Spam and Phishing

In Q3 2018, the average share of spam in global mail traffic rose by 2.88 p.p. to 52.54%, and the Anti-Phishing system prevented more than 137 million redirects to phishing sites, up 30 million against the previous reporting period.

I decided to investigate the black market and see what kind of information is being sold there. We all know that you can buy drugs, weapons and stolen goods there, but you can also buy online identities. How much do you think your online identity is worth?

When we talk about phishing, top of mind are fake banking sites, payment systems, as well as mail and other globally popular services. However, cybercriminals have their fingers in far more pies than that. Unobviously, perhaps, students and university faculties are also in the line of fire.

MuddyWater is a relatively new APT that surfaced in 2017. It has focused mainly on governmental targets in Iraq and Saudi Arabia, according to past telemetry. However, the group behind MuddyWater has been known to target other countries in the Middle East, Europe and the US.

In Q2 2018, Kaspersky Lab published two blogposts about Roaming Mantis sharing details of this new cybercriminal campaign. During our research, it became clear that Roaming Mantis has been rather active and has evolved quickly. The group’s malware now supports 27 languages, including multiple countries from Asia and beyond, Europe and the Middle East.

While conducting audits, penetration tests and incident investigations, we have often come across legitimate remote administration tools (RAT) for PCs installed on operational technology (OT) networks of industrial enterprises. In a number of incidents that we have investigated, threat actors had used RATs to attack industrial organizations.

Starting in early July, we have seen malicious spam activity that has targeted corporate mailboxes. Messages discovered so far contain an attachment with an .iso extension, which Kaspersky Lab solutions detect as Loki Bot.

Average spam volume of 49.66% in world mail traffic in this quarter fell 2.16 p.p. in comparison with the previous reporting period, and the Antiphishing system prevented more than 107M attempts to connect users to phishing sites, which is 17M more than in the first quarter of 2018.

Kaspersky Lab ICS CERT has identified a new wave of phishing emails with malicious attachments targeting primarily companies and organizations that are, in one way or another, associated with industrial production.

Quite recently, we started to designate an entire class of sites — gift card generators — as fraudulent, despite their not stealing any money or personal data from visitors. Why? Let’s try to unpick these sites and see how they work.

While the legal status of cryptocurrencies and laws to regulate them continue to be hammered out, scammers are busy exploiting the digital gold rush. Besides hacking cryptocurrency exchanges, exploiting smart-contract vulnerabilities, and deploying malicious miners, cybercriminals are also resorting to more traditional social-engineering methods that can reap millions of dollars.

There are only two weeks to go before the start of the massive soccer event — FIFA World Cup. This championship has already attracted the attention of millions worldwide, including a fair few cybercriminals. Long before kick-off, email accounts began bulging with soccer-related spam, and scammers started exploiting the topic in mailings and creating World Cup-themed phishing pages.

The quarter’s main topic, one that we will likely return to many times this year, is personal data. It remains one of the most sought-after wares in the world of information technology for app and service developers, owners of various agencies, and, of course, cybercriminals. Unfortunately, many users still fail to grasp the need to protect their personal information and don’t pay attention to who and how their data is transferred in social media.

In May, while monitoring Roaming Mantis, aka MoqHao and XLoader, we observed significant changes in their M.O. The group’s activity expanded geographically and they broadened their attack/evasion methods. Their landing pages and malicious apk files now support 27 languages covering Europe and the Middle East.

In late 2017, information appeared on specialized resources about a Telegram ICO to finance the launch of its own blockchain platform. The lack of information provided fertile ground for scammers: the rumors prompted mailshots seemingly from official representatives of the platform, inviting people to take part in the ICO and purchase tokens.