The ticking time bomb of Microsoft Exchange Server 2013
I monitor (in an amateur, clueless way) ransomware groups in my spare time, to see what intelligence can be gained from looking at victim orgs and what went wrong. Basically, I’m a giant big dork with too much free time. I’ve discovered two organisations with ransomware incidents, where the entry point appears to have been Exchange Server 2013 with Outlook Web Access enabled, where all available security updates were applied.
Understanding the Phobos affiliate structure and activity
Cisco Talos identified the most prolific Phobos variants, TTPs and affiliate structure, based on their activity and analysis of over 1,000 samples from VirusTotal dating back to 2019. We assess with moderate confidence Eking, Eight, Elbie, Devos and Faust are the most common variants
Clop Ransomware: History, Timeline, And Adversary Simulation
The infamous Clop ransomware, mainly known as Cl0p, targets various industries and organizations, extorting data for a huge amount of ransom. It advances actively with new emerging campaigns. This blog walks through the Clop timeline, Mitre TTPs and their emulation.
Tracing Ransomware Threat Actors Through Stylometric Analysis and Chat Log Examination
I stumbled upon an intriguing concept presented by Will Thomas (BushidoToken) in his blog post titled “Unmasking Ransomware Using Stylometric Analysis: Shadow, 8BASE, Rancoz.” This concept revolves around utilizing stylometry to identify potential modifications in new ransomware variants based on existing popular strains. If you’re interested, you can read the blog post here. (Notably, Will Thomas also appeared on Dark Net Diaries, discussing his tracking of the Revil ransomware.)
A new recently observed ransomware family dubbed Akira uses a retro aesthetic on their victim site very reminiscent of the 1980s green screen consoles and possibly takes its namesake from the popular 1988 anime film of the same name.
in 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.
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.
