Financial threats

For this blogpost we gathered all the sinkhole data for Dutch IPs in the last four years, which amounts to around 85,000 entries. The aim is to give an overview of which APT groups are active in the Netherlands and what they are interested in.

In 2016, researchers from the University of Illinois left 297 unlabelled USB flash drives around the university campus to see what would happen. 98% of the dropped drives were picked up by staff and students, and at least half were plugged into a computer in order to view the content. For a hacker trying to infect a computer network, those are pretty irresistible odds.

We encountered the Trojan-Banker.AndroidOS.Asacub family for the first time in 2015. The Trojan has evolved since then, aided by a large-scale distribution campaign by its creators (in spring-summer 2017), helping Asacub to claim top spots in last year’s ranking by number of attacks among mobile banking Trojans.

While investigating a cryptocurrency exchange attacked by Lazarus, we made an unexpected discovery. The victim had been infected with the help of a trojanized cryptocurrency trading application, which had been recommended to the company over email.

Dark Tequila is a complex malicious campaign targeting Mexican users, with the primary purpose of stealing financial information, as well as login credentials to popular websites that range from code versioning repositories to public file storage accounts and domain registrars.

In the last few days, our anti-ransomware module has been detecting a new variant of malware – KeyPass ransomware. According to our information, the malware is propagated by means of fake installers that download the ransomware module.

Olympic Destroyer worm, Roaming Mantis mobile banker, Operation Parliament cyber-espionage campaign, SynAck ransomware and other notable targeted attacks and malware campaigns of Q2 2018.

In Q2 2018, attempted infections by malware designed to steal money via online access to bank accounts were logged on the computers of 215,762 users, ransomware attacks were registered on the computers of 158,921 unique users.

Recently, an interesting miner implementation appeared on Kaspersky Lab’s radar. The malware, which we dubbed PowerGhost, is capable of stealthily establishing itself in a system and spreading across large corporate networks infecting both workstations and servers.

This spring marked the fourth anniversary of the malware’s first attacks. Against the backdrop of a general decline in ransomware activity (see our report), we decided to return to the topic of Cryakl and tell in detail about how one of the most eye-catching members of this endangered species evolved.

Today, after almost 3 years of waiting, it was finally the day of the trial. In the Netherlands, where the whole case took place, the hearings are open to the public. Meaning anyone who is interested can visit. And it was quite busy.

Way back in 2013 our malware analysts spotted the first malicious samples related to the Trojan-Ransom.Win32.Rakhni family. That was the starting point for this long-lived Trojan family, which is still functioning to this day. Now the criminals have decided to add a new feature to their creation – a mining capability.

This report will examine what is hopefully ransomware’s last breath, in detail, along with the rise of mining. The report covers the period April 2017 to March 2018, and compares it with April 2016 – March 2017.

Browser extensions make our lives easier: they hide obtrusive advertising, translate text, help us choose in online stores, etc. There are also less desirable extensions, including those that bombard us with advertising or collect information about our activities. These pale into insignificance, however, when compared to extensions whose main aim is to steal money.

According to KSN, Kaspersky Lab solutions blocked 796,806,112 attacks launched from online resources located in 194 countries across the globe.