APT (Targeted attacks)

At the end of 2021, we inspected UEFI firmware that was tampered with to embed a malicious code we dub MoonBounce. In this report we describe how the MoonBounce implant works and how it is connected to APT41.

It appears that BlueNoroff shifted focus from hitting banks and SWIFT-connected servers to solely cryptocurrency businesses as the main source of the group’s illegal income.

Kaspersky ICS CERT experts identified malware whose loader has some similarities to the Manuscrypt malware, which is part of the Lazarus APT group’s arsenal.

For this annual review, we have tried to focus on what we consider to be the most interesting trends and developments of the last 12 months.

The ScarCruft group (also known as APT37 or Temp.Reaper) is a nation-state sponsored APT actor. Recently, we had an opportunity to perform a deeper investigation on a host compromised by this group.

In this report we provide details on a malicious VBS implant distributed via MS Excel droppers and a fake “Kaspersky Update Agent” which we attribute to WIRTE APT who may be linked to Gaza Cybergang.

WildPressure and LuminousMoth threat actors, FinSpy implants, zero-day vulnerabilities and PrintNightmare, threats for Linux and macOS in our review of Q3 2021.

Over the past 12 months, the style and severity of APT threats has continued to evolve. Despite their constantly changing nature, there is a lot we can learn from recent APT trends to predict what might lie ahead in the coming year.

Go programs may contain hundreds of calls, it is obviously impractical to manually look up each type using a hex editor. So, there is the script I use in my daily work.

The APT trends reports are based on our threat intelligence research and provide a representative snapshot of what we have discussed in greater detail in our private APT reports. This is our latest installment, focusing on activities that we observed during Q3 2021.

According to older public researches, Lyceum conducted operations against organizations in the energy and telecommunications sectors across the Middle East. In 2021, we have been able to identify a new cluster of the group’s activity, focused on two entities in Tunisia.

While investigating a recent rise of attacks against Exchange servers, we noticed a recurring cluster of activity that appeared in several distinct compromised networks. With a long-standing operation, high profile victims, advanced toolset and no affinity to a known threat actor, we decided to dub the cluster GhostEmperor.

We discovered a campaign delivering the Tomiris backdoor that shows a number of similarities with the Sunshuttle malware distributed by DarkHalo APT and target overlaps with Kazuar.

What do cyberthreats, Kubernetes and donuts have in common – except that all three end in “ts”, that is? All these topics will be mentioned during the new SAS@Home online conference, scheduled for September 28th-29th, 2021.

We deliver a range of services: incident response, digital forensics and malware analysis. Data in the report comes from our daily practices with organizations seeking assistance with full-blown incident response or complementary expert activities for their internal incident response teams.