Displaying items by tag: Hacking

The leak of tools used by threat groups, and spying agencies are events of inestimable importance in both the threat group and security worlds. To threat groups this is like free money. They now have access to someone else’s development efforts meaning they can spend less money developing the next payload for their own interests. On the security side it means that there is a high potential to see new variants of these tools hitting the wild which they now must defend against. It also increases the attack pool which they must defend against since now even unsophisticated groups have access to all the fun tools.

The Google Play Store is and has always been something of a playground for mobile malware groups. Over the past few years hundreds of malicious apps have been uncovered with tens of thousands of downloads. Everything from banking malware to information stealers and worse has been identified in the store. Google, to their credit, has tried to find a solution to this. The problem is that the mobile device theater is about as secure as the PC industry was in the late 90s given the shovel ware from mobile device makers, and then carriers.

In the never-ending saga of Ransomware, the threat groups that deploy or leverage this tool for financial gain are always looking for a new method of installation and ways to avoid increasingly sophisticated security measures. Although most organizations might not be employing overly sophisticated security, the really good targets might be. Even the use of advanced MDR/XDR makes the exposure window smaller when it comes to many ransomware attacks.

Popular open-source repository NPM is back in the news as a pair of packages were found to have malware in them. The malware in question is TurkoRat. TurkoRat is an open-source information stealer that has a few features attached to it. Among some of the components are things like a wallet grabber (wallets.js) which seems geared towards stealing crypto currency. Other components are ones you would expect from an InforStealer like credential theft etc. The package was found by ReversingLabs after it had been in place for two months.

As part of our ongoing (really never ending) series on modern ransomware, we are taking a look at a recent study of one Ransomware as a Service operation. In this case the look is at the Qilin scheme which was brought to light by Group-IB. They were able to infiltrate the group through a conversation with a recruiter (nothing like being invited in). The cybersecurity firm started their inside look in March of 2023 and what they found was eye opening. It shows that RaaS clearly pays well and that services like this make things easy and profitable for people looking to get in on the “fun” but might not have the skill set or infrastructure to do it on their own.

The same Ransomware gang that hit MSI recently also appears to have hit Pharmacy services provider PharMerica and stole information on 5.8 million patents. The data that was exfiltrated as part of the attack includes social security numbers, full name and address, health insurance, medications, and date of birth. PharMerica disclosed the breach to the Maine Attorney General on March 12th, 2023.

There is a new player in the ransomware space. Dubber RA group this new organization appears to have had their grand opening last month (April 2023). RA Group published a data leak site on the dark web as part of the now all too familiar double extortion scheme that most ransomware brings to the table. RA Group is also one of the organizations that has leveraged the Babuk source code links to get things going, as reported by Cisco Talos.

There is an old saying that says, when you can no longer do, you teach. This might be a relatively true axiom in the regular world, but in the world of cybercrime it is certainly not what you find happening. Instead, we tend to see that when organized groups no longer want the headache and hassle of doing the heavy lifting for attacks, they just build a platform to sell their tools to others. We have seen ransomware as a service, malware as a service, malvertising as a service, and even phishing as a service.

Updated May-08-2023 with statement from Intel
Back in early April MSI, a popular PC and PC component maker, disclosed that it had a security incident. They stated that they quickly rolled out their Incident Response Team and enacted their recovery procedures (IR and BC/DR plans). Not much was known about the attack at the time, including when the incident happened, just that the disclosure was made to the relevant authorities.

Ransomware is a pain in the ass, no matter what type it is. You have a piece of code that comes in, encrypts all your files, steals them and then you must deal with paying a ransom of some sort to either get your files back or prevent potential disclosure of sensitive information. It is not exactly what you want to deal with on a given day. So, when a new method of deploying ransomware pops up you can excuse our thinking “oh what fresh hell is this”.