Since around October 2016, JPCERT/CC has been confirming emails that are sent to Japanese organisations with a ZIP file attachment containing executable files. The targeted emails, which impersonate existing persons, are sent from free email address services available in Japan. Also, the executable files’ icons are disguised as Word documents. When the recipient executes the file, the machine is infected with malware called ChChes. This blog article will introduce characteristics of ChChes, including its communication.

This blog post continues discussion about the CCleaner supply chain attack.

This post provides information related to supply chain infections.

Researchers from the IBM X-Force Incident Response and Intelligence Services (IRIS) team identified a missing link in the operations of a threat actor involved in recent Shamoon malware attacks against Gulf state organizations. These attacks, which occurred in November 2016 and January 2017, reportedly affected thousands of computers across multiple government and civil organizations in Saudi Arabia and elsewhere in Gulf states. Shamoon is designed to destroy computer hard drives by wiping the master boot record (MBR) and data irretrievably, unlike ransomware, which holds the data hostage for a fee.

In this blog we will detail our discovery of the next two versions of MM Core, namely “BigBoss” (2.2-LNK) and “SillyGoose” (2.3-LNK). Attacks using “BigBoss” appear likely to have occurred since mid-2015, whereas “SillyGoose” appears to have been distributed since September 2016. Both versions still appear to be active.

In late February 2017, FireEye as a Service (FaaS) identified a spear phishing campaign that appeared to be targeting personnel involved with United States Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) filings at various organizations. Based on multiple identified overlaps in infrastructure and the use of similar tools, tactics, and procedures (TTPs), we have high confidence that this campaign is associated with the financially motivated threat group tracked by FireEye as FIN7.

FireEye recently observed a sophisticated campaign targeting individuals within the Mongolian government. Targeted individuals that enabled macros in a malicious Microsoft Word document may have been infected with Poison Ivy, a popular remote access tool (RAT) that has been used for nearly a decade for key logging, screen and video capture, file transfers, password theft, system administration, traffic relaying, and more.

This blog post offers insight into the New ICS Attack Framework “Triton”

Cyber espionage actors, now designated by FireEye as APT32 (OceanLotus Group), are carrying out intrusions into private sector companies across multiple industries and have also targeted foreign governments, dissidents, and journalists. FireEye assesses that APT32 leverages a unique suite of fully-featured malware, in conjunction with commercially-available tools, to conduct targeted operations that are aligned with Vietnamese state interests.

FireEye recently detected a malicious Microsoft Office RTF document that leveraged CVE-2017-8759, a SOAP WSDL parser code injection vulnerability. This vulnerability allows a malicious actor to inject arbitrary code during the parsing of SOAP WSDL definition contents. FireEye analyzed a Microsoft Word document where attackers used the arbitrary code injection to download and execute a Visual Basic script that contained PowerShell commands. FireEye shared the details of the vulnerability with Microsoft and has been coordinating public disclosure timed with the release of a patch to address the vulnerability and security guidance, which can be found here.

This blog post takes a look at APT29 Domain Fronting with Tor.

This report offers insight into the Win32/Industroyer a new threat for industrial control systems.

The latest Petya-like outbreak has gathered a lot of attention from the media. However, it should be noted that this was not an isolated incident: this is the latest in a series of similar attacks in Ukraine. This blogpost reveals many details about the Diskcoder.C (aka ExPetr, PetrWrap, Petya, or NotPetya) outbreak and related information about previously unpublished attacks.

Herein we release our analysis of a previously undocumented backdoor that has been targeted against embassies and consulates around the world leads us to attribute it, with high confidence, to the Turla group. Turla is a notorious group that has been targeting governments, government officials and diplomats for years. They are known to run watering hole and spearphishing campaigns to better pinpoint their targets. Although this backdoor has been actively deployed since at least 2016, it has not been documented anywhere. Based on strings found in the samples we analyzed, we have named this backdoor “Gazer”.

“The Turla espionage group has been targeting various institutions for many years. Recently, we found several new versions of Carbon, a second stage backdoor in the Turla group arsenal. Last year, a technical analysis of this component was made by Swiss GovCERT.ch as part of their report detailing the attack that a defense firm owned by the Swiss government, RUAG, suffered in the past. This blog post highlights the technical innovations that we found in the latest versions of Carbon we have discovered.”

In mid-November 2017, the Dragos, Inc. team discovered ICS-tailored malware deployed against at least one victim in the Middle East. The team identifies this malware as TRISIS because it targets Schneider Electric’s Triconex safety instrumented system (SIS) enabling the replacement of logic in final control elements. TRISIS is highly targeted and likely does not pose an immediate threat to other Schneider Electric customers, let alone other SIS products. Importantly, the malware leverages no inherent vulnerability in Schneider Electric products. However, this capability, methodology, and tradecraft in this very specific event may now be replicated by other adversaries and thus represents an addition to industrial asset owner and operators’ threat models.

Dragos, Inc. was notified by the Slovak anti-virus firm ESET of an ICS tailored malware on June 8th, 2017. The Dragos team was able to use this notification to find samples of the malware, identify new functionality and impact scenarios, and confirm that this was the malware employed in the December 17th, 2016 cyber-attack on the Kiev, Ukraine transmission substation which resulted in electric grid operations impact. This report serves as an industry report to inform the electric sector and security community of the potential implications of this malware and the appropriate details to have a nuanced discussion.

“In my previous blog I posted details of a cyber attack targeting Indian government organizations. This blog post describes another attack campaign where attackers used the Uri terror attack and Kashmir protest themed spear phishing emails to target officials in the Indian Embassies and Indian Ministry of External Affairs (MEA). In order to infect the victims, the attackers distributed spear-phishing emails containing malicious word document which dropped a malware capable of spying on infected systems. The email purported to have been sent from legitimate email ids. The attackers spoofed the email ids associated with Indian Ministry of Home Affairs to send out email to the victims. Attackers also used the name of the top-ranking official associated with Minister of Home affairs in the signature of the email, this is to make it look like the email was sent by a high-ranking Government official associated with Ministry of Home Affairs (MHA).”

“In my previous blog posts I described attack campaigns targeting Indian government organizations, and Indian Embassies and Ministry of External affairs. In this blog post I describe a new attack campaign where cyber espionage group targeted the users of Mazagon Dock Shipbuilders Limited (also called as ship builder to the nation). Mazagon Dock Shipbuilders Limited (MDL) is a Public Sector Undertaking of Government of India (Ministry of Defence) and it specializes in manufacturing warships and submarines for the Indian Navy.”

“In my previous blog posts I posted details of cyber attacks targeting Indian Ministry of External Affairs and Indian Navy’s Warship and Submarine Manufacturer. This blog post describes another attack campaign where attackers impersonated identity of Indian think tank IDSA (Institute for Defence Studies and Analyses) and sent out spear-phishing emails to target officials of the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) and possibly the officials of Indian Army.”

“In an effort to expose a common problem we see happening in the industry, Cylance® would like to shed some light on just how easy it is to fake attribution. The key factor we should focus on, as an industry, is determining HOW an attacker can take down an organization, rather than focusing only on the WHO. Once we can identify how the attack happened, we can focus on what’s really important – prevention.”