Vulnerabilities and exploits

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.

Recently WikiLeaks published a report that, among other things, claims to disclose tools and tactics employed by a state-sponsored organization to break into users’ computers and circumvent installed security solutions. The list of compromised security products includes dozens of vendors and relates to the whole cybersecurity industry.

The Lamberts is a family of sophisticated attack tools that has been used by one or multiple threat actors against high-profile victims since at least 2008. The arsenal includes network-driven backdoors, several generations of modular backdoors, harvesting tools, and wipers.

On average, in the second half of 2016 Kaspersky Lab products across the globe blocked attempted attacks on 39.2% of protected computers that Kaspersky Lab ICS CERT classifies as being part of industrial enterprise technology infrastructure.

The concept of a connected car, or a car equipped with Internet access, has been gaining popularity for the last several years. By using proprietary mobile apps, it is possible to get some useful features, but if a car thief were to gain access to the mobile device that belongs to a victim that has the app installed, then would car theft not become a mere trifle?

In addition to the basic methods and technologies developed to protect corporate networks, there are interactive methods of protection that not only detect an intruder in the infrastructure but also, under certain conditions, receive real-time information about their activities in the corporate network.

While intercepting traffic from a number of infected machines that showed signs of Remote Admin Tool malware known as HawkEye, we stumbled upon an interesting domain. It was registered to a command and control server (C2) which held stolen keylog data from HawkEye RAT victims, but was also being used as a one-stop-shop for purchasing hacking goods.

2016 was a tense and turbulent year in cyberspace – from the massive IoT botnets and ransomware to targeted cyberespionage attacks, financial theft, ‘hacktivism’ and more. Kaspersky Lab’s Review of the Year and Statistics provide a detailed review – you can read the Executive Summary here.

Starting from yesterday, many DSL customers in Germany were reporting problems with their routers. Today we saw news, that a malicious attack could be the reason for this widespread problem.

My goal wasn’t to review the techniques of elevating system privileges. Here, I wanted to look at the overall picture and talk about the whole range of Windows operating systems in all their diversity dating back to Windows Vista, but without discussing specific versions.

Confidential data can be protected by encrypting traffic at wireless access points. In fact, this method of protection is now considered essential for all Wi-Fi networks. But what actually happens in practice?

In September 2016, while researching a new wave of attacks, we found an interesting target which appeared to constantly receive spearphishes, a practice we commonly describe as a “magnet of threats”. Among all the attacks received by this magnet of threats, which included various older Office exploits such as CVE-2012-0158, one of them attracted our attention.