I was checking the 2017 ShadowBrokers leaks when I noticed that one of the EQUATION GROUP tools leaked back then has no public references/analysis (at least as far as I can tell). So, here is what …
For years, activists and academics have been raising concerns that facial analysis software that claims to be able to identify a person’s age, gender and emotional state can be biased, unreliable or invasive — and shouldn’t be sold.
Emotet is back in business and it’s revealing some new tricks. Not long ago, Emotet introduced a new module, the Google Chrome’s credit card grabber. More recently, the SMB spreader module has been brought back and is now, once again, part of the infection chain.
Here we go with another episode about our (not so) old friend, BRATA. In almost one year, threat actors (TAs) have further improved the capabilities of this malware. In our previous blog post [1] we defined three main BRATA variants, which appeared during two different waves detected by our telemetries at the very end of 2021. However, during the last months we have observed a change in the attack pattern commonly used.
Earlier this year Malwarebytes released its 2022 Threat Review, a review of the most important threats and cybersecurity trends of 2021, and what they could mean for 2022. Among other things it covers the year’s alarming rebound in malware detections, and a significant shift in the balance of email threats.
In this analysis, Cyble looks at the Eternity Malware suite, listing a wide variety of malware for sale on Telegram.
While Windows holds the largest market share on malware, macOS has its fair share of threats that mostly exist in an adware/grayware area. In this post I want to walk through how a Pirrit PKG file installer works. There are lots of more complex threats, but this is a good place to start if you’re just jumping into analysis. If you want to follow along at home, I’m working with this file in MalwareBazaar: https://bazaar.abuse.ch/sample/d39426dbceb54bba51587242f8101184df43cc23af7dc7b364ca2327e28e7825/.
Despite open source software’s essential role in all software built today, it’s far too easy for bad actors to circulate malicious packages that attack the systems and users running that software. Unlike mobile app stores that can scan for and reject malicious contributions, package repositories have limited resources to review the thousands of daily updates and must maintain an open model where anyone can freely contribute. As a result, malicious packages like ua-parser-js, and node-ipc are regularly uploaded to popular repositories despite their best efforts, with sometimes devastating consequences for users.
Today we’re pleased to announce the initial prototype version of the Package Analysis project, an OpenSSF project addressing the challenge of identifying malicious packages in popular open source repositories. In just one month of analysis, the project identified more than 200 malicious packages uploaded to PyPI and npm.
As the most impactful cyber attack of the Ukrainian invasion gets downplayed, SentinelLabs uncovers a more plausible explanation.
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.
You may not have missed all the noises recently caused by Lapsus$, a group that seems to specialize in extortion without necessarily leveraging ransomware.
At first glance, Lapsus$ check marks all elements that would make researchers put them in the low priority threats, especially considering their readiness to make dramas and OpSec failures. Except that the group has successfully managed to significantly enrich its victim list with high profile corporations, thus drawing all our attention.
In the following, we will describe the threat actor profile that was drawn by our investigations based either on OSINT, dark web or infrastructure analysis.
On the Effectiveness of Hardware Mitigations Against Cross-Privilege Spectre-v2 Attacks
BHI (or Spectre-BHB) is a revival of cross-privilege Spectre-v2 attacks on modern systems deploying in-hardware defenses. And we have a very neat end-to-end exploit leaking arbitrary kernel memory on modern Intel CPUs to prove it (PoC||GTFO right?).
Online security is extremely important for people in Ukraine and the surrounding region right now. Government agencies, independent newspapers and public service providers need it to function and individuals need to communicate safely. Google’s Threat Analysis Group (TAG) has been working around the clock, focusing on the safety and security of our users and the platforms that help them access and share important information.
Activity in the digital domain may affect the war in Eastern Europe at the margins, but it will not decide it. That should tell us something about the West’s cyber posture.
Bvp47 - a Top-tier Backdoor of US NSA Equation Group
Nearly a month has passed since we determined that servers hosting personal data belonging to more than 515,000 people worldwide were hacked in a sophisticated cyber-attack. We are now in a position to share some findings of our analysis of this data breach.
Analyzing OSX.DazzleSpy
A fully-featured cyber-espionage macOS implant
Earlier today (January 11th), Researchers at Intezer published an report titled, “New SysJoker Backdoor Targets Windows, Linux, and macOS.”
In this report, they detailed a new cross-platform backdoor they named SysJoker. Though initially discovered on Linux, the Intezer researchers shortly thereafter also found both Windows and Mac versions:
"SysJoker was first discovered during an active attack on a Linux-based web server of a leading educational institution. After further investigation, we found that SysJoker also has Mach-O and Windows PE versions." -Intezer
