Vulnerabilities and exploits

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.

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.