Written by: Muhammad Umair Here at Mandiant FLARE, malware reverse engineering is a regular part of our day jobs. At times we are required to perform basic triages on binaries, where every hour saved is critical to incident response timelines.…
Category: Threat Intelligence
Bridging the Gap: Elevating Red Team Assessments with Application Security Testing
Written by: Ilyass El Hadi, Louis Dion-Marcil, Charles Prevost < div class=”block-paragraph_advanced”> Executive Summary Whether through a comprehensive Red Team engagement or a targeted external assessment, incorporating application security (AppSec) expertise enables organizations to better simulate the tactics and techniques of…
(QR) Coding My Way Out of Here: C2 in Browser Isolation Environments
Written by: Thibault Van Geluwe de Berlaere Executive Summary Browser isolation is a security technology where web browsing activity is separated from the user’s local device by running the browser in a secure environment, such as a cloud server or…
Pirates in the Data Sea: AI Enhancing Your Adversarial Emulation
Matthijs Gielen, Jay Christiansen < div class=”block-paragraph_advanced”> Background New solutions, old problems. Artificial intelligence (AI) and large language models (LLMs) are here to signal a new day in the cybersecurity world, but what does that mean for us—the attackers and…
Emerging Threats: Cybersecurity Forecast 2025
Every November, we start sharing forward-looking insights on threats and other cybersecurity topics to help organizations and defenders prepare for the year ahead. The Cybersecurity Forecast 2025 report, available today, plays a big role in helping us accomplish this mission.…
Flare-On 11 Challenge Solutions
Written by: Nick Harbour The eleventh Flare-On challenge is now over! This year proved to be a tough challenge for the over 5,300 players, with only 275 completing all 10 stages. We had a blast making this contest and are…
(In)tuned to Takeovers: Abusing Intune Permissions for Lateral Movement and Privilege Escalation in Entra ID Native Environments
Written by: Thibault Van Geluwe de Berlaere, Karl Madden, Corné de Jong < div class=”block-paragraph_advanced”>The Mandiant Red Team recently supported a client to visualize the possible impact of a compromise by an advanced threat actor. During the assessment, Mandiant moved…
Hybrid Russian Espionage and Influence Campaign Aims to Compromise Ukrainian Military Recruits and Deliver Anti-Mobilization Narratives
In September 2024, Google Threat Intelligence Group (consisting of Google’s Threat Analysis Group (TAG) and Mandiant) discovered UNC5812, a suspected Russian hybrid espionage and influence operation, delivering Windows and Android malware using a Telegram persona named “Civil Defense”. “Civil Defense”…
Investigating FortiManager Zero-Day Exploitation (CVE-2024-47575)
Written by: Foti Castelan, Max Thauer, JP Glab, Gabby Roncone, Tufail Ahmed, Jared Wilson < div class=”block-paragraph_advanced”> Summary In October 2024, Mandiant collaborated with Fortinet to investigate the mass exploitation of FortiManager appliances across 50+ potentially compromised FortiManager devices in…
How Low Can You Go? An Analysis of 2023 Time-to-Exploit Trends
Written by: Casey Charrier, Robert Weiner < div class=”block-paragraph_advanced”>Mandiant analyzed 138 vulnerabilities that were disclosed in 2023 and that we tracked as exploited in the wild. Consistent with past analyses, the majority (97) of these vulnerabilities were exploited as zero-days…
capa Explorer Web: A Web-Based Tool for Program Capability Analysis
Written by: Soufiane Fariss, Willi Ballenthin, Mike Hunhoff, Genwei Jiang, Tina Johnson, Moritz Raabe capa, developed by Mandiant’s FLARE team, is a reverse engineering tool that automates the identification of program capabilities. In this blog post we introduce capa Explorer…
LummaC2: Obfuscation Through Indirect Control Flow
Written by: Nino Isakovic, Chuong Dong Overview This blog post delves into the analysis of a control flow obfuscation technique employed by recent LummaC2 (LUMMAC.V2) stealer samples. In addition to the traditional control flow flattening technique used in older versions, the…
Staying a Step Ahead: Mitigating the DPRK IT Worker Threat
Written by: Codi Starks, Michael Barnhart, Taylor Long, Mike Lombardi, Joseph Pisano, Alice Revelli Strategic Overview of IT Workers Since 2022, Mandiant has tracked and reported on IT workers operating on behalf of the Democratic People’s Republic of North Korea…
UNC1860 and the Temple of Oats: Iran’s Hidden Hand in Middle Eastern Networks
Written by: Stav Shulman, Matan Mimran, Sarah Bock, Mark Lechtik < div class=”block-paragraph_advanced”> Executive Summary UNC1860 is a persistent and opportunistic Iranian state-sponsored threat actor that is likely affiliated with Iran’s Ministry of Intelligence and Security (MOIS). A key feature…
An Offer You Can Refuse: UNC2970 Backdoor Deployment Using Trojanized PDF Reader
Written by: Marco Galli, Diana Ion, Yash Gupta, Adrian Hernandez, Ana Martinez Gomez, Jon Daniels, Christopher Gardner < div class=”block-paragraph_advanced”> Introduction In June 2024, Mandiant Managed Defense identified a cyber espionage group suspected to have a North Korea nexus, tracked…
Announcing the 11th Annual Flare-On Challenge
Written by: Nick Harbour When it’s pumpkin spice season, that means it’s also Flare-On Challenge season. The Flare-On Challenge is a reverse engineering contest held every year by the FLARE team, and this marks its eleventh year running. It draws…
Protecting Multi-Cloud Resources in the Era of Modern Cloud-Based Cyberattacks
Written by: Rupa Mukherjee, Jon Sabberton In the era of multi-cloud adoption, where organizations leverage diverse cloud platforms to optimize their operations, a new wave of security challenges have emerged. The expansion of attack surfaces beyond traditional on-premises environments, coupled…
Insights on Cyber Threats Targeting Users and Enterprises in Mexico
Written by: Aurora Blum, Kelli Vanderlee Like many countries across the globe, Mexico faces a cyber threat landscape made up of a complex interplay of global and local threats, with threat actors carrying out attempted intrusions into critical sectors of…
DeFied Expectations — Examining Web3 Heists
Written by: Robert Wallace, Blas Kojusner, Joseph Dobson Where money goes, crime follows. The rapid growth of Web3 has presented new opportunities for threat actors, especially in decentralized finance (DeFi), where the heists are larger and more numerous than anything…
A Measure of Motive: How Attackers Weaponize Digital Analytics Tools
Adrian McCabe, Ryan Tomcik, Stephen Clement < div class=”block-paragraph_advanced”> Introduction Digital analytics tools are vital components of the vast domain that is modern cyberspace. From system administrators managing traffic load balancers to marketers and advertisers working to deliver relevant content…