Financial threats

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.

Many mobile bankers can block a device in order to extort money from its user. But we have discovered a modification of Trojan-Banker.AndroidOS.Faketoken that went even further – it can encrypt user data.

2016 was a tense and turbulent year in cyberspace – from the massive IoT botnets and ransomware to targeted cyberespionage attacks, financial theft, ‘hacktivism’ and more. Kaspersky Lab’s Review of the Year and Statistics provide a detailed review – you can read the Executive Summary here.

Between January and September 2016 ransomware attacks on business increased three-fold – to the equivalent of an attack every 40 seconds. With the ransomware-as-a-service economy booming, and the launch of the NoMoreRansom project, Kaspersky Lab has named ransomware its key topic for 2016.

Yet another year has flown past and, as far as notable infosec happenings are concerned, this is one for the history books. Drama, intrigue and exploits have plagued 2016 and, as we take stock of some of the more noteworthy stories, we once again cast our gaze forward to glean the shapes of the 2017 threat landscape.

Our research shows that, over the last few years, the holiday period which starts on so-called Black Friday was marked by an increase in phishing and other types of attacks, which suggests that the pattern will be repeated this year.

The most popular mobile Trojan in the third quarter of 2016 was Trojan-Banker.AndroidOS.Svpeng.q. During the quarter, the number of users attacked by it grew almost eightfold.

Trojan-Ransom.AndroidOS.Fusob.h remained the most popular mobile Trojan-Ransomware in the third quarter, accounting for nearly 53% of users attacked by mobile ransomware.

In September 2016, we discovered a new version of Gootkit with a characteristic and instantly recognizable feature: an extra check of the environment variable ‘crackme’ in the downloader’s body. Just as interesting was the fact that we were able to gain access to the bot’s C&C server, including its complete hierarchal tree of folders and files and their contents.

Unlike the previously reported and now decrypted Xpan ransomware, this same-but-different threat from Brazil has recently been spotted in the wild. This time the infection vector is a more massively propagated malicious campaign relying on traditional spam email.