We dive into one of the most sophisticated and impactful ecosystems within the global cybercrime landscape. Our research looks at tools and techniques, specialized forums, popular services, plus a deeply ingrained culture of secrecy and collaboration.
The ZDI team offers an analysis of how CVE-2025-0411, a zero-day vulnerability in 7-Zip was actively exploited to target Ukrainian organizations through spear-phishing and homoglyph attacks.
Since the end of 2024, we have been continuously monitoring large-scale DDoS attacks orchestrated by an IoT botnet exploiting vulnerable IoT devices such as wireless routers and IP cameras.
In December 2024, two critical vulnerabilities in Microsoft's Windows Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP) were addressed via Microsoft’s monthly Patch Tuesday release. Both vulnerabilities were deemed as highly significant due to the widespread use of LDAP in Windows environments:
CVE-2024-49112: A remote code execution (RCE) bug that attackers can exploit by sending specially crafted LDAP requests, allowing them to execute arbitrary code on the target system.
CVE-2024-49113: A denial-of-service (DoS) vulnerability that can be exploited to crash the LDAP service, leading to service disruptions.
In this blog entry, we discuss a fake proof-of-concept (PoC) exploit for CVE-2024-49113 (aka LDAPNightmare) designed to lure security researchers into downloading and executing information-stealing malware.
In December 2024, two Windows Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP) vulnerabilities were identified by independent security researcher Yuki Chen: CVE-2024-49112, a remote code execution (RCE) flaw with a 9.8 CVSS score, and CVE-2024-49113, a denial-of-service (DoS) flaw with a 7.5 CVSS score.
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.
