Secure environment (IoT)

If you want to make the world safer, start with the smart things in your home. Or, to be more specific, start with your router – the core of any home network as well as an interesting research object. And that router you got from your ISP as part of your internet contract is even more interesting when it comes to research.

It would seem that no gadget has escaped the attention of hackers, yet there is one last bastion: “smart” devices for animals. For example, trackers to monitor their location.

In January, we uncovered a sophisticated mobile implant Skygofree that provides attackers with remote control of infected Android devices. Network worm OlympicDestroyer attacked on the Olympic infrastructure just before the opening of the games in February.

In late April 2018, a new zero-day vulnerability for Internet Explorer (IE) was found using our sandbox; more than two years since the last in the wild example (CVE-2016-0189). This particular vulnerability and subsequent exploit are interesting for many reasons.

In Q1 2018, we observed a significant increase in both the total number and duration of DDoS attacks against Q4 2017. The new Linux-based botnets Darkai (a Mirai clone) and AESDDoS are largely responsible for this hike.

In the second quarter of 2017, Kaspersky’s Global Research and Analysis Team (GReAT) began publishing summaries of the quarter’s private threat intelligence reports in an effort to make the public aware of the research we have been conducting. This report serves as the next installment, focusing on the relevant activities that we observed during Q1 2018.

Kaspersky Lab ICS CERT publishes the findings of its research on the threat landscape for industrial automation systems conducted during the second half of 2017. The main objective of these publications is to provide information support to incident response teams, enterprise information security staff and researchers in the area of industrial facility security.

At last year’s Security Analyst Summit 2017 we predicted that medical networks would be a titbit for cybercriminals. Unfortunately, we were right. The numbers of medical data breaches and leaks are increasing. According to public data, this year is no exception.

The researchers at Kaspersky Lab ICS CERT decided to check the popular smart camera to see how well protected it is against cyber abuses. This model has a rich feature list, compares favorably to regular webcams and can be used as a baby monitor, a component in a home security system or as part of a monitoring system.

This time, we’ve chosen a smart hub designed to control sensors and devices installed at home. It can be used for different purposes, such as energy and water management, monitoring and even security systems.

Sofacy, also known as APT28, Fancy Bear, and Tsar Team, is a highly active and prolific APT. From their high volume 0day deployment to their innovative and broad malware set, Sofacy is one of the top groups that we monitor, report, and protect against. 2017 was not any different in this regard.

In October 2017, we learned of a vulnerability in Telegram Messenger’s Windows client that was being exploited in the wild. It involves the use of a classic right-to-left override attack when a user sends files over the messenger service.

A search online lead me to a discovery I didn’t think was possible nowadays. I realized almost immediately that critical security issues were probably involved. I found that out of the many tens of thousands of gas stations the company claimed to have installed their product in, 1,000 are remotely hackable.

Q4 2017 represented something of a lull: both the number and duration of DDoS attacks were down against the previous quarter. At the same time, the increase in the number of attacks on honeypot traps in the runup to holiday sales indicates that cybercriminals are keen to expand their botnets at the most opportune moment by pressuring owners of online resources and preventing them from making a profit.

Being enthusiastic shoppers just like many other people around the world, at Kaspersky Lab we are, however paranoid enough to look at any Internet of Things (IoT)-device with some concern, even when the price is favorable. So we randomly took several different connected devices and reviewed their security set up.