Security | Threat Detection | Cyberattacks | DevSecOps | Compliance

The Windows kernel driver is an interesting space that falls between persistence and privilege escalation. The origins of a vulnerable driver being used to elevate privileges may have begun in the gaming community as a way to hack or cheat in games, but also has potential beginnings with Stuxnet.

In late 2022, SafeBreach commissioned S&P Global Market Intelligence to conduct a research project surveying 400 highly qualified security practitioners across the United States and Europe. The goal was to understand respondents’ biggest security challenges, the level of adoption and maturity of the continuous security validation (CSV) tools they use to address those challenges, and the business outcomes they achieved.

Anticipation leads people to suspend their better judgment as a new campaign of credential theft exploits a person’s excitement about the newest AI systems not yet available to the general public. On Tuesday morning, April 11th, Veriti explained that several unknown actors are making false Facebook ads which advertise a free download of AIs like ChatGPT and Google Bard.

Researchers at Securonix are tracking an ongoing phishing campaign dubbed “TACTICAL#OCTOPUS” that’s been targeting users in the US with tax-related phishing emails.

In this blog post, we’ll provide a detailed analysis of a malicious payload we’ve dubbed “Impala Stealer”, a custom crypto stealer which was used as the payload for the NuGet malicious packages campaign we’ve exposed in our previous post. The sophisticated campaign targeted.NET developers via NuGet malicious packages, and the JFrog Security team was able to detect and report it as part of our regular activity of exposing supply chain attacks.

In this blog post, the KrakenLabs team will take a deep dive into a malware sample classified as LummaC2, an information stealer written in C language that has been sold in underground forums since December 2022. We assess LummaC2’s primary workflow, its different obfuscation techniques (like Windows API hashing and encoded strings) and how to overcome them to effectively analyze the malware with ease.

The FBI’s newly-released report shows just how ransomware continues to plague critical infrastructure sectors, despite the U.S. government’s recent efforts to stop these attacks. You’ll probably recall the news about ransomware attacking the Colonial Pipeline and other U.S. critical infrastructure (CI) to the point that the government was stepping up their efforts to stop these attacks and even conducting congressional hearings on what to do about the problem.

The first quarter of 2023 was the best quarter we’ve seen for the ransomware industry in a long time, even exceeding Q1 2022. With 831 victims, Q1 2023’s victim count was much higher than the first quarter of 2022, with just 763 victims. Unsurprisingly, LockBit3.0 remained the number one group claiming an average of around 23 victims per week and almost 33% of all ransomware cases this quarter.

In early March, one of the notorious botnets, Emotet, resumed its spamming activities after a 3-month period of inactivity. Recently, Trustwave SpiderLabs saw Emotet switch focus to using OneNote attachments, which is a tactic also adopted by other malware groups in recent months. This analysis is intended to help the cybersecurity community better understand the wider obfuscation and padding tricks Emotet is using.