APT (Targeted attacks)

Ferocious Kitten, TunnelSnake, PuzzleMaker and other threat actors, zero-day vulnerabilities, ransomware and banking Trojans – check out our review of Q2 2021.

This is our latest summary of advanced persistent threat (APT) activity, focusing on significant events that we observed during Q2 2021: attacks against Microsoft Exchange servers, APT29 and APT31 activities, targeting campaigns, etc.

We recently came across unusual APT activity that was detected in high volumes, albeit most likely aimed at a few targets of interest. Further analysis revealed that the actor, which we dubbed LuminousMoth, shows an affinity to the HoneyMyte group, otherwise known as Mustang Panda.

We found new malware samples used in WildPressure campaigns: newer version of the C++ Milum Trojan, a corresponding VBScript variant with the same version number, and a Python script working on both Windows and macOS.

An attack perpetrated by REvil aka Sodinokibi ransomware gang against Managed Service Providers (MSPs) and their clients was discovered on July 2. Some of the victims reportedly have been compromised a popular MSP software which led to encryption of their customers.

Costin Raiu has been with Kaspersky since 2000. In 2010, he became Director of our Global Research and Analysis Team (GReAT). In our interview with Costin, he spoke about the job of a security researcher, its challenges and advantages, and offered some advice for newcomers to cybersecurity.

Ferocious Kitten is an APT group that has been targeting Persian-speaking individuals in Iran. Some of the TTPs used by this threat actor are reminiscent of other groups, such as Domestic Kitten and Rampant Kitten. In this report we aim to provide more details on these findings.

In April 2021, we observed a suspicious Word document with a Korean file name and decoy. It revealed a novel infection scheme and an unfamiliar payload. After a deep analysis, we came to a conclusion: the Andariel group was behind these attacks.

We detected a wave of highly targeted attacks against multiple companies. Closer analysis revealed that all these attacks exploited a chain of Google Chrome and Microsoft Windows zero-day exploits.

A newly discovered rootkit that we dub ‘Moriya’ is used by an unknown actor to deploy passive backdoors on public facing servers, facilitating the creation of a covert C&C communication channel through which they can be silently controlled. The victims are located in Africa, South and South-East Asia.

This report highlights significant events related to advanced persistent threat (APT) activity observed in Q1 2021. The summaries are based on our threat intelligence research and provide a representative snapshot of what we have published and discussed in greater detail in our private APT reports.

The Reverse Engineering webinar audience having been so active not only were we unable to address all the incoming questions online, we didn’t even manage to pack the rest of them in one blogpost. So here comes the second part of the webinar follow-up.

With so many questions collected during the Targeted Malware Reverse Engineering webinar we lacked the time to answer them all online, we promised we would come up with this blogpost.

CVE-2021-28310 is an out-of-bounds (OOB) write vulnerability in dwmcore.dll, which is part of Desktop Window Manager (dwm.exe). We believe it is exploited in the wild, potentially by several threat actors.

The investigation described in this article started with one such file which caught our attention due to the various improvements it brought to this well-known infection vector.