Cybercriminals make use of old file types in brand-new ways in spam attachments, proving that they are regularly experimenting to evade spam filters.
Read More We recently found a malware that abuses two legitimate Windows files — the command line utility wmic.exe and certutil.exe, a program that manages certificates for Windows — to download its payload onto the victim’s device. What’s notable about these files is that they are also used to download other files as part of its normal set of features, making them susceptible to abuse for malicious purposes.
Read More 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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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.
Read MoreThe Cobalt hacking group was one of the first to promptly and actively exploit CVE-2017-11882 (patched last November) in their cybercriminal campaigns. We uncovered several others following suit in early December, delivering a plethora of threats that included Pony/FAREIT, FormBook, ZBOT, and Ursnif. Another stood out to us: a recent campaign that used the same vulnerability to install a “cracked” version of the information-stealing Loki.
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