Director, Global Research & Analysis Team, APAC
Vitaly has been involved in research at Kaspersky since 2005. In 2008, he was appointed Senior Antivirus Expert, before becoming Director of the EEMEA Research Center in 2009. In 2014 he was seconded to INTERPOL, where for two years he worked in the Digital Crime Center, specializing in malware reverse engineering, digital forensics and cybercrime investigation. Currently Vitaly is based in Singapore and is leading a team of APAC threat researchers focused on targeted attacks investigation. He is the author of Kaspersky’s first open-source project, a remote digital forensics tool called Bitscout, made available on Github. Vitaly has presented at many international security conferences as well as multiple invite-only security events. He is a trainer in malware analysis, YARA for malware hunters, and remote digital forensics.In early 2022, we investigated an IIS backdoor called SessionManager. It has been used against NGOs, government, military and industrial organizations in Africa, South America, Asia, Europe, Russia and the Middle East.
ToddyCat is a relatively new APT actor responsible for multiple sets of attacks against high-profile entities in Europe and Asia. Its main distinctive signs are two formerly unknown tools that we call ‘Samurai backdoor’ and ‘Ninja Trojan’.
We have discovered that malware dubbed WinDealer, spread by Chinese-speaking APT actor LuoYu, has an ability to perform intrusions through a man-on-the-side attack.
This is our latest summary of advanced persistent threat (APT) activity, focusing on events that we observed during Q1 2022.