Same Old yet Brand-new: New File Types Emerge in Malware Spam Attachments
By Miguel Ang and Donald Castillo As cybersecurity defenses continue to improve, cybercriminals have learned to become more creative with malware. We recently encountered threats being packaged inside old yet rarely used file types in spam campaigns. Spam continues to be a cybercriminal favorite – this old-school infection vector makes up more than 48 percent […] more…What are botnets downloading?
Spam mailshots with links to malware and bots downloading other malware are just a couple of botnet deployment scenarios. The choice of infectious payload is limited only by the imagination of the botnet operator or customer. It might be a ransomware, a banker, a miner, a backdoor, the list goes on, and you don’t need […] more…CVE-2017-0780: Denial-of-Service Vulnerability can Crash Android Messages App
by Jason Gu and Seven Shen Just about anyone can appreciate a good old meme GIF every now and then, but what if one caused your Android Messages to crash? A denial-of-service vulnerability we recently disclosed to Google can do exactly that and more. Designated as CVE-2017-0780, we’ve confirmed it to be in the latest […] more…A Rising Trend: How Attackers are Using LNK Files to Download Malware
PowerShell is a versatile command-line and shell scripting language from Microsoft that can integrate and interact with a wide array of technologies. It runs discreetly in the background, and can be used to obtain system information without an executable file. All told, it makes an attractive tool for threat actors. There were a few notable instances […] more…Spam and phishing in Q1 2017
Spam: quarterly highlights Spam from the Necurs botnet We wrote earlier about a sharp increase in the amount of spam with malicious attachments, mainly Trojan encryptors. Most of that spam was coming from the Necurs botnet, which is currently considered the world’s largest spam botnet. However, in late December 2016, the network’s activity almost ceased […] more…Malware distributors are switching to less suspicious file types
After aggressively using JavaScript email attachments to distribute malware for the past year, attackers are now switching to less suspicious file types to trick users. Last week, researchers from the Microsoft Malware Protection Center warned about a new wave of spam emails that carried malicious .LNK files inside ZIP archives. Those files had malicious PowerShell […] more…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 […] more…Great R packages for data import, wrangling, and visualization
The table below shows my favorite go-to R packages for data import, wrangling, visualization and analysis — plus a few miscellaneous tasks tossed in. The package names in the table are clickable if you want more information. To find out more about a package once you’ve installed it, type help(package = "packagename") in your R […] more…APT trends report Q1 2021
For four years, the Global Research and Analysis Team (GReAT) at Kaspersky has been publishing quarterly summaries of advanced persistent threat (APT) activity. The summaries are based on our threat intelligence research and provide a representative snapshot of what we have published and discussed in greater detail in our private APT reports. They are designed […] more…Financial Cyberthreats in 2020
2020 was challenging for everyone: companies, regulators, individuals. Due to the limitations imposed by the epidemiological situation, particular categories of users and businesses were increasingly targeted by cybercriminals. While we were adjusting to remote work and the rest of the new conditions, so were scammers. As a result, 2020 was extremely eventful in terms of digital […] more…The Tetrade: Brazilian banking malware goes global
Introduction Brazil is a well-known country with plenty of banking trojans developed by local crooks. The Brazilian criminal underground is home to some of the world’s busiest and most creative perpetrators of cybercrime. Like their counterparts’ in China and Russia, their cyberattacks have a strong local flavor, and for a long time, they limited their […] more…Pig in a poke: smartphone adware
Our support team continues to receive more and more requests from users complaining about intrusive ads on their smartphones from unknown sources. In some cases, the solution is quite simple. In others, the task is far harder: the adware plants itself in the system partition, and trying to get rid of it can lead to […] more…New Android Spyware ActionSpy Revealed via Phishing Attacks from Earth Empusa
By Ecular Xu and Joseph C. Chen While tracking Earth Empura, also known as POISON CARP/Evil Eye, we identified an undocumented Android spyware we have named ActionSpy (detected by Trend Micro as AndroidOS_ActionSpy.HRX). During the first quarter of 2020, we observed Earth Empusa’s activity targeting users in Tibet and Turkey before they extended their scope […] more…IT threat evolution Q1 2020. Statistics
These statistics are based on detection verdicts for Kaspersky products received from users who consented to providing statistical data. Quarterly figures According to Kaspersky Security Network, Kaspersky solutions blocked 726,536,269 attacks launched from online resources in 203 countries across the globe. A total of 442,039,230 unique URLs were recognized as malicious by Web Anti-Virus components. […] more…More Than 8,000 Unsecured Redis Instances Found in the Cloud
By David Fiser (Security Researcher) We discovered 8,000 Redis instances that are running unsecured in different parts of the world, even ones deployed in public clouds. These Redis instances have been found without Transport Layer Security (TLS) encryption and are not password protected. Redis, according to its developers, is originally intended to be used only […] more…Malicious Optimizer and Utility Android Apps on Google Play Communicate with Trojans that Install Malware, Perform Mobile Ad Fraud
By Lorin Wu (Mobile Threats Analyst) We recently discovered several malicious optimizer, booster, and utility apps (detected by Trend Micro as AndroidOS_BadBooster.HRX) on Google Play that are capable of accessing remote ad configuration servers that can be used for malicious purposes, perform mobile ad fraud, and download as many as 3,000 malware variants or malicious […] more…More information
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