We provide a technical analysis on how CVE-2023-22527 can be exploited by malicious actors for cryptojacking attacks that can spread across the victim’s system.
Since late 2022, Earth Baku has broadened its scope from the Indo-Pacific region to Europe, the Middle East, and Africa. Their latest operations demonstrate sophisticated techniques, such as exploiting public-facing applications like IIS servers for initial access and deploying the Godzilla webshell for command and control.
We uncovered a malvertising campaign where the threat actor hijacks social media pages, renames them to mimic popular AI photo editors, then posts malicious links to fake websites.
Trend Micro threat hunters discovered that the Play ransomware group has been deploying a new Linux variant that targets ESXi environments.
On Thursday, April 18, 2024, the UK’s Metropolitan Police Service, along with fellow UK and international law enforcement, as well as several trusted private industry partners, conducted an operation that succeeded in taking down the Phishing-as-a-Service (PhaaS) provider LabHost. This move was also timed to coincide with a number of key arrests related to this operation. In this entry, we will briefly explain what LabHost was, how it affected its victims, and the impact of this law enforcement operation — including the assistance provided by Trend Micro.
Since early 2022, we have been monitoring an APT campaign that targets several government entities worldwide, with a strong focus in Southeast Asia, but also seen targeting Europe, America, and Africa.
From July to September, we observed the DarkGate campaign (detected by Trend Micro as TrojanSpy.AutoIt.DARKGATE.AA) abusing instant messaging platforms to deliver a VBA loader script to victims. This script downloaded and executed a second-stage payload consisting of a AutoIT scripting containing the DarkGate malware code. It’s unclear how the originating accounts of the instant messaging applications were compromised, however is hypothesized to be either through leaked credentials available through underground forums or the previous compromise of the parent organization.
The Trend Micro threat hunting team came across an RA World attack involving multistage components designed to ensure maximum impact.
The APT group Water Hydra has been exploiting the Microsoft Defender SmartScreen vulnerability CVE-2024-21412 in its campaigns targeting financial market traders. This vulnerability, which has now been patched by Microsoft, was discovered and disclosed by the Trend Micro Zero Day Initiative.
In this blog, we detail our investigation of the Kasseika ransomware and the indicators we found suggesting that the actors behind it have acquired access to the source code of the notorious BlackMatter ransomware.
This blog delves into the Phemedrone Stealer campaign's exploitation of CVE-2023-36025, the Windows Defender SmartScreen Bypass vulnerability, for its defense evasion and investigates the malware's payload.
We uncovered the active exploitation of the Apache ActiveMQ vulnerability CVE-2023-46604 to download and infect Linux systems with the Kinsing malware (also known as h2miner) and cryptocurrency miner.
As the use of ChatGPT and other artificial intelligence (AI) technologies becomes more widespread, it is important to consider the possible risks associated with their use. One of the main concerns surrounding these technologies is the potential for malicious use, such as in the development of malware or other harmful software. Our recent reports discussed how cybercriminals are misusing the large language model’s (LLM) advanced capabilities:
We discussed how ChatGPT can be abused to scale manual and time-consuming processes in cybercriminals’ attack chains in virtual kidnapping schemes.
We also reported on how this tool can be used to automate certain processes in harpoon whaling attacks to discover “signals” or target categories.
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.
In this blog post, we will provide details on a BlackCat ransomware incident that occurred in February 2023, where we observed a new capability, mainly used for the defense evasion phase.
An overview of the Lemon Group’s use of preinfected mobile devices, and how this scheme is potentially being developed and expanded to other internet of things (IoT) devices. This research was presented in full at the Black Hat Asia 2023 Conference in Singapore in May 2023.
We found TrafficStealer abusing open container APIs in order to redirect traffic to specific websites and manipulate engagement with ads.
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.
In this blog entry, we provide technical details and analysis on the 3CX attacks as they happen. We also discuss available solutions which security teams can maximize for early detection and mitigate the impact of 3CX attacks.
