The Dridex banking Trojan, which has become a major financial cyberthreat in the past years (in 2015, the damage done by the Trojan was estimated at over $40 million), stands apart from other malware because it has continually evolved and become more sophisticated since it made its first appearance in 2011. Dridex has been able to escape justice for so long

– Say my name. – 127.0.0.1! – You are goddamn right. Network communication is a key function for any malicious program. Yes, there are exceptions, such as cryptors and ransomware Trojans that can do their job just fine without using the Internet. However, they also require their victims to establish contact with the threat actor so they can

Introduction Hajime (meaning ‘beginning’ in Japanese) is an IoT worm that was first mentioned on 16 October 2016 in a public report by RapidityNetworks. One month later we saw the first samples being uploaded from Spain to VT. This worm builds a huge P2P botnet (almost 300,000 devices at the time of publishing this blogpost), but its real purpose

Kaspersky Lab has been tracking a targeted attack actor’s activities in Japan and South Korea recently. This attacker has been using the XXMM malware toolkit, which was named after an original project path revealed through a pdb string inside the file: “C:Users123documentsvisual studio 2010Projectsxxmm2Releasetest2.pdb”. We came across an u

Recently WikiLeaks published a report that, among other things, claims to disclose tools and tactics employed by a state-sponsored organization to break into users’ computers and circumvent installed security solutions. The list of compromised security products includes dozens of vendors and relates to the whole cybersecurity industry. The published re

Introduction Ask any expert who analyzes malicious code for Windows which system privileges malware works with and wants to acquire and, without a second thought, they’ll tell you: “Administrator rights”. Are there any studies to back this up? Unfortunately, I was unable to find any coherent analysis on the subject; however, it is never too

 Download the PDF 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. Rather than thinly

The Gootkit bot is one of those types of malicious program that rarely attracts much attention from researchers. The reason is its limited propagation and a lack of distinguishing features. There are some early instances, including on Securelist (here and here), where Gootkit is mentioned in online malware research as a component in bots and Trojans. However

One piece of advice that often appears in closed message boards used by Russian cybercriminals is “Don’t work with RU”. This is a kind of instruction given by more experienced Russian criminals to the younger generation. It can be interpreted as: “don’t steal money from people in Russia, don’t infect their machines, don

In February 2016, the Internet was shaken by an epidemic caused by the new ransomware Trojan Locky (detected by Kaspersky Lab products as Trojan-Ransom.Win32.Locky). The Trojan has been actively propagating up to the present day. Kaspersky Lab products have reported attempts to infect users with the Trojan in 114 countries around the world. Analysis of the s

 Download PDF version Download EPUB Download Full Report PDF Download Full Report EPUB Top security stories Evolution of cyber threats in the corporate sector Overall statistics for 2015 Predictions 2016 The year in figures In 2015, there were 1,966,324 registered notifications about attempted malware infections that aimed to steal mon

 Download PDF version  Download EPUB Targeted attacks and malware campaigns Targeted attacks are now an established part of the threat landscape, so it’s no surprise to see such attacks feature in our yearly review. Last year, in our security forecast, we outlined what we saw as the likely future APT developments. The merger of cybercrime an

A day after we published our No Ransom Campaign decryptor in the fight against the CoinVault ransomware, we were contacted by a fellow researcher from Panda, Bart Blaze. He kindly suggested that new variants of this dreadful ransomware were available and that he would happily share them with us. After obtaining the new MD5 hashes for the files, we set out t

A family of ransomware Trojans that encrypts files and adds the extensions “.xtbl” and “.ytbl” emerged in late 2014/early 2015, and quickly established itself among the top three most widespread encryptors in Russia (along with Trojan-Ransom.Win32.Cryakl and Trojan-Ransom.BAT.Scatter). This threat has been assigned the verdict Trojan-

Since June 2015, we have seen a steady growth in the number of mobile malware attacks that use superuser privileges (root access) on the device to achieve their goals. Root access is incompatible with the operating system’s security model because it violates the principle that applications should be isolated from each other and from the system. It give