Meet Shathak – a threat group tied to malware used in the Russian-speaking underground targeting enterprises across different sectors in the Americas, Europe and Asia

Ransomware and other malicious threats have become commonplace around the globe. But the reality is, whether it be encrypted records, stolen email credentials, or exfiltrated financial statements, these incidents generally involve a limited number of individuals or groups. Before your feathers are completely ruffled, understand that by no means am I minimizing the impact cybercriminals can have on a business. But have you considered attacks of greater scale? Perhaps those that affect the populus?

TeamTNT is a prevalent threat actor who has been targeting cloud and virtual environments such as Kubernetes and Docker since at least late 2019. This threat actor is financially motivated, focusing their efforts on stealing credentials and cryptomining. In 2020, we analyzed their use of Weave Scope on an unsecured Docker API endpoint exposed to the internet. In December 2021, we attributed an attack to TeamTNT in which they targeted a vulnerable WordPress pod to steal AWS credentials.

Anyone who has watched the Lockpicking Lawyer realizes that certain locks promoted as the latest-and-greatest aren’t necessarily the most reliable devices for securing physical assets. Like many other security professionals, he seeks to educate consumers and manufacturers on defects in devices and how to improve their security. It reminds me of a quote by Deviant Ollam (security auditor and penetration testing consultant): "Security is achieved through openness.

Lampion is a banking trojan with a particular predisposition to targeting Portuguese-speaking users (and exploiting cloud services). First documented in December 2019, the malware has gone through multiple releases, characterized by a number of different mechanisms to deliver the initial VBS (Visual Basic Script Loader). All the different variants have an element in common, the malware is distributed abusing legitimate cloud services throughout different stages of the attack chain.

Throughout the first half of 2022, Vedere Labs published analyses of prominent ransomware families, such as Conti, Night Sky and ALPHV. We also examined well-known ransomware incidents such as the attacks on the NFL’s SF 49ers by the BlackByte group; on a UK water utility, where the Clop gang managed to access their SCADA system; and on an NHSsoftware provider, where an unknown group managed to disrupt healthcare services in the UK for weeks.

The Arctic Wolf Labs team recently investigated a Lorenz ransomware intrusion, which leveraged a Mitel MiVoice VoIP appliance vulnerability (CVE-2022-29499) for initial access and Microsoft’s BitLocker Drive Encryption for data encryption. Lorenz is a ransomware group that has been active since at least February 2021 and like many ransomware groups, performs double-extortion by exfiltrating data before encrypting systems.

In our companion blog post, Vedere Labs analyzed the main ransomware trends we observed in the first half of 2022, including state-sponsored ransomware, new mainstream targets and evolving extortion techniques. Ransomware is the main threat targeting most organizations nowadays. However, three other notable cyberthreat trends also evolved during this period: Below we analyze each of these trends in more detail.

Modern organizations are built on data. It enables collaboration and helps us engage with customers. But that same helpful data is also sprawled across countless apps, making it difficult to secure. Ransomware attacks are on the rise — 57% of security leaders expect ransomware to compromise their organization within the next year — which makes data protection more essential than ever.