A spam campaign we observed in September indicates attackers are angling towards a more sophisticated form of phishing. The campaign uses hijacked email accounts to deliver URSNIF as part of or as a response to an existing email thread.
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Together with our colleagues at IssueMakersLab, we uncovered Operation Red Signature, an information theft-driven supply chain attack targeting organizations in South Korea. We discovered the attacks around the end of July, while the media reported the attack in South Korea on August 6.
The threat actors compromised the update server of a remote support solutions provider to deliver a remote access tool called 9002 RAT to their targets of interest through the update process. They carried this out by first stealing the company’s certificate then using it to sign the malware. They also configured the update server to only deliver malicious files if the client is located in the range of IP addresses of their target organizations.
9002 RAT also installed additional malicious tools: an exploit tool for Internet Information Services (IIS) 6 WebDav (exploiting CVE-2017-7269) and an SQL database password dumper. These tools hint at how the attackers are also after data stored in their target’s web server and database.
Read More Current data on the threat landscape of North America shows the need for a comprehensive and proactive approach to security. A traditional approach would be to build a threat response team. However, to be effective against current threats, a threat response team needs to have a considerable amount of skills, time, and resources, which may not be feasible for some organizations. This is only exacerbated by the daily tasks associated with keeping the business up and running. If treated as just a part of the broader job of regular IT staff, threat management can prove overwhelming, as it includes vulnerability assessment, patching, firmware upgrades, vendor management, intrusion detection and prevention systems (IDS/IPS) and firewall monitoring, and other specialized focus areas. And even if enterprises were willing to allot people to react to security incidents, the sheer volume of events and the time-consuming tasks of prioritizing and analyzing them often prove too much to handle.
These could be handled better by security professionals especially focused on threats — an advantage that managed detection and response (MDR) can bring to organizations. MDR provides advanced threat hunting services, faster alert prioritization, root cause analysis, detailed research, and a remediation plan that empowers organizations with better ability to respond to sophisticated attacks, examples of which have been found throughout North America for the second quarter of 2018.
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We discovered a new exploit kit we named Underminer that employs capabilities used by other exploit kits to deter researchers from tracking its activity or reverse engineering the payloads. Underminer delivers a bootkit that infects the system’s boot sectors as well as a cryptocurrency-mining malware named Hidden Mellifera. Underminer transfers malware via an encrypted transmission control protocol (TCP) tunnel and packages malicious files with a customized format similar to ROM file system format (romfs). These make the exploit kits and its payload challenging to analyze.
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by Loseway Lu Despite being around for decades, cybercriminals are still using malicious macro to deliver malware, albeit in more creative ways to make them more effective. The threat actors behind a recent case used macro in a more roundabout way, with a macro that searches for specific shortcut files in the user’s system, which…
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