In 2018, EFF along with researchers from Lookout Security published a report describing the Advanced Persistent Threat (APT) we dubbed "Dark Caracal." Now we have uncovered a new Dark Caracal campaign operating since March of 2022, with hundreds of infections across more than a dozen countries. In this report we will present evidence that the cyber mercenary group Dark Caracal is still active and continues to be focused on Latin America, as was reported last year. We have discovered that Dark Caracal, using the Bandook spyware, is currently infecting over 700 computers in Central and South America, primarily in The Dominican Republic and Venezuela.

We discovered an active campaign targeting Eastern Europeans in the cryptocurrency industry using fake job lures.

At the end of November 2022, OpenAI released ChatGPT, the new interface for its Large Language Model (LLM), which instantly created a flurry of interest in AI and its possible uses. However, ChatGPT has also added some spice to the modern cyber threat landscape as it quickly became apparent that code generation can help less-skilled threat actors effortlessly launch cyberattacks. In Check Point Research’s (CPR) previous blog, we described how ChatGPT successfully conducted a full infection flow, from creating a convincing spear-phishing email to running a reverse shell, capable of accepting commands in English. The question at hand is whether this is just a hypothetical threat or if there are already threat actors using OpenAI technologies for malicious purposes. CPR’s analysis of several major underground hacking communities shows that there are already first instances of cybercriminals using OpenAI to develop malicious tools. As we suspected, some of the cases clearly showed that many cybercriminals using OpenAI have no development skills at all. Although the tools that we present in this report are pretty basic, it’s only a matter of time until more sophisticated threat actors enhance the way they use AI-based tools for bad.