Vulnerabilities and exploits

In this report, Kaspersky Lab ICS CERT publishes the findings of its research on the threat landscape for industrial automation systems conducted during the first half of 2018.

Every day we intercept numerous file-download commands sent to bots of various types and families. Here we present the results of our botnet activity analysis for H2 2017 and H1 2018.

Each year, Kaspersky Lab’s Security Services department carries out dozens of cybersecurity assessment projects for companies worldwide. In this publication, we present a general summary and statistics for the cybersecurity assessments we have conducted of corporate information systems throughout 2017.

Olympic Destroyer worm, Roaming Mantis mobile banker, Operation Parliament cyber-espionage campaign, SynAck ransomware and other notable targeted attacks and malware campaigns of Q2 2018.

In Q2 2018, attempted infections by malware designed to steal money via online access to bank accounts were logged on the computers of 215,762 users, ransomware attacks were registered on the computers of 158,921 unique users.

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.

Recently, an interesting miner implementation appeared on Kaspersky Lab’s radar. The malware, which we dubbed PowerGhost, is capable of stealthily establishing itself in a system and spreading across large corporate networks infecting both workstations and servers.

The growing popularity of car sharing services has led some experts to predict an end to private car ownership in big cities. But information security specialists have started raising some pertinent questions: how are the users of these services protected and what potential risks do they face in the event of unauthorized access to their accounts?

These summaries are a representative snapshot of what has been discussed in greater detail in our private reports during Q2 2018. They aim to highlight the significant events and findings that we feel people should be aware of.

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.