Introduction In February 2024, we discovered a new malware campaign targeting government entities in the Middle East. We dubbed it “DuneQuixote”; and our investigation uncovered over 30 DuneQuixote dropper samples actively employed in the campaign. These droppers, which exist in two versions – regular droppers and tampered installer files for a legitimate tool named “Total Commander”, carried malicious code to download an additional payload in the form of a backdoor we call “CR4T”. While we identified only two CR4T implants at the time of discovery, we strongly suspect the existence of others ..read more

The previous Kaspersky research focused on a detailed analysis of the LockBit 3.0 builder leaked in 2022. Since then, attackers have been able to generate customized versions of the threat according to their needs. This opens up numerous possibilities for malicious actors to make their attacks more effective, since it is possible to configure network spread options and defense-killing functionality. It becomes even more dangerous if the attacker has valid privileged credentials in the target infrastructure. In a recent incident response engagement, we faced this exact scenario: the adversary ..read more

On March 29, 2024, a single message on the Openwall OSS-security mailing list marked an important discovery for the information security, open source and Linux communities: the discovery of a malicious backdoor in XZ. XZ is a compression utility integrated into many popular distributions of Linux. The particular danger of the backdoored library lies in its use by the OpenSSH server process sshd. On several systemd-based distributions, including Ubuntu, Debian and RedHat/Fedora Linux, OpenSSH is patched to use systemd features, and as a result has a dependency on this library (note that Arch L ..read more

DinodasRAT, also known as XDealer, is a multi-platform backdoor written in C++ that offers a range of capabilities. This RAT allows the malicious actor to surveil and harvest sensitive data from a target’s computer. A Windows version of this RAT was used in attacks against government entities in Guyana, and documented by ESET researchers as Operation Jacana. In early October 2023, after the ESET publication, we discovered a new Linux version of DinodasRAT. Sample artifacts suggest that this version (V10 according to the attackers’ versioning system) may have started operating in 2022, al ..read more

Introduction Malware for mobile devices is something we come across very often. In 2023, our technologies blocked 33.8 million malware, adware, and riskware attacks on mobile devices. One of 2023’s most resonant attacks was Operation Triangulation, targeting iOS, but that was rather a unique case. Among the mobile platforms, Android remains the most popular target operating system for cybercriminals. Last month, we wrote a total of four private crimeware reports on Android malware, three of which are summarized below. To learn more about our crimeware reporting service, you can contact us at ..read more

Global statistics across all threats In the second half of 2023, the percentage of ICS computers on which malicious objects were blocked decreased by 2.1 pp to 31.9%. Percentage of ICS computers on which malicious objects were blocked, by half year Selected industries In H2 2023, building automation once again had the highest percentage of ICS computers on which malicious objects were blocked of all industries that we looked at. Oil and Gas was the only industry to see a slight (0.5 pp) increase in the second half of the year. Percentage of ICS computers on which malicious object ..read more

On August 8, 2023, Microsoft finally released a kernel patch for a class of vulnerabilities affecting Microsoft Windows since 2015. The vulnerabilities lead to elevation of privilege (EoP), which allows an account with user rights to gain SYSTEM privileges on a vulnerable host. The root cause of this attack surface, according to a 2015 blog, is the ability of a normal user account to replace the original C:\ drive with a fake one by placing a symlink for the system drives in the device map for each login session. This fake drive will be followed by the kernel during impersonation instead ..read more

“Malvertising” is a popular way of attracting victims to malicious sites: an advertisement block is placed at the top of the search results, increasing the likelihood of users clicking the link. Sites at the top of search results also tend to be more trusted by users. A year ago, our experts discussed a malvertising campaign that spread the RedLine stealer via Google Ads. Using typosquatting and other techniques, the attackers tried to make their resources look as similar as possible to the official websites of popular programs. This time, a similar threat has affected users of one of the mos ..read more

The State of Stalkerware in 2023 (PDF) The annual Kaspersky State of Stalkerware report aims to contribute to awareness and a better understanding of how people around the world are impacted by digital stalking. Stalkerware is commercially available software that can be discreetly installed on smartphone devices, enabling a perpetrator to monitor an individual’s private life without their knowledge. Stalkerware requires physical access to be installed, but our report also looks at a range of remote technology that can be used for nefarious purposes. Once installed, stalkerware makes it possib ..read more

To help companies with navigating the world of web application vulnerabilities and securing their own web applications, the Open Web Application Security Project (OWASP) online community created the OWASP Top Ten. As we followed their rankings, we noticed that the way we ranked major vulnerabilities was different. Being curious, we decided to find out just how big the difference was. That’s why we set up our own rankings that reflected our take on the most widespread and critical web application vulnerabilities as viewed through a prism of eight years’ experience. Profile of participants and ..read more