Vulnerabilities and exploits

While we already described the exploit for Internet Explorer in the original blog post about Operation PowerFall, we also promised to share more details about the elevation of privilege exploit. Let’s take a look at vulnerability CVE-2020-0986.

Kaspersky prevented an attack on a South Korean company by a malicious script for Internet Explorer. Closer analysis revealed that the attack used a previously unknown full chain that consisted of two zero-day exploits.

Exploit kits still play a role in today’s threat landscape and continue to evolve. For this blogpost I studied and analyzed the evolution of one of the most sophisticated exploit kits out there – Magnitude EK – for a whole year.

Back in October 2019 we detected a classic watering-hole attack that exploited a chain of Google Chrome and Microsoft Windows zero-days. In this blog post we’d like to take a deep technical dive into the attack.

Kaspersky solutions blocked 726,536,269 attacks launched from online resources across the globe, a total of 442,039,230 unique URLs were recognized as malicious.

For more than two years, the Global Research and Analysis Team (GReAT) at Kaspersky has been publishing quarterly summaries of advanced persistent threat (APT) activity. This is our latest installment, focusing on activities that we observed during Q1 2020.

A watering hole was discovered on January 10, 2020 utilizing a full remote iOS exploit chain to deploy a feature-rich implant named LightSpy. The site appears to have been designed to target users in Hong Kong based on the content of the landing page.

During the year, Kaspersky solutions repelled 975 491 360 attacks launched from online resources located all over the world and 273 782 113 unique URLs were recognized as malicious by web antivirus components.

During our investigation, we discovered that yet another 0-day exploit (CVE-2019-1458) was used in Operation WizardOpium attacks.

Kaspersky solutions blocked 989,432,403 attacks launched from online resources in 203 countries across the globe; 560,025,316 unique URLs were recognized as malicious by Web Anti-Virus components.

Recently, we caught a new unknown exploit for Chrome browser. We promptly reported this to the Google. After reviewing of the PoC we provided, the company confirmed there was a zero-day vulnerability and assigned it CVE-2019-13720.

Kaspersky solutions blocked 717,057,912 attacks launched from online resources in 203 countries across the globe, 217,843,293 unique URLs triggered Web Anti-Virus components.

When Sodin appeared in the first half of 2019, it immediately caught our attention for distributing itself through an Oracle Weblogic vulnerability and carrying out attacks on MSP providers.

In this article, we publish the results of our study of the Fibaro Home Center smart home. We identified vulnerabilities in Fibaro Home Center 2 and Fibaro Home Center Lite version 4.540, as well as vulnerabilities in the online API.

In Q1 2019, Kaspersky Lab solutions blocked attempts to launch one or more types of malware designed to steal money from bank accounts on the computers of 243,604 users and detected attacks using miners on the computers of 1,197,066 users.