Vulnerabilities and exploits

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.

While analyzing some memory dumps suspicious of being infected with a keylogger, we identified a library containing strings to interact with a virtual file system. This turned out to be a malicious loader internally named “Slingshot”.

In our previous blog , we detailed our findings about the attack against the Pyeongchang 2018 WinterOlympics. For this investigation, our analysts were provided with administrative access to one of the affected servers located in a hotel based in Pyeongchang county, South Korea. In addition, we collected all available evidence from various private and public sources and worked with several companies on investigating the C&C infrastructure associated with the attackers.

A couple of days after the opening ceremony of the Winter Olympics in Pyeongchang, South Korea, we received information from several partners, on the condition of non-disclosure (TLP:Red), about a devastating malware attack on the Olympic infrastructure.

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.

In 2017, we encountered lots of samples that were ‘exploiting’ the implementation of Microsoft Word’s RTF parser to confuse all other third-party RTF parsers, including those used in anti-malware software.

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.

At first, it looked like we’d found a zero-day local privilege escalation vulnerability for Windows, but the sample that was triggering Exploit Checker events turned out to be the clean signed executable file, part of the multiplayer online game.

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.

We confront hundreds of thousands of new threats every day and we can see that threat actors are on a constant lookout for new attack opportunities. According to our research, connecting a software license management token to a computer may open a hidden remote access channel for an attacker.

We have been detecting attacks that have employed the use of PYLOT malware since at least 2015 and refer to it as Travle. Coincidentally, KL was recently involved in an investigation of a successful attack where Travle was detected, during which we conducted a deep analysis of this malware.

In 2017, Kaspersky Lab’s web antivirus detected 15 714 700 unique malicious objects and 199 455 606 unique URLs were recognized as malicious by web antivirus components. Kaspersky Lab solutions detected and repelled 1 188 728 338 malicious attacks launched from online resources located in 206 countries all over the world.

The end of the year is a good time to take stock of the main cyberthreat incidents that took place over the preceding 12 months or so. To reflect on the impact these events had on organizations and individuals, and consider what they could mean for the overall evolution of the threat landscape.