APT (Targeted attacks)

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.

Kaspersky Lab has been tracking a targeted attack actor’s activities in Japan and South Korea recently. This attacker has been using the XXMM malware toolkit, which was named after an original project path revealed through a pdb string inside the file.

The Lamberts is a family of sophisticated attack tools that has been used by one or multiple threat actors against high-profile victims since at least 2008. The arsenal includes network-driven backdoors, several generations of modular backdoors, harvesting tools, and wipers.

In February 2017, we published research on fileless attacks against enterprise networks. This second paper is about the methods and techniques that were used by the attackers in the second stage of their attacks against financial organizations – basically enabling remote administration of ATMs.

Today we’d like to share some of our findings, and add something new to what’s currently common knowledge about Lazarus Group activities, and their connection to the much talked about February 2016 incident, when an unknown attacker attempted to steal up to $851M USD from Bangladesh Central Bank.

Moonlight Maze is the stuff of cyberespionage legend. In 1996 someone was rummaging through military, research, and university networks primarily in the United States, stealing sensitive information on a massive scale. To say that this historic threat actor is directly related to the modern day Turla would elevate an already formidable modern day attacker to another league altogether.

This year we found a new family of ransomware used in targeted attacks against organizations. The next fact about this ransomware is that the threat actors decided to use the well-known Petya ransomware to encrypt user data.