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.
Earlier this year, we started hunting for possible new DeftTorero (aka Lebanese Cedar, Volatile Cedar) artifacts. This threat actor is believed to originate from the Middle East and was publicly disclosed to the cybersecurity community as early as 2015. Notably, no other intelligence was shared until 2021, which led us to speculate on a possible shift by the threat actor to more fileless/LOLBINS techniques, and the use of known/common offensive tools publicly available on the internet that allows them to blend in.
An unusual malicious bundle (a collection of malicious programs distributed in the form of a single installation file, self-extracting archive or other file with installer-type functionality) recently caught our eye. Its main payload is the widespread RedLine stealer. Discovered in March 2020, RedLine is currently one of the most common Trojans used to steal passwords and credentials from browsers, FTP clients and desktop messengers. It is openly available on underground hacker forums for just a few hundred dollars, a relatively small price tag for malware.
The gaming industry went into full gear during the pandemic, as many people took up online gaming as their new hobby to escape the socially-distanced reality. Since then, the industry has never stopped growing. According to the analytical agency Newzoo, in 2022, the global gaming market will exceed $ 200 billion, with 3 billion players globally. Such an engaged, solvent and eager-to-win audience becomes a tidbit for cybercriminals, who always find ways to fool their victims. One of the most outstanding examples involves $2 million‘s worth of CS:GO skins stolen from a user’s account, which means that losses can get truly grave. Besides stealing personal credentials and funds, hackers can affect the performance of gaming computers, infecting these with unsolicited miner files.
We used our internal automated system for monitoring open-source repositories and discovered two other malicious Python packages in the PyPI.