More than six years have passed since the banking Trojan Emotet was first detected. During this time it has repeatedly mutated, changed direction, acquired partners, picked up modules, and generally been the cause of high-profile incidents and multimillion-dollar losses. The malware is still in fine fettle, and remains one of the most potent cybersecurity th

News overview Q3 was relatively calm from a DDoS perspective. There were no headline innovations, although cybercriminals did continue to master techniques and develop malware already familiar to us from the last reporting period. For example, another DDoS botnet joined in the assault on Docker environments. The perpetrators infiltrated the target server, cr

A relatively new player in the threat arena, the Mozi botnet, has spiked among Internet of things (IoT) devices, IBM X-Force has discovered. This malware has been active since late 2019 and has code overlap with Mirai and its variants. Mozi accounted for nearly 90% of the observed IoT network traffic from October 2019 through June 2020. This startling takeo

Malware or malicious code has been around for over 40 years now, but its use to obtain control of a group of Internet-connected systems in something called a ‘botnet’ is a relatively new phenomenon. Botnets have been behind some of the most costly security incidents of the last 10 years and, consequently, companies around the world are going to great lengths

News overview Not just one but two new DDoS amplification methods were discovered last quarter. In mid-May, Israeli researchers reported a new DNS server vulnerability that lurks in the DNS delegation process. The vulnerability exploitation scheme was dubbed “NXNSAttack”. The hacker sends to a legitimate recursive DNS server a request to several

Update as of 10:00 A.M. PST, July 30, 2020: Our continued analysis of the malware sample showed adjustments to the details involving the URI and Shodan scan parameters. We made the necessary changes in this post. We would like to thank F5 Networks for reaching out to us to clarify these details. With additional insights from Jemimah Molina and Augusto Remill

We may only be six months in, but there’s little doubt that 2020 will go down in history as a rather unpleasant year. In the field of cybersecurity, the collective hurt mostly crystallized around the increasing prevalence of targeted ransomware attacks. By investigating a number of these incidents and through discussions with some of our trusted indust

By Augusto Remillano II and Jemimah Molina We discovered a new Mirai variant (detected as  IoT.Linux.MIRAI.VWISI) that exploits nine vulnerabilities, most notable of which is CVE-2020-10173 in Comtrend VR-3033 routers which we have not observed exploited by past Mirai variants. This discovery is a new addition to the Mirai variants that appeared in the past

Insights and analysis by Augusto Remillano II With additional analysis by Patrick Noel Collado and Karen Ivy Titiwa We have recently detected variants of two existing Linux botnet malware types targeting exposed Docker servers; these are XORDDoS malware (detected by Trend Micro as Backdoor.Linux.XORDDOS.AE) and Kaiji DDoS malware (detected by Trend Micro as

By Raphael Centeno and Llallum Victoria With additional insights from Bren Matthew Ebriega Cybercriminals are taking advantage of “the new normal” — involving employees’ remote working conditions and the popularity of user-friendly online tools — by abusing and spoofing popular legitimate applications to infect systems with malicious routines. We found two m

News overview Since the beginning of 2020, due to the COVID-2019 pandemic, life has shifted almost entirely to the Web — people worldwide are now working, studying, shopping, and having fun online like never before. This is reflected in the goals of recent DDoS attacks, with the most targeted resources in Q1 being websites of medical organizations, delivery

The video gaming landscape has changed drastically over the past few decades. Some of these changes have led to considerable developments in the cyberthreat landscape as it applies to gaming companies, the games themselves and the user base that enjoys them. Integration of the cloud, mobile apps and social networks, the diversity of games and platforms, th

Kaspersky has continued to track the Roaming Mantis campaign. The group’s attack methods have improved and new targets continuously added in order to steal more funds. The attackers’ focus has also shifted to techniques that avoid tracking and research: whitelist for distribution, analysis environment detection and so on. We’ve also observe

The financial malware arena became a mainstream issue a little over a decade ago with the rise of malware like the Zeus Trojan, which at the time was the first commercial banking Trojan available to the cybercrime world. We have come a long way since, and the past decade saw banking Trojans become increasingly sophisticated, specialized and exclusive, operat

AZORult has its history. However, a few days ago, we discovered what appears to be one of its most unusual campaigns: abusing the ProtonVPN service and dropping malware via fake ProtonVPN installers for Windows. Screenshot of a fake ProtonVPN website The campaign started at the end of November 2019 when the threat actor behind it registered a new domain und