNS data for the SUNBURST-malware root C2 domain with the CNAME records, to identify who was targeted for further exploitation. In total, we analyzed 1722 DNS records, leading to 1026 unique target name parts and 964 unique UIDs.
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