Web threats

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.

Although the first quarter of 2017 was rather quiet compared to the previous reporting period, there were a few interesting developments. Despite the growing popularity of IoT botnets, Windows-based bots accounted for 59.81% of all attacks. Meanwhile, complex attacks that can only be repelled with sophisticated protection mechanisms are becoming more frequent.

Often, virus writers don’t even bother to run encryption or mask their communications. However, you do get the occasional off-the-wall approaches that don’t fall into either of the categories. Take, for instance, the case of a Trojan that Kaspersky Lab researchers discovered in mid-March and which establishes a DNS tunnel for communication with the C&C server.

Hajime (meaning ‘beginning’ in Japanese) is an IoT worm that was first mentioned on 16 October 2016 in a public report by RapidityNetworks. In this blogpost we outline some of the recent ‘improvements’ to Hajime, some techniques that haven’t been made public, and some statistics about infected IoT devices.

Almost anyone can fall victim to a DDoS attack. They are relatively cheap and easy to organize, and can be highly effective if reliable protection is not in place. Based on analysis of the data obtained from open sources, we managed to find out the current cost of a DDoS attack on the black market. We also established what exactly the cybercriminals behind DDoS attacks offer their customers.

2016 was the year of Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) with major disruptions in terms of technology, attack scale and impact on our daily life. In fact, the year ended with massive DDoS attacks unseen before, leveraging Mirai botnet technology.

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.

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.

From November 8 to 12, websites of some of the largest Russian banks fell victim to heavy DDoS attacks. Initially, it was no indication of anything unusual – all well-known banks get attacked from time to time – but further developments have evolved in the manner that allowed us to suggest a high level of organization in regards to the series of attacks.

Yet another year has flown past and, as far as notable infosec happenings are concerned, this is one for the history books. Drama, intrigue and exploits have plagued 2016 and, as we take stock of some of the more noteworthy stories, we once again cast our gaze forward to glean the shapes of the 2017 threat landscape.

Our research shows that, over the last few years, the holiday period which starts on so-called Black Friday was marked by an increase in phishing and other types of attacks, which suggests that the pattern will be repeated this year.

The most popular mobile Trojan in the third quarter of 2016 was Trojan-Banker.AndroidOS.Svpeng.q. During the quarter, the number of users attacked by it grew almost eightfold.

Interesting trend this quarter was the increased activity of DDoS botnets in Western Europe. For the first time in a year the TOP 10 most attacked countries included three Western European countries – Italy, France and Germany.

Earlier today we became aware of a malicious website delivering Petya through the Hunter exploit kit. While there is nothing special about yet another exploit kit page, this one caught our attention because it mimics the index page of our sinkhole systems.