Vulnerabilities and exploits

A little while back we were investigating the malicious activities of the Freakyshelly targeted attack and came across spear phishing emails that had some interesting documents attached to them. They were in OLE2 format and contained no macros, exploits or any other active content.

Results that had been obtained during research that we discussed in a previous article called for a more detailed analysis of the security problem, but now from within medical institutions (with the consent of their owners, of course). The analysis allowed us to work on mistakes and give a series of recommendations for IT experts who service medical infrastructure.

Corporate information security services often turn out to be unprepared: their employees underestimate the speed, secrecy and efficiency of modern cyberattacks and do not recognize how ineffective the old approaches to security are. And if there is no clear understanding of what sort of incident it is, an attack cannot be repelled. We hope that our recommendations about identifying incidents and responding to them will help information security specialists create a solid foundation for reliable multi-level business protection.

The threat from ransomware continues to grow. Between April 2016 and March 2017, we blocked ransomware on the computers of 2,581,026 Kaspersky Lab customers. In May, we saw the biggest ransomware epidemic in history, called WannaCry.

According to KSN data, Kaspersky Lab solutions detected and repelled 342, 566, 061 malicious attacks from online resources located in 191 countries all over the world.

Since 2014, Kaspersky GReAT has been providing threat intelligence reports to a wide-range of customers worldwide, leading to the delivery of a full and dedicated private reporting service. Prior to the new service offering, GReAT published research online for the general public in an effort to help combat the ever-increasing threat from nation-state and other advanced actors.

The first half of 2017 began with two intriguing ransomware events, both partly enabled by wormable exploit technology dumped by a group calling themselves “The ShadowBrokers”. These WannaCry and ExPetr ransomware events are the biggest in the sense that they spread the quickest and most effectively of known ransomware to date.

Earlier today (June 27th), we received reports about a new wave of ransomware attacks spreading around the world, primarily targeting businesses in Ukraine, Russia and Western Europe. Our investigation is ongoing and our findings are far from final at this time. Despite rampant public speculation, the following is what we can confirm from our independent analysis.

In late 2016, the Kaspersky Lab ICS CERT reported on phishing attacks that were primarily targeting industrial companies from the metallurgy, electric power, construction, engineering and other sectors. As further research demonstrated, this was just part of a bigger story that began much earlier and is unlikely to end any time soon.

Not long ago, news appeared online of a younger sibling for the sensational vulnerability EternalBlue. The story was about a new vulnerability for *nix-based systems – EternalRed (aka SambaCry). On May 30th our honeypots captured the first attack to make use of this particular vulnerability, but the payload in this exploit had nothing in common with the Trojan-Crypt that was EternalBlue and WannaCry.

According to KSN data, Kaspersky Lab solutions detected and repelled 479,528,279 malicious attacks from online resources located in 190 countries all over the world. File antivirus detected a total of 174,989,956 unique malicious and potentially unwanted objects.

We’ve become accustomed to seeing a steady stream of security breaches month after month; and this quarter has been no exception, including attacks on Barts Health Trust, Sports Direct, Intercontinental Hotels Group and ABTA.

Friday May 12th marked the start of the dizzying madness that has been ‘WannaCry’, the largest ransomware infection in history. We figured it’s time to sit down and set the record straight on what we know, what we wish we knew, and what the near future might hold for us going forward.

Earlier today, our products detected and successfully blocked a large number of ransomware attacks around the world. In these attacks, data is encrypted with the extension “.WCRY” added to the filenames. Our analysis indicates the attack, dubbed “WannaCry”, is initiated through an SMBv2 remote code execution in Microsoft Windows.

How serious, really, is the danger presented by exploits? The recent leak of an exploit toolset allegedly used by the infamous Equation Group suggests it’s time to revisit that question. Using our own telemetry data and intelligence reports as well as publicly available information, we’ve looked at the top vulnerabilities and applications exploited by attackers.