Web threats

The second quarter quite clearly showed that the DDoS-attack threat is perceived rather seriously. Some companies were prepared to pay cybercriminals literally after their first demand without waiting for the attack itself. This set off a whole new wave of fraud involving money extortion under threat of a DDoS attack, also known as “ransom DDoS”.

We recently reported about SambaCry, a new family of Linux Trojans exploiting a vulnerability in the Samba protocol. A week later, Kaspersky Lab analysts managed to detect a malicious program for Windows that was apparently created by the same group responsible for SambaCry.

According to Gartner, there are currently over 6 billion IoT devices on the planet. Such a huge number of potentially vulnerable gadgets could not possibly go unnoticed by cybercriminals. As of May 2017, Kaspersky Lab’s collections included several thousand different malware samples for IoT devices, about half of which were detected in 2017.

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.

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.