Principal Security Researcher, Global Research & Analysis Team
Kurt joined Kaspersky in 2010. He researches and reports on targeted attack activity, complex intrusions, and advanced malware. He focuses on privacy and cryptography technologies. Kurt contributes to working groups and shares his findings with other members of various online communities. He regularly gives presentations on malware issues at international conferences and offers his thoughts to a variety of journalists and media about current cybersecurity matters. Prior to joining Kaspersky, Kurt was VP of Behavioral Threat Research at Symantec for PC Tools’ ThreatFire. Originally joining ThreatFire when it was a startup in 2005, Kurt was as their sole researcher and led their research efforts through two successful acquisitions. Before Symantec, Kurt was Chief Threat Officer at Novatix and a Threat Analyst at SonicWALL.An unknown actor targeted an electric utility in southern Africa with Cobalt Strike beacons and DroxiDat, a new variant of the SystemBC payload. We speculate that this incident was in the initial stages of a ransomware attack.
This is our latest summary of the significant events and findings, focusing on activities that we observed during Q2 2023.
While monitoring the traffic of our own corporate Wi-Fi network, we noticed suspicious activity that originated from several iOS-based phones. We created offline backups of the devices, inspected them and discovered traces of compromise.
GoldenJackal is an APT group, active since 2019, that usually targets government and diplomatic entities in the Middle East and South Asia. The main feature of this group is a specific toolset of .NET malware, JackalControl, JackalWorm, JackalSteal, JackalPerInfo and JackalScreenWatcher.