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The group behind BlackCat ransomware seem to be following some good business practices as they have launched a new variant with improved performance (faster encryption) and detection evasion. First identified in February of 2023 the new variant has been given some extra attention after an update to this flavor was seen in April. BlackCat is notable as being the first ransomware written in Rust identified in the wild.

A couple of days ago an email was sent to me about a new tool kit being sold on the darker side of the internet. The claim what that this new tool could kill the processes behind “any” AV, EDR, or XDR running on Windows 7 and newer. The same email included a link to what was supposed to be proof of its efficacy. I opened the link in a sandbox on a controlled VM just to be sure the link was not malicious all on its own. What I saw was nothing all that new, although it was a bit worrying.

This one goes in both the “failure of imagination” and “this is why we can’t have nice things” category. It seems that Gigabyte, for some reason, decided to embed an insecure update function into the UEFI BIOS of their motherboards, then shipped roughly 7 million of them to customers. The fatal flaw? Well, this is an update function that runs on startup. It writes a file to disk, reaches out to update servers over open HTTP then downloads any updates and installs them.

The RomCom backdoor malware appears to have a new campaign running. The new campaign is using impersonation attacks for different software packages (some real, some not). The goal is to trick the unwary into downloading, and hopefully launching malicious payloads. This type of campaign leverages ad services like Google Ads as a “trusted” platform using ads for software that is either often sought after or currently very popular, like ChatGPT, PDF readers, Remote Management software, etc. They are also, at times, leveraged as links in targeted or blanket phishing and social engineering attacks to get the malware on the targeted systems.