December 2020, the weeks before Christmas, saw an increase in reported malware activity that culminated most prominently in the Sunburst Trojan attacks - events that are still developing as of today. As we were asserting our readiness to respond to new threats under our watch, we identified a suspicious executable being copied to a remote network share.
There's every indication that the pandemic is changing the nature of cybersecurity. Online threats are evolving to match our new remote-work paradigm, with 91% of businesses reporting an increase in cyberattacks during the coronavirus outbreak. Hackers are getting more and more sophisticated and targeted in their attacks. Many of these cyber threats have been around for a while, but they are becoming harder for the average user to detect. Beware of these four common types of cyber threats - and learn what you can do to prevent them.
In their attempt to extort as much money as quickly as possible out of companies, ransomware gangs know some effective techniques to get the full attention of a firm’s management team. And one of them is to specifically target the sensitive information stored on the computers used by a company’s top executives, in the hope of finding valuable data that can best pressure bosses into approving the payment of a sizeable ransom.
Additionally, the Ezuri memory loader tool acts as a malware loader and executes its payload in memory, without writing the file to disk. While this technique is known and commonly used by Windows malware, it is less popular in Linux environments. The loader decrypts the malicious malware and executes it using memfd create (as described in this blog in 2018).
Visual Basic (VB) and its derivatives - VBA and VBScript - are common attack vectors when targeting Windows systems. These languages allow users and attackers alike to complete security-sensitive tasks such as accessing the internet, running command-line instructions and editing the Registry.
As if dealing with COVID-19 were not enough, 2020 turned out to be a banner year for another troublesome strain of virus— ransomware. Malicious actors grew more sophisticated, daring and brutal. They also hit a number of high-profile targets. For those of you who didn’t keep up with all of the developments in the ransomware space, we’ve broken down some of the most important events and trends of the year here.
Adrozek is a malicious browser modifier that, when installed on users’ machines, infects them with adware. This particular strain of malware has been making rounds since May 2020; according to Microsoft, it was at its peak in August, when as many as 30,000 computers were affected per day. Although classified as adware, Adrozek is also designed to collect information extracted from browsers by modifying browser settings and extensions.
First identified in late 2016, 'Trickbot' evolved from being a well-established banking trojan into a malware-as-a-service (MaaS) threat utilized by both cybercriminals and nation-state threat actors for predominantly financially motivated campaigns. Supporting modular components, Trickbot campaigns will differ based on the requirements of the MaaS 'customer' with many being used to steal personal and financial data as well as deploying ransomware threats, such as 'Conti' and 'Ryuk', to victims.
