
In this blog post, we analyze ChessMaster’s current status, including the updated tools in its arsenal — with a particular focus on the evolution of ANEL and how it is used in the campaign.
Read MoreIn this blog post, we analyze ChessMaster’s current status, including the updated tools in its arsenal — with a particular focus on the evolution of ANEL and how it is used in the campaign.
Read MoreWe uncovered a new Android malware that can surreptitiously use the infected device’s computing power to mine Monero. Trend Micro detects this as ANDROIDOS_HIDDENMINER. This Monero-mining Android app’s self-protection and persistence mechanisms include hiding itself from the unwitting user and abusing the Device Administrator feature (a technique typically seen in SLocker Android ransomware).
Read MoreAs a large cyber security vendor, Trend Micro deals with millions of threat data per day. Our Smart Protection Network (SPN), among other technologies, helps us conduct research and investigate new threats and cybercrimes to improve our ability to protect our customers.
In this blog post, the first of a three-part series, I would like to share some insights on trends that we have observed in the wild after analyzing 3 million software downloads, involving hundreds of thousands of internet-connected machines.
Specifically, we turn our focus on web downloads originating from browsers or any other (HTTP) client application installed on a machine. Note that we limited the study to machines that execute software after download. Given the huge quantity of data, we also limited our research to unpopular software downloaded from URLs that were not whitelisted. This automatically excludes software from Windows Updates and other well-known domains. All this information is PII anonymized.
We classify these downloads as benign (legitimate software), malicious or unknown. Unknown means that the downloaded software is currently unknown to us or to other public data sources that we monitor.
Read MoreAs new trends and developments in the malicious mining of cryptocurrency emerge, a smart and sustainable way of detecting these types of threats is swiftly becoming a cybersecurity necessity. By using Trend Micro Locality Sensitive Hashing (TLSH), a machine learning hash that is capable of identifying similar files, we were able to group together similar cryptocurrency-mining samples gathered from the wild. By grouping together samples based on their behavior and file types, detection of similar or modified malware becomes possible.
Read MoreThe Trend Micro Cyber Safety Solutions team has been tracking a potentially unwanted app (PUA) distribution campaign that installs PUA software downloaders. During our research, we found that some of these distributors started pushing malware along with PUAs in late 2017. In this post we focus on one of the older PUA software downloaders called ICLoader (also called FusionCore and detected by Trend Micro as PUA_ICLOADER). Different reports identified it as a PUA software downloader because it installed adware or unwanted software.
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