QakBot is a banking trojan that has been evolving since its first version was discovered in 2008. According to the 2022 report published by CISA, it was one of the most active variants in 2021, and during 2022 and so far in 2023 it has remained quite active. Taking a brief look at the latests news of QakBot it has been updating its tactics constantly, for example, using a Windows zero-day to avoid displaying the MoTW or the most recent one, using OneNote files to drop QakBot. In this case we are particularly interested in the anti-analysis techniques used by QakBot during the early stages of its execution. These techniques can make malware analysis harder if they are not known, so learning to identify and bypass them is essential to get to see the malware’s operation at its full potential. Furthermore, there are techniques that can replicate / adopt different types of malware, so knowking them opens the door to the study of different samples.

Since the last quarter of 2020 MuddyWater has mantained a “long-term” infection campaign targeting Middle East countries. We have gathered samples from November 2020 to January 2022, and due to the recent samples found, it seems that this campaign might still be currently active. The latest campaigns of the Muddy Water threat group, allegedly sponsored by the Iranian government and linked to the Iranian revolutionary guard (the main armed forces of the Iranian government), could be framed within the dynamics of maintaining Iran’s regional sovereignty.

During our analysis of the Penquin-related infrastructure we reported in our previous post, we paid special attention to the malicious binaries contacting these IP addresses, since as we showed in the analysis, they had been used as C2 of other threats used by Turla.

Since the last quarter of 2020 MuddyWater has mantained a “long-term” infection campaign targeting Middle East countries. We have gathered samples from November 2020 to January 2022, and due to the recent samples found, it seems that this campaign might still be currently active. The latest campaigns of the Muddy Water threat group, allegedly sponsored by the Iranian government and linked to the Iranian revolutionary guard (the main armed forces of the Iranian government), could be framed within the dynamics of maintaining Iran’s regional sovereignty.

During our analysis of the Penquin-related infrastructure we reported in our previous post, we paid special attention to the malicious binaries contacting these IP addresses, since as we showed in the analysis, they had been used as C2 of other threats used by Turla.