Vulnerabilities and exploits

In late April we found and wrote a description of CVE-2018-8174, a new zero-day vulnerability for Internet Explorer that uses a well-known technique from the PoC exploit CVE-2014-6332. But whereas CVE-2014-6332 was aimed at integer overflow exploitation for writing to arbitrary memory locations, my interest lay in how this technique was adapted to exploit the use-after-free vulnerability.

At Kaspersky Lab we analyze the technologies available on cybersecurity market and this time we decided to look at what OS developers are offering for embedded systems (or, in other words, the internet of things). Our primary interest is how and to what degree these OSs can solve cybersecurity-related issues.

In May-June 2018 we discovered new spear-phishing documents that closely resembled weaponized documents used by Olympic Destroyer in the past. This and other TTPs led us to believe that we were looking at the same actor again. However, this time the attacker has new targets.

In March 2018 we detected an ongoing campaign targeting a national data center in the Central Asia that we believe has been active since autumn 2017. The choice of target made this campaign especially significant – it meant the attackers gained access to a wide range of government resources at one fell swoop.

We all know how easy it is for users to connect to open Wi-Fi networks in public places. A lack of essential traffic encryption for Wi-Fi networks where official and global activities are taking place – such as at locations around the forthcoming FIFA World Cup 2018 – offers especially fertile ground for criminals.

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.

According to KSN, Kaspersky Lab solutions blocked 796,806,112 attacks launched from online resources located in 194 countries across the globe.

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.

This article discusses our project that involved searching for vulnerabilities in implementations of the OPC UA protocol. We hope to draw the attention of vendors that develop software for industrial automation systems and the industrial IoT to problems associated with using such widely available technologies.

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.

This report by Kaspersky Lab ICS CERT presents information on identified servers that have been infected and used by the Energetic Bear/Crouching Yeti group. The report also includes the findings of an analysis of several webservers compromised by the group during 2016 and in early 2017.

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.