Tag: Threat Watch – Binary Defense

Flaw in Exchange Allows Attackers to Easily Execute Code:

Microsoft patched around 99 important/critical vulnerabilities in their most recent February Patch Tuesday. Among those vulnerabilities was a critical vulnerability (CVE-2020-0688) affecting all versions of Microsoft Exchange, which allows attackers to remotely execute code through ViewState.  ViewState is server-side data…

Iranian APT Behind ForeLord Malware

Iran: A new malware that has been dubbed ForLord was found targeting government officials and corporations from mid-2019 to January 2020. The malware was distributed through emails and targeted corporations in the countries of Turkey, Jordan, and Iraq. Government officials…

SQL Dump Shared on Hacker Forum

A large SQL dump was found by the team at Under the Breach that contained about 21.5 GB of uncompressed data from at least two different sites. The SQL, which is a method of communicating with a database, were obtained…

IMP4GT Attack Targets 4G Networks

Ruhur-Universität Bochum researchers have seen a new attack that targets 4G networks and allows attackers to operate as a user. Research reveals that IMP4GT affects any device that uses LTE to communicate, including phones, tablets, and other IoT devices. Two…

New “ObliqueRAT” Targeting Southeast Asia

Researchers at Cisco Talos have come across a new RAT (Remote Access Trojan) that they are calling ObliqueRAT. The new RAT appears to be targeting Southeast Asian organizations through attached Word documents with macros. Cisco Talos also believes there may…

Google Patches Chrome Zero-Day Being Actively Exploited

Google has released a Chrome update that patches three different security bugs, including a zero-day vulnerability that has been actively exploited. Google has not made any details of the active exploitation of the zero-day public though. The only detail being…

DopplePaymer Actors Set up Public Site to Post Data:

Just like the Maze ransomware authors, the DopplePaymer ransomware authors have created a public site to post victim’s data should they refuse to pay the ransom. This site should serve as a motivator for companies hit by DopplePaymer to pay…

Mexico’s Economy Ministry Involved in Cyber-attack

Mexico’s economy ministry detected a cyber-attack on February 23, 2020. The servers that were targeted in the attack did not contain any sensitive information. After the attack was discovered, security measures were increased to prevent future attacks. It was not…

Mozart Malware Hides Traffic

Discovered by MalwareHunterTeam, a new backdoor malware, called Mozart, has been found using DNS protocol to communicate with remote attackers to evade detection by security software. Normally when a malware communicates for commands, it does over HTTP/S protocols for ease…

More Than 123 Million Records Leaked by Decathlon

The France-based sports retailer Decathlon noticed recently that over 123 million records that included customer and employee information were exposed through a misconfigured database. A 9GB database on an Elasticsearch server was discovered by researchers at vpnMentor. From observations by…

Defense Information Systems Agency Suffers Data Breach

The Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA) announced that it was the subject of a significant data breach. DISA provides IT support and services to the White House, the President and Vice-President, US Secret Service, Joint Chiefs of Staff and more.…

Slickwraps Breached, Customer and Employee Data Exposed

Slickwraps, a store for creating custom “skins” for mobile devices, consoles and more have recently alerted customers to a data breach. After finding a path traversal vulnerability with the image uploader used for designing skins, Twitter user @Lynx0x00 (whose account…

Critical Vulnerabilities in Honeywell Fire Alarm Systems

Honeywell released a firmware update to patch two vulnerabilities in the NOTI-FIRE-NET Web Server (NWS-3) product. One of the vulnerabilities, identified as CVE-2020-6972, allows an attacker to bypass the authentication system to gain access to the administration dashboard and control…

ISS World Suffers Ransomware Attack

The integrated facility services provider ISS World recently suffered a cyber-attack that caused its websites to go down for a few days and disrupted email services. It was reported that the attack left nearly 43,000 UK staff without email access.…

Ring Doorbell Forces Two-Factor Authentication

The Ring doorbell camera system has become one of the most popular home security add-ons in recent years, but some people have questioned the security of the Internet of Things (IoT) devices. On Feb 18th, Ring president Leila Rouhi published…

WP-VCD Botnet Now Injecting Anti-Adblocker Scripts

WP-VCD is a WordPress botnet that has been around since early 2017. It is able to create backdoor accounts, spread to other installed themes, redirect visitors, inject ads, and add command and control capabilities to a victim’s site. Ad revenue…

Adobe Patches Two Critical Arbitrary Code Execution Vulnerabilities:

In an out-of-schedule patch, Adobe patched an out-of-bounds write for Adobe After Effects (CVE-2020-3765). This critical vulnerability affects Adobe After Effects versions 16.1.2 and earlier.  Additionally, Adobe patched another out-of-bounds write for Adobe Media Encoder. This critical vulnerability affects Adobe…

Dharma Ransomware Attacks Italian Users

Security researchers JAMESWT, TG soft and reecdeep have found new malicious spam (malspam) email campaign delivering ransomware that is currently targeting Italian Windows users. The Dharma ransomware is a variant of another ransomware family called Crysis. Dharma has been active…

Fox Kitten Targeting VPN Providers to Install Backdoors

Iran: A significant number of security bugs were disclosed last year pertaining to major VPN providers such as Pulse Secure, Palo Alto, Fortinet, and Citrix. A new report indicates that the Iranian government took notice of those vulnerabilities and set…

LokiBot Impersonating Epic Games Launcher

Researchers at Trend Micro have recently discovered a LokiBot variant disguising itself as the Epic Games Launcher. The variant uses the open source NSIS (Nullsoft Scriptable Install System) to create an installer application with the Epic Games logo to convince…

At Least 13 Companies Targeted by new Phishing Attacks

The researchers at MalwareHunterTeam have discovered a new phishing campaign targeting at least 13 companies, some of them very well known. This new campaign uses SLK (Symbolic Link) file attachments that are used by the Microsoft Excel program to share…

Persistent Android Trojan xHelper Now Removable

Several months ago, the Android Trojan “xHelper” infected tens of thousands of devices, and was unable to be removed even after a factory reset of the phone. With the help of the user “misspaperwait,” Malwarebytes was recently able to discover…

Altice USA Breach

Altice USA Inc, provider of Optimum cable television and internet services in the New York tri-state area, can now be included in the long list of companies that have become victims of phishing scams. An official from the company states…

MoleRATs Working on Two Active Campaigns

MoleRATs: The Arabic speaking threat actor known as MoleRATs, which is part of a trio of groups, is believed to be behind two recent campaigns tracked by researchers from the Cybereason Nocturnus team. The first campaign is called Spark and…

Cloud-Based App Exposes Inmate’s Data

On January 3rd, researchers from VPNMentor uncovered an unsecured Amazon Web Services Simple Storage Service (S3) bucket, owned by JailCore, a cloud-based app used by multiple US correctional facilities. Anyone could access the files stored on the S3 bucket using…

KPOT Virus Infects Executable Files on Disk

The cybersecurity company Kaspersky has discovered a new virus, dubbed KPOT. KPOT is the first true computer virus in recent years—most infections tend to fall into other categories of malware. The term “virus” is often used interchangeably with “malware,” but…

Outlaw Group Updates Toolkit

Outlaw: Researchers from Trend Micro have identified that after a few months of silence, the Outlaw crypto-mining group has returned. The group was last seen in June 2019, when they were using a similar toolkit to carry out attacks. In…

New PayPal Scam Seen in the Wild

Recent observations by researchers have revealed a new PayPal phishing email scam that attempts to obtain data, including Social Security numbers (SSN). Potential victims receive an email that states their account has been locked. Within the email is a bit.ly…

New Android Bluetooth Vulnerability Allows Silent Code Execution

Last November, the security company ERNW reported a critical vulnerability that affected Android’s implementation of Bluetooth. The vulnerability, dubbed “BlueFrag,” has been assigned CVE-2020-0022 and affects Android versions 8 and 9. Although Android 10 is technically affected, the exploit currently…

Metamorfo Malware Returns to Target the Finance Industry

In April 2018, researchers first discovered the Metamorfo malware in various campaigns. The malware initially targeted Brazilian companies in the finance industry. Recently a new campaign to deliver the malware expanded its geographic range and added a keylogger function. The…

Iranian APT 35 Group Posing as Journalist to Phish Victims

IRAN: The Iranian-backed threat group known as APT35 or Charming Kitten has recently used phishing email messages claiming to be a journalist to trick victims. The phishing campaign targets political figures and human rights activists, attempting to lure them into…

Emotet Evolves With Wi-Fi Spreader

While tracking Emotet activity, Binary Defense’s analysts found that Emotet dropped a Wi-Fi spreader that used brute-force password guessing, contained inside a self-extracting RAR file. Inside the RAR file were two files, worm.exe and service.exe, which were used to spread…

Members of Anonymous Hack UN Website to Support Taiwan

Anonymous: Members of the hacktivist collective Anonymous targeted a website belonging to the United Nations (UN). The specific page which was defaced was the UN’s Economic and Social Council web page. The group defaced the website with the Taiwanese flag,…

New “SaveTheQueen” Ransomware Found

New ransomware using the extension “.SaveTheQueen” was found in December by Twitter user @malwrhunterteam. To spread and track the infection, an attacker used the SYSVOL share on the domain controller by creating a scheduled task and creating log files for…

APT Gamaredon Improves Toolset

Gamaredon: A new report released by Sentinel Labs has illustrated how the well-known pro-Russian Advanced Persistent Threat (APT) Gamaredon has improved their toolkits in previous months to continue their campaigns. Attacks from the group have ramped up against Ukrainian national…

BitBucket Abused for Viruses

Researchers from Cybereason have discovered seven types of malware threats being hosted on the code hosting service Bitbucket. Cybercriminals use legitimate hosting services hoping to look less suspicious and infect more systems. They trick unsuspecting victims into downloading these viruses…

Sodinokibi Operators Sponsor Hacking Competition

A Russian-speaking cybercriminal forum has recently announced a forum-wide competition with a $15k prize pool up for grabs sponsored by operators of the Sodinokibi ransomware. First place in the competition gets $5,000, with the prize decreasing by $1,000 for second…

Racine Computer Systems Taken Down by Ransomware

The City of Racine’s city website, email system, and online payment system were all knocked offline by ransomware early Friday morning.  While the city’s Management Information Systems department worked Friday to determine the extent of the infection and began to…

Building Access Control Systems Actively Being Attacked

The Linear eMerge E3 building access system, created by Linear Solutions, has an unpatched vulnerability that was first announced in May 2019, identified as CVE-2019-7256. In November 2019, code that provided a proof-of-concept exploit was released publicly. Now, researchers from…

TA505 Returns From Hiatus

TA505: Researchers from Microsoft have seen the threat group TA505 return from a short break of no activity. Since 2014, the financially motivated threat group has been notorious for spreading remote access trojans (RAT) to compromise retailers and large financial…

Trickbot Evolves with new RDP scanner:

Trickbot has evolved again with a new module, called rdpscanDll, which allows computers infected with Trickbot to scan other systems on the network for Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP) access. As there have been several critical RDP vulnerabilities released recently, this…

Emotet Using Coronavirus Fears as a Lure

Emotet, the highly prolific and sophisticated botnet, has recently started using email templates posing as a Kyoto Coronavirus notification. The templates are used to send malicious email messages from infected computers to spread the botnet. The email messages contain malware…

Netflix Scammers

The email security firm MailGuard has intercepted an email that claims to be from the popular streaming service Netflix. This new email appears to be from Netflix and states that the user’s “billing information has been modified,” attempting to trick…

Ryuk Stealer Updated to Target More Files

Twitter user @malwrhunterteam recently discovered an updated version of the “Ryuk Stealer” malware. Ryuk Stealer automatically searches for and steals files from infected computers. It is thought to be related to Ryuk ransomware because it shares some code similarities, but…

Maze Ransomware Operators Leak More Stolen Data

The Maze Ransomware operators have kept their promise to leak data after not collecting their ransom payments. Medical Diagnostics Laboratories (MDLab) was reported to be infected on December 2nd, 2019 and they have refused to pay the 200 Bitcoin ransom…

TrickBot Starts the Year off With New Tricks

TrickBot, a well-known banking trojan, uses a series of modules to accomplish a wide variety of tasks.  Some examples of modules are wormWinDll, which uses EternalBlue to spread through a network by exploiting unpatched Windows computers, and DomainDll which steals…

Sodinokibi Operators Threaten Another Victim

Sodinokibi has struck again, this time threatening to release stolen data from GEDIA Automotive Group. In previous threats, the group tried to use GDPR as a motivator for victims to pay the ransom. This latest post makes no such threat,…

sLoad 2.0 Malware

After details of the sLoad malware were exposed in a Microsoft report last month, the authors of the malware have released a new version this month, dubbed Starslord or sLoad 2.0. The new variant doesn’t change much but it does…

Mitsubishi Electric Discloses Cyber-Attack

Mitsubishi Electric, which manufactures electronic goods ranging from household items to defense equipment, announced that they were the victims of a cyber-attack sometime last year. The intrusion came to light for the company last June when it detected unauthorized access…

FTCode Ransomware Updates, Now Steals Credentials

FTCode, a PowerShell-based ransomware originally found in 2013 by researchers at Sophos has recently resurfaced with an update. Because this ransomware is entirely script-based, no other components are required, and no further downloads are made. This also makes it simple…

JhoneRAT Targeting Middle East

Middle East: A new Remote Access Trojan (RAT) has been identified by researchers at Talos that is using malicious Word documents to target people in the Middle East who speak Arabic. The threat actor behind this campaign is using a…

Over 500,000 Server, Router and IoT Passwords Leaked

A cybercriminal has published a list of Telnet credentials on a popular hacking forum that contains more than 515,000 credentials for servers, home routers, and IoT smart devices. Telnet is an insecure remote access protocol that allows the administration of…

WeLeakInfo Domain Seized:

On Thursday, January 16th, 2020 the FBI and US Department of Justice announced that they had seized the internet domain name WeLeakInfo.com.  The website served as a breach notification service, similar to HaveIBeenPwned, with one key difference.  Unlike HaveIBeenPwned, WeLeakInfo…

PlanetDrugsDirect Security Breach

The Canadian online pharmacy PlanetDrugsDirect is notifying its customers of a data breach that impacted some personal and financial information. The company is a member of the Canadian International Pharmacy Association (CIPA) and has both Canadian and US customers.  The…

Remote Desktop Vulnerable to Remote Code Execution

Microsoft had a particularly important Patch Tuesday this week. Not only were flaws found in the CryptoAPI library, but arguably more severe flaws were found with the Remote Desktop Client and Gateway that allow for unauthenticated remote code execution. CVE-2020-0609…

Texas School District Phished for $2.3 Million

The Manor Independent School District in Texas revealed that an investigation has begun into a series of phishing emails sent to multiple employees that eventually resulted in a loss of $2.3 million USD.  While multiple employees received emails requesting money…

China APT40 Using Front Companies to Hire Hackers

China (APT 40): Reports from two researchers calling themselves Intrusion Truth state that they have found evidence to link APT40 and other Chinese APT activity to job postings that are a front for companies to hire hackers. While looking through…