APT (Targeted attacks)

Targeted attackers are using an increasingly wide range of deception techniques to muddy the waters of attribution, planting ‘False Flag’ timestamps, language strings, malware, among other things, and operating under the cover of non-existent groups.

What is most interesting about the StrongPity APT’s more recent activity however, is their focus on users of encryption tools, peaking this past summer. In particular, the focus was on Italian and Belgian users, but the StrongPity watering holes affected systems in far more locations than those two.

In June, 2016, the Russian police arrested the alleged members of the criminal group known as Lurk. The police suspected Lurk of stealing nearly three billion rubles. The story of Lurk gives some idea of the amount of work that has to be done to obtain enough evidence to arrest and prosecute suspects.

We recently identified a cybercriminal operation targeting a large number of organizations, with focus on few countries more than others. Attackers are utilizing simple tools with proficient social engineering, highly successful with Industrial and engineering SMBs. Attacks are ongoing, slowly crippling businesses, spreading harm and ruin wherever they land, like a Ghoul.

August 13, 2016 saw the beginning of a truly bizarre episode. A new identity going under the name ‘ShadowBrokers’ came onto the scene claiming to possess files belonging to the apex predator of the APT world, the Equation Group.

‘ProjectSauron’ – a nation-state threat actor attacking state organizations with a unique set of tools for each victim, making traditional indicators of compromise almost useless. The aim of the attacks appears to be mainly cyber-espionage.

While we were researching the malicious program Lurk in early February 2016, we discovered an interesting oddity in how this banking Trojan spreads. From the data we had, it emerged that the users attacked by Lurk also installed the remote administration software Ammyy Admin on their computers.

A threat actor, likely operating from India, was undertaking aggressive cyber-espionage activity in the Asian region, targeting multiple diplomatic and government entities with a particular focus on China and its international affairs.

Kaspersky Lab discovers CVE-2016-4171 used in limited targeted attacks to compromise high profile victims.

Cyberespionage attacks conducted by different groups across the Asia-Pacific (APAC) and Far East regions share one common feature: in order to infect their victims with malware, the attackers use an exploit for the CVE-2015-2545 vulnerability.

Instead of developing customized hacking tools or buying them from third-party suppliers on the criminal underground, cyberespionage threat actors are using tools available on the web for research purposes. Several cyberespionage campaigns utilizing such tools have been spotted recently by experts.

Our first research into PlugX was published in 2012 – since then this remote access tool (RAT) has become a well-known instrument used in a series of attacks all over the globe targeting multiple industry verticals.

Recently Patrick Wardle published an analysis of a new Backdoor and Dropper used by HackingTeam. It looks like the samples mentioned in the blog were found in-the-wild, so we decided to see how this latest Backdoor works.

Kaspersky Lab has joined industry alliance driven by Novetta to announce Operation Blockbuster. The goal of the operation is to disrupt the activity of the Lazarus Group – a highly malicious entity responsible for data destruction as well as conventional cyber-espionage operations against multiple companies around the world.

Kaspersky Lab researcher Vitaly Kamluk gave a talk about the latest version of the cross-platform Adwind RAT. The remote access Trojan is unique in that it’s written in JavaScript, giving this version — which is also known as Frutas, AlienSpy and JSocket — the flexibility to be used liberally in cybercrime operations as well as in targeted attacks.