n February 2023, Kaspersky technologies detected a number of attempts to execute similar elevation-of-privilege exploits on Microsoft Windows servers belonging to small and medium-sized businesses in the Middle East, in North America, and previously in Asia regions. These exploits were very similar to already known Common Log File System (CLFS) driver exploits that we analyzed previously, but we decided to double check and it was worth it – one of the exploits turned out to be a zero-day, supporting different versions and builds of Windows, including Windows 11. The exploit was highly obfuscated with more than 80% of the its code being “junk” elegantly compiled into the binary, but we quickly fully reverse-engineered it and reported our findings to Microsoft. Microsoft assigned CVE-2023-28252 to the Common Log File System elevation-of-privilege vulnerability, and a patch was released on April 11, 2023, as part of April Patch Tuesday.

CRIL analyses the anatomy of a new ransomware group named Money Message, which can encrypt network shares and target both Windows and Linux.

Cyble Research & Intelligence Labs analyzes Cl0p ransomware which is rapidly gaining attention for its success in extorting businesses.

We recently discovered ransomware, which performs MSDTC service DLL Hijacking to silently execute its payload. We have named this ransomware CatB, based on the contact email that the ransomware group uses. The sample was first uploaded to VT on November 23, 2022 and tagged by the VT community as a possible variant of the Pandora Ransomware. The assumed connection to the Pandora Ransomware was due to some similarities between the CatB and Pandora ransom notes. However, the similarities pretty much end there. The CatB ransomware implements several anti-VM techniques to verify execution on a “real machine”, followed by a malicious DLL drop and DLL hijacking to evade detection.

New PolyVice ransomware is likely in use by multiple threat actors building re-branded payloads with the same custom encryption scheme.

Cyble Research and Intelligence Labs analyzes multiple ransomware strains created based on leaked source code of Conti Ransomware.

“TargetCompany” is a type of ransomware that was first identified in June 2021. The researchers named it TargetCompany ransomware because it adds the targeted company name as a file extension to the encrypted files. In September 2022, researchers identified a TargetCompany ransomware variant targeting Microsoft SQL servers and adding the “Fargo” extension to the encrypted files. TargetCompany ransomware is also known to add a “Mallox” extension after encrypting the files.

* Check Point Research (CPR) provides under-the-hood details of its analysis of the infamous Azov Ransomware * Investigation shows that Azov is capable of modifying certain 64-bit executables to execute its own code * Azov is designed to inflict impeccable damage to the infected machine it runs on * CPR sees over 17K of Azov-related samples submitted to VirusTotal

Cyble analyzes a new wave of ransomware attacks being led by AXLocker, Octocrypt, and Alice ransomware and how they target Discord tokens.

BlueSky Ransomware is a modern malware using advanced techniques to evade security defences. It predominantly targets Windows hosts and utilizes the Windows multithreading model for fast encryption.