Financial threats

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.

This spring, the author of the NukeBot banking Trojan published the source code of his creation. Now, three months after the source code was published, we decided to have a look at what has changed in the banking malware landscape.

After an analysis of the encryption routine of the malware used in the Petya/ExPetr attacks, we have thought that the threat actor cannot decrypt victims’ disk, even if a payment was made. This supports the theory that this malware campaign was not designed as a ransomware attack for financial gain.

Earlier today (June 27th), we received reports about a new wave of ransomware attacks spreading around the world, primarily targeting businesses in Ukraine, Russia and Western Europe. Our investigation is ongoing and our findings are far from final at this time. Despite rampant public speculation, the following is what we can confirm from our independent analysis.

From time to time authors of effective and long-lived Trojans and viruses create new modifications and forks of them, like any other software authors. One of the brightest examples amongst them is Zeus, which continues to spawn new modifications of itself each year.

In early 2017, Kaspersky Lab’s researchers have discovered an emerging and dangerous trend: more and more cybercriminals are turning their attention from attacks against private users to targeted ransomware attacks against businesses.

Sometimes ransomware developers make mistakes in their code. These mistakes could help victims regain access to their original files after a ransomware infection. This article is a short description of several errors, which were made by the WannaCry ransomware developers.

In the several years that the Dridex family has existed, there have been numerous unsuccessful attempts to block the botnet’s activity. The ongoing evolution of the malware demonstrates that the cybercriminals are not about to bid farewell to their brainchild, which is providing them with a steady revenue stream.

According to KSN data, Kaspersky Lab solutions detected and repelled 479,528,279 malicious attacks from online resources located in 190 countries all over the world. File antivirus detected a total of 174,989,956 unique malicious and potentially unwanted objects.

We’ve become accustomed to seeing a steady stream of security breaches month after month; and this quarter has been no exception, including attacks on Barts Health Trust, Sports Direct, Intercontinental Hotels Group and ABTA.

Earlier today, our products detected and successfully blocked a large number of ransomware attacks around the world. In these attacks, data is encrypted with the extension “.WCRY” added to the filenames. Our analysis indicates the attack, dubbed “WannaCry”, is initiated through an SMBv2 remote code execution in Microsoft Windows.

While we have previously written on the now infamous XPan ransomware family, some of it’s variants are still affecting users primarily located in Brazil. This sample is what could be considered as the “father” of other XPan ransomware variants. A considerable amount of indicators within the source code depict the early origins of this sample.

Ransomware’s popularity has attracted the attention of cybercriminal gangs; they use these malicious programs in targeted attacks on large organizations in order to steal money. In late 2016, we detected an increase in the number of attacks, the main goal of which was to launch an encryptor on an organization’s network nodes and servers.

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.