We have recently observed the Virobot ransomware (detected by Trend Micro as RANSOM_VIBOROT.THIAHAH) which has botnet capabilities, affecting users in the United States.
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September’s Patch Tuesday provides a security patch for CVE-2018-8440, an elevation of privilege vulnerability that occurs when Windows incorrectly handles calls to the Advanced Local Procedure Call (ALPC) interface. This bug allows threat actors to run code with administrative privileges, install programs, or even create new accounts with full user rights. This bug’s source code has been publicly disclosed as of August 27 via Twitter and has been seen actively used in malicious campaigns as early as September 5.
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While ransomware has noticeably plateaued in today’s threat landscape, it’s still a cybercriminal staple. In fact, it saw a slight increase in activity in the first half of 2018, keeping pace by being fine-tuned to evade security solutions, or in the case of PyLocky (detected by Trend Micro as RANSOM_PYLOCKY.A), imitate established ransomware families and ride on their notoriety.
In late July and throughout August, we observed waves of spam email delivering the PyLocky ransomware. Although it tries to pass off as Locky in its ransom note, PyLocky is unrelated to Locky. PyLocky is written in Python, a popular scripting language; and packaged with PyInstaller, a tool used to package Python-based programs as standalone executables.
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We uncovered personally identifiable information (PII) stolen from a China-based hotel chain being sold on a deep web forum we were monitoring. Further analysis revealed that the stolen data was not only the PII of Chinese customers, but also included the hotel chain’s customers from Western and East Asian countries. The sample data we saw was unencrypted (in plaintext), some of which were in CSV, SQL, and TXT dumps.
We believe this stolen data is related to the data breach (reported on August 29) that exposed up to 130 million PII. The news that reported the data breach matched with an advertisement we saw in the dark web selling the stolen data for eight bitcoins (equivalent to more than US$58,000 as of September 5, 2018).
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In the process of monitoring changes in the threat landscape, we get a clearer insight into the way threat actors work behind the schemes. In this case we dig deeper into the possible connection between cyberattacks by focusing on the similarities an unnamed threat actor shares with Confucius, Patchwork, and another threat actor called Bahamut. For the sake of this report, we will call this unnamed threat actor “Urpage.”
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