Russian-speaking cybercrime evolution: What changed from 2016 to 2021

Experts at Kaspersky have been investigating various computer incidents on a daily basis for over a decade. Having been in the field for so long, we have witnessed some major changes in the cybercrime world’s modus operandi. This report shares our insights into the Russian-speaking cybercrime world and the changes in how it operates that have happened...

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Trickbot module descriptions

Trickbot (aka TrickLoader or Trickster), is a successor of the Dyre banking Trojan that was active from 2014 to 2016 and performed man-in-the-browser attacks in order to steal banking credentials. Trickbot was first discovered in October 2016. Just like Dyre, its main functionality was initially the theft of online banking data. However, over time,...

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Lyceum group reborn

This year, we had the honor to be selected for the thirty-first edition of the Virus Bulletin conference. During the live program, we presented our research into the Lyceum group (also known as Hexane), which was first exposed by Secureworks in 2019. In 2021, we have been able to identify a new cluster of the group’s activity, focused on two entities...

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MysterySnail attacks with Windows zero-day

Executive Summary In late August and early September 2021, Kaspersky technologies detected attacks with the use of an elevation of privilege exploit on multiple Microsoft Windows servers. The exploit had numerous debug strings from an older, publicly known exploit for vulnerability CVE-2016-3309, but closer analysis revealed that it was a zero-day....

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SAS 2021: Learning to ChaCha with APT41

Straight from the sunny UK to the stage of SAS-at-Home 2021, John Southworth (PwC) will be giving some insights about the threat actor APT41, also known as Red Kelpie and Winnti. Starting with APT10 (Red Apollo), the presentation will dance you through the malware used by APT41 – the Motnug loader and its descendant, the ChaCha loader, to some thoughts...

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SAS 2021: Fireside chat with Chris Bing

How to build up a fascinating story from a hardcore APT report? Where to find details and how to work with information sources? Sitting by the virtual fireside, Brian Bartholomew (Kaspersky GReAT) and Christopher Bing (Reuters) will discuss how malware researchers and investigative journalists can help each other in their work.

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SAS 2021: Operation Software Concepts

During the ‘Operation Software Concepts: A Beautiful Envelope for Wrapping Weapon‘ talk on SAS-at-Home 2021, Rintaro Koike, Shogo Hayashi and Ryuichi Tanabe from NTT Security (Japan) will cover a new APT campaign named Operation Software Concepts. They will share details about this multi-stage attack campaign targeting Russian and Mongolian governments...

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Ransomware in the CIS

Introduction These days, when speaking of cyberthreats, most people have in mind ransomware, specifically cryptomalware. In 2020–2021, with the outbreak of the pandemic and the emergence of several major cybercriminal groups (Maze, REvil, Conti, DarkSide, Avaddon), an entire criminal ecosystem took shape, leading to a mounting worldwide wave of attacks...

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GhostEmperor: From ProxyLogon to kernel mode

 Download GhostEmperor’s technical details (PDF) While investigating a recent rise of attacks against Exchange servers, we noticed a recurring cluster of activity that appeared in several distinct compromised networks. This cluster stood out for its usage of a formerly unknown Windows kernel mode rootkit that we dubbed Demodex, and a sophisticated...

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DarkHalo after SolarWinds: the Tomiris connection

Background In December 2020, news of the SolarWinds incident took the world by storm. While supply-chain attacks were already a documented attack vector leveraged by a number of APT actors, this specific campaign stood out due to the extreme carefulness of the attackers and the high-profile nature of their victims. It is believed that when FireEye...

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