APT (Targeted attacks)

With this article, our core aim is to share a threat landscape overview, which Kaspersky cybersecurity researchers are observing in relation to the conflict, with the wider international community and thus to contribute to broader ongoing cyber-stability discussions of threat-related insights.

This is our latest summary of advanced persistent threat (APT) activity, focusing on events that we observed during Q1 2022.

We recently discovered a Trojanized DeFi application that was compiled in November 2021. This application contains a legitimate program called DeFi Wallet that saves and manages a cryptocurrency wallet, but also implants a full-featured backdoor.

Last week, Kaspersky’s GReAT shared their insights into the current (and past) cyberattacks in Ukraine. In this post we address the questions that we did not have the time to answer and provide IoCs.

We present our analysis of HermeticRansom (aka Elections GoRansom) ransomware that was likely used as a smokescreen for the HermeticWiper attack.

At the end of 2021, we inspected UEFI firmware that was tampered with to embed a malicious code we dub MoonBounce. In this report we describe how the MoonBounce implant works and how it is connected to APT41.

It appears that BlueNoroff shifted focus from hitting banks and SWIFT-connected servers to solely cryptocurrency businesses as the main source of the group’s illegal income.

Kaspersky ICS CERT experts identified malware whose loader has some similarities to the Manuscrypt malware, which is part of the Lazarus APT group’s arsenal.

For this annual review, we have tried to focus on what we consider to be the most interesting trends and developments of the last 12 months.

The ScarCruft group (also known as APT37 or Temp.Reaper) is a nation-state sponsored APT actor. Recently, we had an opportunity to perform a deeper investigation on a host compromised by this group.

In this report we provide details on a malicious VBS implant distributed via MS Excel droppers and a fake “Kaspersky Update Agent” which we attribute to WIRTE APT who may be linked to Gaza Cybergang.

WildPressure and LuminousMoth threat actors, FinSpy implants, zero-day vulnerabilities and PrintNightmare, threats for Linux and macOS in our review of Q3 2021.

Over the past 12 months, the style and severity of APT threats has continued to evolve. Despite their constantly changing nature, there is a lot we can learn from recent APT trends to predict what might lie ahead in the coming year.

Go programs may contain hundreds of calls, it is obviously impractical to manually look up each type using a hex editor. So, there is the script I use in my daily work.

The APT trends reports are based on our threat intelligence research and provide a representative snapshot of what we have discussed in greater detail in our private APT reports. This is our latest installment, focusing on activities that we observed during Q3 2021.