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Hackers targeted at least 8 ATMs in Russia and stole $800,000 in a single night, but the method used by the intruders remained a complete mystery with CCTV footage just showing a lone culprit walking up to the ATM and collecting cash without even touching the machine. Even the affected banks could not find any trace of malware on its ATMs or backend network or any sign of an intrusion. The only clue the unnamed bank's specialists found from the ATM's hard drive was — two files containing malware logs. The log files included the two process strings containing the phrases: "Take the Money Bitch!" and "Dispense Success." This small clue was enough for the researchers from the Russian security firm Kaspersky, who have been investigating the ATM heists, to find malware samples related to the ATM attack. In February, Kaspersky Labs reported that attackers managed to hit over 140 enterprises, including banks, telecoms, and government organizations, in th...

Watch out Windows users! There's a new strain of malware making rounds on the Internet that has already infected thousands of computers worldwide and most likely, your antivirus program would not be able to detect it. Why? That's because, first, it's an advanced fileless malware and second, it leverages only legitimate built-in system utilities and third-party tools to extend its functionality and compromise computers, rather than using any malicious piece of code. The technique of bringing its own legitimate tools is effective and has rarely been spotted in the wild, helping attackers to blend in their malicious activities with regular network activity or system administration tasks while leaving fewer footprints. Independently discovered by cybersecurity researchers at Microsoft and Cisco Talos, the malware — dubbed " Nodersok " and " Divergent " — is primarily being distributed via malicious online advertisements and infecting users using ...

Security researchers at Microsoft have released details of a new widespread campaign distributing an infamous piece of fileless malware that was primarily being found targeting European and Brazilian users earlier this year. Dubbed Astaroth , the malware trojan has been making the rounds since at least 2017 and designed to steal users' sensitive information like their credentials, keystrokes, and other data, without dropping any executable file on the disk or installing any software on the victim's machine. Initially discovered by researchers at Cybereason in February this year, Astaroath lived off the land by running the payload directly into the memory of a targeted computer or by leveraging legitimate system tools, such as WMIC, Certutil, Bitsadmin, and Regsvr32, to run the malicious code. While reviewing the Windows telemetry data, Andrea Lelli, a researcher at Microsoft Defender ATP Research Team, recently spotted a sudden unusual spike in the usage of Managemen...

More than a hundred banks and financial institutions across the world have been infected with a dangerous sophisticated, memory-based malware that's almost undetectable, researchers warned. Newly published report by the Russian security firm Kaspersky Lab indicates that hackers are targeting banks, telecommunication companies, and government organizations in 40 countries, including the US, South America, Europe and Africa, with Fileless malware that resides solely in the memory of the compromised computers. Fileless malware was first discovered by the same security firm in 2014, has never been mainstream until now. Fileless malware is a piece of nasty software that does not copy any files or folder to the hard drive in order to get executed. Instead, payloads are directly injected into the memory of running processes, and the malware executes in the system's RAM. Since the malware runs in the memory, the memory acquisition becomes useless once the system gets reboot...

It is no secret that cybercriminals are becoming dramatically more adept, innovative, and stealthy with each passing day. While new forms of cybercrime are on the rise, traditional activities seem to be shifting towards more clandestine techniques that involve the exploitation of standard system tools and protocols, which are not always monitored. The latest example of such attack is DNSMessenger – a new Remote Access Trojan (RAT) that uses DNS queries to conduct malicious PowerShell commands on compromised computers – a technique that makes the RAT difficult to detect onto targeted systems. The Trojan came to the attention of Cisco's Talos threat research group by a security researcher named Simpo, who highlighted a tweet that encoded text in a PowerShell script that said 'SourceFireSux.' SourceFire is one of Cisco's corporate security products. DNSMessenger Attack Is Completely Fileless Further analysis of the malware ultimately led Talos researchers to...

Cybersecurity researchers have uncovered an updated version of a backdoor called  LODEINFO  that's distributed via spear-phishing attacks. The findings come from Japanese company ITOCHU Cyber & Intelligence, which  said  the malware "has been updated with new features, as well as changes to the anti-analysis (analysis avoidance) techniques." LODEINFO (versions 0.6.6 and 0.6.7) was  first documented  by Kaspersky in November 2022, detailing its capabilities to execute arbitrary shellcode, take screenshots, and exfiltrate files back to an actor-controlled server. A month later, ESET  disclosed attacks  targeting Japanese political establishments that led to the deployment of LODEINFO. The backdoor is the work of a Chinese nation-state actor known as Stone Panda (aka APT10, Bronze Riverside, Cicada, Earth Tengshe, MirrorFace, and Potassium), which has a history of orchestrating attacks targeting Japan since 2021. Attack chains commence wit...

A new JavaScript-based remote access Trojan (RAT) propagated via a social engineering campaign has been observed employing sneaky "fileless" techniques as part of its detection-evasion methods to elude discovery and analysis. Dubbed DarkWatchman by researchers from Prevailion's Adversarial Counterintelligence Team (PACT), the malware uses a resilient domain generation algorithm ( DGA ) to identify its command-and-control (C2) infrastructure and utilizes the Windows Registry for all of its storage operations, thereby enabling it to bypass antimalware engines. The RAT "utilizes novel methods for fileless persistence, on-system activity, and dynamic run-time capabilities like self-updating and recompilation," researchers Matt Stafford and Sherman Smith  said , adding it "represents an evolution in fileless malware techniques, as it uses the registry for nearly all temporary and permanent storage and therefore never writes anything to disk, allowing it to o...

Security researchers have discovered two separate malware campaigns, one of which is distributing the Ursnif data-stealing trojan and the GandCrab ransomware in the wild, whereas the second one is only infecting victims with Ursnif malware. Though both malware campaigns appear to be a work of two separate cybercriminal groups, we find many similarities in them. Both attacks start from phishing emails containing an attached Microsoft Word document embedded with malicious macros and then uses Powershell to deliver fileless malware. Ursnif is a data-stealing malware that typically steals sensitive information from compromised computers with an ability to harvest banking credentials, browsing activities, collect keystrokes, system and process information, and deploy additional backdoors. Discovered earlier last year, GandCrab is a widespread ransomware threat that, like every other ransomware in the market, encrypts files on an infected system and insists victims to pay a ransom ...

It is no secret that hackers and cybercriminals are becoming dramatically more adept, innovative, and stealthy with each passing day. While new forms of cybercrime are on the rise, traditional activities seem to be shifting towards more clandestine techniques that come with limitless attack vectors with low detection rates. Security researchers have recently discovered a new fileless ransomware, dubbed " Sorebrect, " which injects malicious code into a legitimate system process (svchost.exe) on a targeted system and then self-destruct itself in order to evade detection. Unlike traditional ransomware, Sorebrect has been designed to target enterprise's servers and endpoint. The injected code then initiates the file encryption process on the local machine and connected network shares. This fileless ransomware first compromises administrator credentials by brute forcing or some other means and then uses Microsoft’s Sysinternals PsExec command-line utility to encry...

Dynamic malware analysis is a key part of any threat investigation. It involves executing a sample of a malicious program in the isolated environment of a malware sandbox to monitor its behavior and gather actionable indicators. Effective analysis must be fast, in-depth, and precise. These five tools will help you achieve it with ease. 1. Interactivity Having the ability to interact with the malware and the system in real-time is a great advantage when it comes to dynamic analysis. This way, you can not only observe its execution but also see how it responds to your inputs and triggers specific behaviors.  Plus, it saves time by allowing you to download samples hosted on file-sharing websites or open those packed inside an archive, which is a common way to deliver payloads to victims. The initial phishing email containing the malicious pdf and password for the archive Check out this sandbox session in the ANY.RUN sandbox that shows how interactivity is used for analyzing th...

A new malicious campaign has been spotted taking advantage of Windows event logs to stash chunks of shellcode for the first time in the wild. "It allows the 'fileless' last stage trojan to be hidden from plain sight in the file system," Kaspersky researcher Denis Legezo  said  in a technical write-up published this week. The stealthy infection process, not attributed to a known actor, is believed to have commenced in September 2021 when the intended targets were lured into downloading compressed .RAR files containing Cobalt Strike and  Silent Break . "The spreading of the Cobalt Strike module was achieved by persuading the target to download the link to the .RAR on the legitimate site file.io, and run it themselves," Legezo explained. The adversary simulation software modules are then used as a launchpad to inject code into Windows system processes or trusted applications. Also notable is the use of anti-detection wrappers as part of the toolset, sugg...

It's been a summer of ransomware hold-ups, supply chain attacks and fileless attacks flying under the radar of old-school security. With malware running amok while we were lying on the beach, here's a recap of the most burning strains and trends seen in the wild during the months of July and August 2019. Malware Evolution Trends The heat must have had an effect as this summer saw malware continuing to evolve, particularly around three core trends: Evasion-by-design Malware has been increasingly designed to bypass security controls leveraging a host of tactics, most notably by: Changing hashes via file obfuscation to evade AVs. Using encrypted communication with C2 servers to foil EDRs. Using feature manipulation and tampering to trick AI, machine-learning engines, and sandboxes through the detection of such environments and the deliberate delay in execution. Fileless Attacks and Living-Off-The-Land (LOTL) Taking evasion techniques one step further, an in...