APT (Targeted attacks)

In early October, a story was published by the Wall Street Journal alleging Kaspersky Lab software was used to siphon classified data from an NSA employee’s home computer system. To assist any independent investigators and all the people who have been asking us questions whether those allegations were true, we decided to conduct an internal investigation to attempt to answer a few questions we had related to the article and some others

Beginning in the second quarter of 2017, Kaspersky’s Global Research and Analysis Team (GReAT) began publishing summaries of the quarter’s private threat intelligence reports in an effort to make the public aware of what research we have been conducting.  This report serves as the next installment, focusing on important reports produced during Q3 of 2017.

Gaza cybergang is an Arabic politically motivated cyber criminal group, operating since 2012 and is actively targeting the MENA (Middle East North Africa) region. Gaza cybergang attacks have never slowed down, recent targets by the group does seem to be varied in nature, attackers do not seem to be selectively choosing targets, but rather seeking different kinds of MENA intelligence.

On October 10, 2017, we identified a new Adobe Flash zero day exploit used in the wild against our customers. The exploit was delivered through a Microsoft Office document and the final payload was the latest version of FinSpy malware.

The 2017 VirusBulletin conference is upon us and, as in previous years, we’re taking the opportunity to dive into an exciting subject, guided by our experience from doing hands-on APT research.

We’re already used to the fact that complex cyberattacks use 0-day vulnerabilities, bypassing digital signature checks, virtual file systems, non-standard encryption algorithms and other tricks. Sometimes, however, all of this may be done in much simpler ways, as was the case in the Microcin malicious campaign.

A little while back we were investigating the malicious activities of the Freakyshelly targeted attack and came across spear phishing emails that had some interesting documents attached to them. They were in OLE2 format and contained no macros, exploits or any other active content.

WhiteBear is a parallel project or second stage of the Skipper Turla cluster of activity documented in another private intelligence report “Skipper Turla – the White Atlas framework” from mid-2016.

In July 2017, during an investigation, suspicious DNS requests were identified in a partner’s network. The source of the queries was a software package produced by NetSarang. Our analysis showed that recent versions of the software had been surreptitiously modified to include an encrypted payload that could be remotely activated by a knowledgeable attacker.

At the end of 2016, there was a major attack against San Francisco’s Municipal Transportation Agency. The attack was done using Mamba ransomware. This month, we noted that the group behind this ransomware has resumed their attacks against corporations.

Since 2014, Kaspersky GReAT has been providing threat intelligence reports to a wide-range of customers worldwide, leading to the delivery of a full and dedicated private reporting service. Prior to the new service offering, GReAT published research online for the general public in an effort to help combat the ever-increasing threat from nation-state and other advanced actors.

In the beginning of 2017, Kaspersky Lab became aware of new activities by an APT actor we have been tracking for several years called Spring Dragon (also known as LotusBlossom). Information about the new attacks arrived from a research partner in Taiwan and we decided to review the actor’s tools, techniques and activities.

Recently, there have been discussions around the topic that if our product is installed, ExPetr malware won’t write the special malicious code which encrypts the MFT to MBR. Some have even speculated that some kind of conspiracy might be ongoing. Others have pointed out it’s plain and simple nonsense. As usual, Vesselin Bontchev, a legend

While the world was still shaking under the destructive ExPetr/Petya attack that hit on June 27, another ransomware attack targeting Ukraine at the same time went almost unnoticed.

To date, nobody has been able to find any significant code sharing between ExPetr/Petya and older malware. Given our love for unsolved mysteries, we jumped right on it. We’d like to think of this ongoing research as an opportunity for an open invitation to the larger security community to help nail down (or disprove) the link between BlackEnergy and ExPetr/Petya.