Vulnerabilities and exploits

I have given a step-by-step guide on the analysis of embedded firmware, finding vulnerabilities and exploiting them to acquire a firmware dump and to carry out code execution on a USB device.

In February 2019, our Automatic Exploit Prevention (AEP) systems detected an attempt to exploit a vulnerability in the Microsoft Windows operating system. Further analysis of this event led to us discovering a zero-day vulnerability in win32k.sys.

There are lots of home charger vendors. Some of them, such as ABB or GE, are well-known brands, but some smaller companies have to add ‘bells and whistles’ to their products to attract customers. One of the most obvious and popular options in this respect is remote control of the charging process. But from our point of view this sort of improvement can make chargers an easy target for a variety of attacks.

In October 2018, our AEP systems detected an attempt to exploit a vulnerability in the Microsoft Windows. Further analysis led us to uncover a zero-day vulnerability in ntoskrnl.exe.

During the year, Kaspersky Lab solutions repelled 1 876 998 691 attacks launched from online resources located all over the world, 554 159 621 unique malicious objects were detected and 21 643 946 unique URLs were recognized as malicious by web antivirus components.

Asking the most intelligent people I know, and basing our scenario on APT attacks because they traditionally show the most innovation when it comes to breaking security, here are our main ‘predictions’ of what might happen in the next few months.

Yesterday, Microsoft published its security bulletin, which patches a vulnerability discovered by our technologies. We reported it to Microsoft on October 17, 2018. The company confirmed the vulnerability and assigned it CVE-2018-8589.

These statistics are based on detection verdicts of Kaspersky Lab products received from users who consented to provide statistical data. Q3 figures According to Kaspersky Security Network: Kaspersky Lab solutions blocked 947,027,517 attacks launched from online resources located in 203 countries. 246,695,333 unique URLs were recognized as malicious by Web Anti-Virus components. Attempted infections by

To better understand the potential future threat landscape facing memory implants, researchers from Kaspersky Lab and the University of Oxford Functional Neurosurgery Group have undertaken a practical and theoretical threat review of existing neurostimulators and their supporting infrastructure.

Yesterday, Microsoft published their security bulletin, which patches CVE-2018-8453, among others. It is a vulnerability in win32k.sys discovered by Kaspersky Lab in August. Microsoft confirmed the vulnerability and designated it CVE-2018-8453.

In 2016, researchers from the University of Illinois left 297 unlabelled USB flash drives around the university campus to see what would happen. 98% of the dropped drives were picked up by staff and students, and at least half were plugged into a computer in order to view the content. For a hacker trying to infect a computer network, those are pretty irresistible odds.

While conducting audits, penetration tests and incident investigations, we have often come across legitimate remote administration tools (RAT) for PCs installed on operational technology (OT) networks of industrial enterprises. In a number of incidents that we have investigated, threat actors had used RATs to attack industrial organizations.

Cybercriminals’ interest in IoT devices continues to grow: in H1 2018 we picked up three times as many malware samples attacking smart devices as in the whole of 2017. And in 2017 there were ten times more than in 2016. That doesn’t bode well for the years ahead.

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.