Brigid O Gorman from Symantec joins Dave to discuss their research, “Lancefly: Group Uses Custom Backdoor to Target Orgs in Government, Aviation, Other Sectors." Researchers discovered in 2020 that Lancefly, an APT group, is using a custom-written backdoor in attacks targeting government, aviation, educations, and telecoms organizations in South and Southeast Asia. The research states "The backdoor is used very selectively, appearing on just a handful of networks and a small number of machines over the years, with its use appearing to be highly targeted." These targets, though&n ..read more

This week, our guests are Emily Austin and Himaja Motheram from Censys and their sharing their research - "Months after first GoAnywhere MFT zero-day attacks, Censys still sees about 180 public admin panels." In early February 2023, Censys researchers discovered a zero-day RCE vulnerability in Fortra’s “GoAnywhere MFT” (Managed File Transfer) software. After finding this the Clop ransomware gang claimed that they exploited this vulnerability to breach the data of 130 organizations and Censys found other ransomware groups were jumping on the bandwagon. They said " A sin ..read more

Willy R. Vasquez from The University of Texas at Austin discussing research on "The Most Dangerous Codec in the World - Finding and Exploiting Vulnerabilities in H.264 Decoders." Researchers are looking at the marvel that is modern video encoding standards such as H.264 for vulnerabilities and ultimately hidden security risks. The research states "We introduce and evaluate H26FORGE, domain-specific infrastructure for analyzing, generating, and manipulating syntactically correct but semantically spec-non-compliant video files." Using H26FORCE, they were able to uncover insecurities in depth acr ..read more

Aleksandar Milenkoski and Juan Andres Guerrero-Saade from SentinelOne's SentinelLabs join Dave to discuss their research "Operation Tainted Love | Chinese APTs Target Telcos in New Attacks." Researchers found initial phases of attacks against telecommunication providers in the Middle East in Q1 in 2023. The research states "We assess that this activity represents an evolution of tooling associated with Operation Soft Cell." While the exact grouping is unclear, researchers think it is highly likely that the threat actor is a Chinese cyberespionage group in the nexus of Gallium and APT41. The re ..read more

Ryan Robinson from Intezer to discuss his team's work on "Phishing Campaign Targets Chinese Nuclear Energy Industry." The research team discovered activity targeting the nuclear energy industry in China. Researchers attributed the activity to Bitter APT, a South Asian APT that is known to target the energy, manufacturing and government sectors, mainly in Pakistan, China, Bangladesh, and Saudi Arabia. The article states "We identified seven emails pretending to be from the Embassy of Kyrgyzstan, being sent to recipients in the nuclear energy industry in China. In some emails, people and entitie ..read more

This week our guests are, Larry Cashdollar, Chad Seaman and Allen West from Akamai Technologies, and they are discussing their research on "Uncovering HinataBot: A Deep Dive into a Go-Based Threat." The team discovered a new Go-based, DDoS-focused botnet. They found it was named after the popular anime show "Naruto," they are calling it "HinataBot" In the research it says "HinataBot was seen being distributed during the first three months of 2023 and is actively being updated by the authors/operators." Akamai was able to get a deep look into the malware works by using a combination of reverse ..read more

Shiran Guez from Akamai sits down with Dave to discuss their research on "Chatbots, Celebrities, and Victim Retargeting and Why Crypto Giveaway Scams Are Still So Successful." Researchers at Akamai have been on the lookout for crypto giveaway scams. These scams have been impersonating celebrities and brands, most notably Elon Musk and his associated companies. The research states "the scams are delivered through various social media platforms as well as direct messaging apps such as WhatsApp or Telegram." These scams have helped add to the existing damages that exceed $1 billion caus ..read more

Dick O'Brien from Symantec’s Threat Hunter team discusses their research on "Blackfly - Espionage Group Targets Materials Technology." Researchers say the Blackfly espionage group (aka APT41), has been mounting attacks against Asian materials and composite organizations in attempts to steal intellectual property. This group has been known as one of the longest known Chinese advanced persistent threat (APT) groups since at least 2010. The research shares that "early attacks were distinguished by the use of the PlugX/Fast (Backdoor.Korplug), Winnti/Pasteboy (Backdoor.Winnti), and Shado ..read more

On this episode, Jérôme Segura, senior threat researcher at Malwarebytes, shares his team's work, "WordPress sites backdoored with ad fraud plugin." WordPress is an immensely popular content management system (CMS) powering over 43% of all websites. Many webmasters will monetize their sites by running ads and need to draw particular attention to search engine optimization (SEO) techniques to maximize their revenues. The Malwarebytes team discovered a few dozen WordPress blogs using the same plugin that mimics human activity by automatically scrolling a page and following links within it, all t ..read more

Bar Block, Threat Intelligence Researcher at Deep Instinct, joins Dave to discuss their work on "ChatGPT and Malware - Making Your Malicious Wishes Come True." Deep Instinct goes into depth on just how dangerous ChatGPT can be in the wrong hands as well as how artificial intelligence is better at creating malware than providing ways to detect it. Researchers go on to explain how the AI app can be used in the wrong hands saying "Examples of malicious content created by the AI tool, such as phishing messages, information stealers, and encryption software, have all been shared online." The resear ..read more