THREAT ALERT: Raspberry Robin Worm Abuses Windows Installer and QNAP Devices
Raspberry Robin involves a worm that spreads over USB devices or shared folders, leveraging compromised QNAP (Network Attached Storage or NAS) devices as stagers and an old but still effective method of using “LNK” shortcut files to lure its victims...
Defending Ukraine: Early Lessons from the Cyber War
This report represents research conducted by Microsoft’s threat intelligence and data science teams with the goal of sharpening our understanding of the threat landscape in the ongoing war in Ukraine. The report also offers a series of lessons and conclusions resulting from the data gathered and analyzed. Notably, the report reveals new information about Russian efforts including an increase in network penetration and espionage activities amongst allied governments, non-profits and other organizations outside Ukraine. This report also unveils detail about sophisticated and widespread Russian foreign influence operations being used among other things, to undermine Western unity and bolster their war efforts. We are seeing these foreign influence operations enacted in force in a coordinated fashion along with the full range of cyber destructive and espionage campaigns. Finally, the report calls for a coordinated and comprehensive strategy to strengthen collective defenses – a task that will require the private sector, public sector, nonprofits and civil society to come together. The foreword of this new report, written by Microsoft President and Vice Chair Brad Smith, offers additional detail below.
Aquarium Leaks. Inside the GRU’s Psychological Warfare Program
In this exclusive and groundbreaking report, Free Russia Foundation has translated and published five documents from the GRU, Russia’s military intelligence agency. The documents, obtained and analyzed by Free Russia Foundation’s Director of Special Investigations Michael Weiss, details the...
In 2022, The DFIR Report observed an increase in the adversarial usage of Remote Management and Monitoring (RMM) tools. When compared to post-exploitation channels that heavily rely on terminals, such … Read More
Time keeps on slippin’ slippin’ slippin’: The 2023 Active Adversary Report for Tech Leaders – Sophos News
Compromised credentials are a gift that keeps on giving (your stuff away) MFA is your mature, sensible friend Dwell time is sinking faster than RMS Titanic Criminals don’t take time off; neither can you
Active Directory servers: The ultimate attacker tool RDP: High time to decline the risk Missing telemetry just makes things harder
Cryptojacking: Understanding and defending against cloud compute resource abuse
Cloud cryptojacking, a type of cyberattack that uses computing power to mine cryptocurrency, could result in financial loss to targeted organizations due to the compute fees that can be incurred from the abuse.
Q2 2023 saw an unprecedented escalation in DDoS attack sophistication. Pro-Russian hacktivists REvil, Killnet and Anonymous Sudan joined forces to attack Western sites. Mitel vulnerability exploits surged by a whopping 532%, and attacks on crypto rocketed up by 600%. Read the full story...
The five-day job: A BlackByte ransomware intrusion case study
In a recent investigation by Microsoft Incident Response of a BlackByte 2.0 ransomware attack, we found that the threat actor progressed through the full attack chain, from initial access to impact, in less than five days, causing significant business disruption for the victim organization.
Malvertising Used as Entry Vector for BlackCat Actors Also Leverage SpyBoy Terminator
We found that malicious actors used malvertising to distribute malware via cloned webpages of legitimate organizations. The distribution involved a webpage of the well-known application WinSCP, an open-source Windows application for file transfer. We were able to identify that this activity led to a BlackCat (aka ALPHV) infection, and actors also used SpyBoy, a terminator that tampers with protection provided by agents.
The risk of distributed denial-of-service attacks (DDoS) has never been greater. Over the past several years, organizations have encountered a deluge of DDoS extortion, novel threats, state-sponsored hacktivism, and unprecedented innovation in the threat landscape.
THREAT ALERT: Raspberry Robin Worm Abuses Windows Installer and QNAP Devices
Raspberry Robin involves a worm that spreads over USB devices or shared folders, leveraging compromised QNAP (Network Attached Storage or NAS) devices as stagers and an old but still effective method of using “LNK” shortcut files to lure its victims...
Defending Ukraine: Early Lessons from the Cyber War
This report represents research conducted by Microsoft’s threat intelligence and data science teams with the goal of sharpening our understanding of the threat landscape in the ongoing war in Ukraine. The report also offers a series of lessons and conclusions resulting from the data gathered and analyzed. Notably, the report reveals new information about Russian efforts including an increase in network penetration and espionage activities amongst allied governments, non-profits and other organizations outside Ukraine. This report also unveils detail about sophisticated and widespread Russian foreign influence operations being used among other things, to undermine Western unity and bolster their war efforts. We are seeing these foreign influence operations enacted in force in a coordinated fashion along with the full range of cyber destructive and espionage campaigns. Finally, the report calls for a coordinated and comprehensive strategy to strengthen collective defenses – a task that will require the private sector, public sector, nonprofits and civil society to come together. The foreword of this new report, written by Microsoft President and Vice Chair Brad Smith, offers additional detail below.
Aquarium Leaks. Inside the GRU’s Psychological Warfare Program
In this exclusive and groundbreaking report, Free Russia Foundation has translated and published five documents from the GRU, Russia’s military intelligence agency. The documents, obtained and analyzed by Free Russia Foundation’s Director of Special Investigations Michael Weiss, details the...
Cyber Extortion activity reached the highest volume ever recorded in Q1 2023 after a decline of 8% in 2022, reveals new Orange Cyberdefense report
The shift previously observed in the geographical location of cyber extortion (Cy-X) victims continues to accelerate, moving from the United States (-21%), and Canada (-28%) to Southeast Asia region (+42%), the Nordics (+40%) & Latin America (+32%). * Whilst Manufacturing continues to be the biggest industry impacted, the number of victims decreased (-39%), with a shift towards the Utilities sector (+51%), Educational Services (+41%) and Finance and Insurance Sectors (+11%). * Businesses in 96 different countries were impacted by Cy-X in 2022, equating to nearly half (49%) the countries in the world. Since 2020 Orange Cyberdefense has recorded victims in over 70% of all countries worldwide * Over 2,100 organizations in the world were publicly shamed as a victim of Cy-X in 2022, across an almost even distribution of business sizes.
We detected Mac malware MacStealer spreading via websites, social media, and messaging platforms Twitter, Discord, and Telegram. Cybercriminals lure victims to download it by plagiarizing legitimate play-to-earn (P2E) apps’ images and offering jobs as beta testers.
Creal: New Stealer Targeting Cryptocurrency Users Via Phishing Sites
Open-Source Stealer Widely Abused by Threat Actors The threat of InfoStealers is widespread and has been frequently employed by various Threat Actors (TA)s to launch attacks and make financial gains. Until now, the primary use of stealers by TAs has been to sell logs or to gain initial entry into a corporate network.
In recent weeks OneNote has gotten a lot of media attention as threat actors are abusing the embedded files feature in OneNote in their phishing campaigns. I first observed this OneNote abuse in the media via Didier’s post. This was later also mentioned in Xavier’s ISC diary and on the podcast. Later, in the beginning of February, the hacker news covered this as well.
Activision's Data Breach Contains Employee Information, Call of Duty and More, Report
Insider Gaming has been able to obtain the entirety of the gaming giant Activision’s data breach initially reported by vx-underground and confirmed the data contains plans for Modern Warfare 2’s upcoming DLCs, Call of Duty 2023 (Codenamed Jupiter) and Call of Duty 2024 (Codenamed Cerberus), as well as sensitive employee information.
2023 Crypto Crime Trends: Illicit Cryptocurrency Volumes Reach All-Time Highs Amid Surge in Sanctions Designations and Hacking
Every year, we publish our estimates of illicit cryptocurrency activity to demonstrate the power of blockchains’ transparency – these kinds of estimates aren’t possible in traditional finance – and to teach investigators and compliance professionals about the latest trends in cryptocurrency-related crime that they need to know about. What could those estimates look like in a year like 2022? Last year was one of the most tumultuous in cryptocurrency history, with several large firms imploding, including Celsius, Three Arrows Capital, FTX, and others — some amid allegations of fraud.
No Pineapple! –DPRK Targeting of Medical Research and Technology Sector
During Q4 2022, WithSecure™ detected and responded to a cyber attack conducted by a threat actor that WithSecure™ have attributed with high confidence to an intrusion set referred to as Lazarus Group. Attribution with high confidence was based off of overlapping techniques tactics and procedures as well as an operational security mistake by the threat actor. Amongst technical indications, the incident observed by WithSecure™ also contains characteristics of recent campaigns attributed to Lazarus Group by other researchers.
More than 200 U.S. institutions hit with ransomware in 2022: report
More than 200 local governments, schools and hospitals in the U.S. were affected by ransomware in 2022, according to research conducted by cybersecurity firm Emsisoft. The annual “State of Ransomware in the US” report found that 105 local governments; 44 universities and colleges; 45 school districts; and 25 healthcare providers operating 290 hospitals dealt with ransomware attacks last year.
Nation-state cyberattacks become more brazen as authoritarian leaders ramp up aggression
On February 23, 2022, the cybersecurity world entered a new age, the age of the hybrid war, as Russia launched both physical and digital attacks against Ukraine. This year’s Microsoft Digital Defense Report provides new detail on these attacks and on increasing cyber aggression coming from authoritarian leaders around the world.