Exploit kits continue to be used as a malware delivery platform. In 2020, we’ve observed a number of different malvertising campaigns leading to RIG, Fallout, Spelevo and Purple Fox, among others. And, in September, we put out a blog post detailing a surge in malvertising via adult websites. One of those campaigns we dubbed ‘malsmoke’ h

This blog post was authored by Hossein Jazi and Jérôme Segura. On September 17th, we discovered a new attack called Kraken that injected its payload into the Windows Error Reporting (WER) service as a defense evasion mechanism. That reporting service, WerFault.exe, is usually invoked when an error related to the operating system, Windows features, or a

As we continue to track web threats and credit card skimming in particular, we often rediscover techniques we’ve encountered elsewhere before. In this post, we share a recent find that involves what is known as an homoglyph attack. This technique has been exploited for some time already, especially in phishing scams with IDN homograph attacks. Th

They say any publicity is good publicity. But perhaps this isn’t true for CloudEye, an Italian firm that claims to provide “the next generation of Windows executables’ protection”. First described by Proofpoint security researchers in March 2020, GuLoader is a downloader used by threat actors to distribute malware on a large scale.

Vulnerabilities are weaknesses leveraged by adversaries to compromise the confidentiality, availability or integrity of a resource. The vulnerability ecosystem has matured considerably in the last few years. A significant amount of effort has been invested to capture, curate, taxonomize and communicate the vulnerabilities in terms of severity, impact and com

This blog post was authored by Hossein Jazi and Jérôme Segura On July 2, we found an archive file with an embedded document pretending to be from the government of India. This file used template injection to drop a malicious template which loaded a variant of Cobalt Strike. One day later, the same threat actor changed their template and dropped a load

Cybercriminals typically focus on targets that can get them the highest return with the least amount of effort. This is often determined by their ability to scale attacks, and therefore on how prevalent a vulnerability or target system is. Enter: the credit card skimmer. In the world of digital skimming, we’ve seen the most activity on e-commerce co

They say a picture is worth a thousand words. Threat actors must have remembered that as they devised yet another way to hide their credit card skimmer in order to evade detection. When we first investigated this campaign, we thought it may be another one of those favicon tricks, which we had described in a previous blog. However, it turned out to be diff

This blog post was authored by Hossein Jazi and Jérôme Segura On June 10, we found a malicious Word document disguised as a resume that uses template injection to drop a .Net Loader. This is the first part of a multi-stage attack that we believe is associated to an APT attack. In the last stage, the threat actors used Cobalt Strike’s Malleable C2 fe

Car manufacturer Honda has been hit by a cyber attack, according to a report published by the BBC, and later confirmed by the company in a tweet. Another similar attack, also disclosed on Twitter, hit Edesur S.A., one of the companies belonging to Enel Argentina which operates in the business of energy distribution in the City of Buenos Aires. Based on sa

This post was authored by Hossein Jazi and Jérôme Segura On May 29th, we identified an attack that we believe is part of a new campaign from an Advanced Persistent Threat actor known as Higaisa. The Higaisa APT is believed to be tied to the Korean peninsula, and was first disclosed by Tencent Security Threat Intelligence Center in early 2019. The grou

In the first three months of 2020, as the world clamped down to limit coronavirus, cyber threats ramped up. Our latest, special edition for our quarterly CTNT report focuses on recent, increased malware threats which all have one, big thing in common—using coronavirus as a lure. Our report, “Cybercrime tactics and techniques: Attack on home base,” analyze

In this final article of our trilogy, we investigate how a cyber threat intelligence (CTI) analyst and associated programmes provide insight about physical and cyber threats to your organisation. The value of these insights is reflected in the wins, which come as a result of context building, holistic understanding, and enhanced awareness in order to outmano

When it comes to banking Trojans, ZeuS is probably the most famous one ever released. Since its source code originally leaked in 2011, several new variants proliferated online. That includes a past fork called Terdot Zbot/Zloader, which we extensively covered in 2017. But recently, we observed another bot, with a design reminiscent of ZeuS, that seems to

Malware authors are notorious for their deceptive attempts at staying one step ahead of defenders. As their schemes get exposed, they always need to go back to their bag of tricks to pull out a new one. When it comes to online credit card skimmers, we have already seen a number of evasion techniques, some fairly simple and others more elaborate. The goal