APT (Targeted attacks)

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.

Moments ago, Neel Mehta, a researcher at Google posted a mysterious message on Twitter. The cryptic message in fact refers to similarity between samples that have shared code between themselves. The two samples Neel refers to post are a Wannacry cryptor sample and a Lazarus APT group sample.

Friday May 12th marked the start of the dizzying madness that has been ‘WannaCry’, the largest ransomware infection in history. We figured it’s time to sit down and set the record straight on what we know, what we wish we knew, and what the near future might hold for us going forward.

Kaspersky Lab is currently tracking more than a hundred threat actors and sophisticated malicious operations in over 80 countries. During the first quarter of 2017, there were 33 private reports released to subscribers of our Intelligence Services, with IOC data and YARA rules to assist in forensics and malware-hunting.