Introduction Bulk phishing email campaigns tend to target large audiences. They use catch-all wordings and simplistic formatting, and typos are not uncommon. Targeted attacks take greater effort, with attackers sending personalized messages that include personal details and might look more like something you’d get from your employer or a customer. Adopting that approach on a larger scale is a pricey endeavor. Yet, certain elements of spear phishing recently started to be used in regular mass phishing campaigns. This story looks at some real-life examples that illustrate the trend. Spear phish ..read more

Detection is a traditional type of cybersecurity control, along with blocking, adjustment, administrative and other controls. Whereas before 2015 teams asked themselves what it was that they were supposed to detect, as MITRE ATT&CK evolved, SOCs were presented with practically unlimited space for ideas on creating detection scenarios. With the number of scenarios becoming virtually unlimited, another question inevitably arises: “What do we detect first?” This and the fact that SOC teams forever play the long game, having to respond with limited resources to a changing threat landscape, ev ..read more

In May 2024, we discovered a new advanced persistent threat (APT) targeting Russian government entities that we dubbed CloudSorcerer. It’s a sophisticated cyberespionage tool used for stealth monitoring, data collection, and exfiltration via Microsoft Graph, Yandex Cloud, and Dropbox cloud infrastructure. The malware leverages cloud resources as its command and control (C2) servers, accessing them through APIs using authentication tokens. Additionally, CloudSorcerer uses GitHub as its initial C2 server. CloudSorcerer’s modus operandi is reminiscent of the CloudWizard APT that we reported on i ..read more

The processing power of computers keeps growing, helping users to solve increasingly complex problems faster. A side effect is that passwords that were impossible to guess just a few years ago can be cracked by hackers within mere seconds in 2024. For example, the RTX 4090 GPU is capable of guessing an eight-character password consisting of same-case English letters and digits, or 36 combinable characters, within just 17 seconds. Our study of resistance to brute-force attacks found that a large percentage of passwords (59%) can be cracked in under one hour. How passwords are typically stored ..read more

Small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) are increasingly targeted by cybercriminals. Despite adopting digital technology for remote work, production, and sales, SMBs often lack robust cybersecurity measures. SMBs face significant cybersecurity challenges due to limited resources and expertise. The cost of data breaches can cripple operations, making preventive measures essential. This is a growing tendency that continues to pose a challenge for businesses. For example, the UK’s National Cyber Security Centre reports that around 50% of SMBs in the UK are likely to experience a cybersecurity b ..read more

Part 1: XZ backdoor story – Initial analysis Part 2: Assessing the Y, and How, of the XZ Utils incident (social engineering) In our first article on the XZ backdoor, we analyzed its code from initial infection to the function hooking it performs. As we mentioned then, its initial goal was to successfully hook one of the functions related to RSA key manipulation. In this article, we will focus on the backdoor’s behavior inside OpenSSH, specifically OpenSSH portable version 9.7p1 – the most recent version at this time. To better understand what’s going on, we recommend you to read Baeldung’s ar ..read more

The processing power of computers keeps growing, helping users to solve increasingly complex problems faster. A side effect is that passwords that were impossible to guess just a few years ago can be cracked by hackers within mere seconds in 2024. For example, the RTX 4090 GPU is capable of guessing an eight-character password consisting of same-case English letters and digits, or 36 combinable characters, within just 17 seconds. Our study of resistance to brute-force attacks found that a large percentage of passwords (59%) can be cracked in under one hour. How passwords are typically stored ..read more

Modems play an important role in enabling connectivity for a wide range of devices. This includes not only traditional mobile devices and household appliances, but also telecommunication systems in vehicles, ATMs and Automated Process Control Systems (APCS). When integrating the modem, many product developers do not think of protecting their device from a potential modem compromise. As one of the main communication channels for the end device, the modem not only has access to the information flow between the device and the outside world, but also may have almost unlimited access to the most c ..read more

Biometric scanners offer a unique way to resolve the conflict between security and usability. They help to identify a person by their unique biological characteristics – a fairly reliable process that does not require the user to exert any extra effort. Yet, biometric scanners, as any other tech, have their weaknesses. This article touches on biometric scanner security from the red team’s perspective and uses the example of a popular hybrid terminal model to demonstrate approaches to scanner analysis. These approaches are admittedly fairly well known and applied to analysis of any type of dev ..read more

Introduction Two-factor authentication (2FA) is a security feature we have come to expect as standard by 2024. Most of today’s websites offer some form of it, and some of them won’t even let you use their service until you enable 2FA. Individual countries have adopted laws that require certain types of organizations to protect users’ accounts with 2FA. Unfortunately, its popularity has spurred on the development of many methods to hack or bypass it that keep evolving and adapting to current realities. The particular hack scheme depends on the type of 2FA that it targets. Although there are qu ..read more