CactusPete (also known as Karma Panda or Tonto Team) is an APT group that has been publicly known since at least 2013. Some of the group’s activities have been previously described in public by multiple sources. We have been investigating and privately reporting on this group’s activity for years as well. Historically, their activity has been foc

Executive summary In May 2020, Kaspersky technologies 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: a remote code execution exploit for Internet Explorer and an elevation of privilege exploit for

The use of crypto-ransomware in targeted attacks has become an ordinary occurrence lately: new incidents are being reported every month, sometimes even more often. On July 23, Garmin, a major manufacturer of navigation equipment and smart devices, including smart watches and bracelets, experienced a massive service outage. As confirmed by an official stateme

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

As the IT and OT environment becomes more complex, adversaries are quick to adapt their attack strategy. For example, as users’ work environments diversify, adversaries are busy acquiring the TTPs to infiltrate systems. Recently, we reported to our Threat Intelligence Portal customers a similar malware framework that internally we called MATA. The MATA

Introduction Brazil is a well-known country with plenty of banking trojans developed by local crooks. The Brazilian criminal underground is home to some of the world’s busiest and most creative perpetrators of cybercrime. Like their counterparts’ in China and Russia, their cyberattacks have a strong local flavor, and for a long time, they limited

Exploit kits are not as widespread as they used to be. In the past, they relied on the use of already patched vulnerabilities. Newer and more secure web browsers with automatic updates simply do not allow known vulnerabilities to be exploited. It was very different back in the heyday of Adobe Flash because it’s just a plugin for a web browser, meaning

In mid-April, our threat monitoring systems detected malicious files being distributed under the name “on the new initiative of the World Bank in connection with the coronavirus pandemic” (in Russian) with the extension EXE or RAR. Inside the files was the well-known Rovnix bootkit. There is nothing new about cybercriminals exploiting the coronav

In February 2020, we observed a Trojan injected into the system process memory on a particular host. The target turned out to be a diplomatic entity. What initially attracted our attention was the enterprise-grade API-like (application programming interface) programming style. Such an approach is not that common in the malware world and is mostly used by top

Today, we are announcing the release of KTAE, the Kaspersky Threat Attribution Engine. This code attribution technology, developed initially for internal use by the Kaspersky Global Research and Analysis Team, is now being made available to a wider audience. You can read more about KTAE in our official press release, or go directly to its info page on the Ka

Back in October 2019 we detected a classic watering-hole attack on a North Korea-related news site that exploited a chain of Google Chrome and Microsoft Windows zero-days. While we’ve already published blog posts briefly describing this operation (available here and here), in this blog post we’d like to take a deep technical dive into the exploit

Targeted attacks and malware campaigns Operation AppleJeus: the sequel In 2018, we published a report on Operation AppleJeus, one of the more notable campaigns of the threat actor Lazarus, currently one of the most active and prolific APT groups. One notable feature of this campaign was that it marked the first time Lazarus had targeted macOS targets, with t

Our colleagues at Checkpoint put together a fine research writeup on some Naikon resources and activity related to “aria-body” that we detected in 2017 and similarly reported in 2018. To supplement their research findings, we are summarizing and publishing portions of the findings reported in our June 2018 “Naikon’s New AR Backdoor De

In July 2019, Dr. Web reported about a backdoor trojan in Google Play, which appeared to be sophisticated and unlike common malware often uploaded for stealing victims’ money or displaying ads. So, we conducted an inquiry of our own, discovering a long-term campaign, which we dubbed “PhantomLance”, its earliest registered domain dating back

It was the middle of last year that we detected the start of mass attacks by the xHelper Trojan on Android smartphones, but even now the malware remains as active as ever. The main feature of xHelper is entrenchment — once it gets into the phone, it somehow remains there even after the user deletes it and restores the factory settings. We conducted a thoroug