Kaspersky Security Bulletin 2018. Top security stories
Introduction The internet is now woven into the fabric of our lives. Many people routinely bank, shop and socialize online and the internet is the lifeblood of commercial organizations. The dependence on technology of governments, businesses and consumers provides a broad attack surface for attackers with all kinds of motives – financial theft, theft of […] more…Inside of the WASP’s nest: deep dive into PyPI-hosted malware
Photo by Matheus Queiroz on Unsplash In late 2022 we decided to start monitoring PyPI, arguably the most important Python repository, as there were a number of reports on it hosting malware. PyPI took exceptional relevance amongst all repositories as, historically, it was trusted by default by many software developers. Any security breach or abuse […] more…APT43: An investigation into the North Korean group’s cybercrime operations
Introduction As recently reported by our Mandiant’s colleagues, APT43 is a threat actor believed to be associated with North Korea. APT43’s main targets include governmental institutions, research groups, think tanks, business services, and the manufacturing sector, with most victims located in the United States and South Korea. The group uses a variety of techniques and […] more…Cyberthreats to financial organizations in 2022
First of all, we are going to analyze the forecasts we made at the end of 2020 and see how accurate they were. Then we will go through the key events of 2021 relating to attacks on financial organizations. Finally, we will make some forecasts about financial attacks in 2022. Analysis of forecasts for 2021 […] 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…IT threat evolution Q2 2021
Targeted attacks The leap of a Cycldek-related threat actor It is quite common for Chinese-speaking threat actors to share tools and methodologies: one such example is the infamous “DLL side-loading triad”: a legitimate executable, a malicious DLL to be side-loaded by it and an encoded payload, generally dropped from a self-extracting archive. This was first thought to […] 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…Spam and phishing in 2020
Figures of the year In 2020: The share of spam in email traffic amounted to 50.37%, down by 6.14 p.p. from 2019. Most spam (21.27%) originated in Russia. Kaspersky solutions detected a total of 184,435,643 malicious attachments. The email antivirus was triggered most frequently by email messages containing members of the Trojan.Win32.Agentb malware family. The […] more…Cyberthreats to financial organizations in 2021
It is hard to believe that a year has gone since our last article on financial attacks and our predictions for 2020. It has been a tough one, but first things first. Let us review the forecasts we made at the end of 2019 and see how accurate we were. Then we will go through […] more…IT threat evolution Q3 2019
Targeted attacks and malware campaigns Mobile espionage targeting the Middle East At the end of June we reported the details of a highly targeted campaign that we dubbed ‘Operation ViceLeaker’ involving the spread of malicious Android samples via instant messaging. The campaign affected several dozen victims in Israel and Iran. We discovered this activity in […] more…A Closer Look at the Locky Poser, PyLocky Ransomware
by Ian Kenefick (Threats Analyst) 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), […] more…IT threat evolution Q2 2018
Targeted attacks and malware campaigns Operation Parliament In April, we reported the workings of Operation Parliament, a cyber-espionage campaign aimed at high-profile legislative, executive and judicial organizations around the world – with its main focus in the MENA (Middle East and North Africa) region, especially Palestine. The attacks, which started early in 2017, target parliaments, […] more…Cerber Version 6 Shows How Far the Ransomware Has Come (and How Far it’ll Go)
Additional analysis/insights by Alfredo Oliveira A little over a year after its first variants were found in the wild, Cerber (Detected by Trend Micro as RANSOM_CERBER family) now has the reputation for being the most prolific family of ransomware in the threat landscape. Since it first emerged in Russian underground marketplaces in March, 2016, Cerber has […] more…Spam and phishing in 2016
The year in figures According to Kaspersky Lab, in 2016: The proportion of spam in email flows was 58.31%, which is 3.03 percentage points more than in 2015. 62.16% of spam emails were no more than 2 KB in size. 12.08% of spam was sent from the US. Trojan.Win32.Bayrob was the most popular malware family […] more…Mobile Ransomware: How to Protect Against It
In our previous post, we looked at how malware can lock devices, as well as the scare tactics used to convince victims to pay the ransom. Now that we know what bad guys can do, we’ll discuss the detection and mitigation techniques that security vendors can use to stop them. By sharing these details with other […] more…More information
- MGM Resorts Says Ransomware Hack Cost $110 Million
- Use-after-free (UAF) Vulnerability CVE-2018-8373 in VBScript Engine Affects Internet Explorer to Run Shellcode
- Gatak Trojan Continues to Target Healthcare Organizations
- Resolved: University Fiber Back Haul Relocation May 14th – May 15th
- Mozilla database leaks 76,000 email addresses, 4,000 passwords
- “Crocodile of Wall Street” and her husband plead guilty to giant-sized cryptocrimes
- Restraining orders by telepresence — and why the law needs to catch up with tech
- ASUS Italy defaced – Accounts leaked
- Bad Romance: Social Media Influence and Teen Relationships
- OCZ files for bankruptcy; Toshiba offers to buy most of its assets