Financial threats

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.

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.

In 2016, the growth in the number of advertising Trojans capable of exploiting super-user rights continued. Throughout the year it was the No. 1 threat, and we see no sign of this trend changing.

In 2016 we continued our in-depth research into the financial cyberthreat landscape. We’ve noticed over the last few years that large financial cybercriminal groups have started to concentrate their efforts on targeting large organizations – such as banks, payment processing systems, retailers, hotels and other businesses where POS terminals are widely used.

In other words, crypto ransomware is a fine tuned, user friendly and constantly developing ecosystem. In the last few years we, at Kaspersky Lab, have been monitoring the development of this ecosystem. This is what we’ve learned.

Last November we conducted a brief analysis of the threat landscape over the holiday period – from October to December in 2014 and 2015. And we made the following prognosis: the same holiday period in 2016 will see a spike in cyberattacks. Now that the holidays are over, it is time to find out how accurate that prediction was.