The Emotet malware family just raised the stakes by adding email exfiltration to its arsenal, thereby escalating its capabilities to cyber espionage. While it has recently made headlines for delivering ransomware payloads to United States infrastructure such as Water Utilities, Emotet has laid mostly dormant for the past month. In the past days, however, the mummy has returned just in time for Halloween as we observed a new module capable of exfiltrating email content back to the botnet’s operators ..read more

The Emotet botnet reputation precedes it; historically aggressive and malicious, today it has evolved and incorporated a number of advancements to create a more resilient botnet delivery system, nearly immune from takedown. Recently, US CERT reported that Emotet incidents (and its subsequent payload droppers) are affecting state, local, tribal, and territorial (SLTT) governments at up to 1 million dollars per incident. We have captured a global view of many of the active infections within the latest Emotet botnet ..read more

In light of the recent news circulating about sporadic WannaCry outbreaks, namely defense contractor Boeing and earlier last month Connecticut state agencies, as well as Honda, we think it important to provide further guidance on assessing ongoing and hidden dangers related to WannaCry outbreaks. To immediately begin reducing risk and augmenting your existing security defenses, we are providing at no cost Telltale, a free version of Vantage Breach Intelligence Feed. Telltale is a simplified version of our breach monitoring and can help your organization assess past or ongoing malware infection ..read more

Overview AnchorDNS is a backdoor used by the TrickBot actors to target selected high value victims. It has been seen delivered by both TrickBot and Bazar1 malware campaigns2. AnchorDNS is particularly difficult to track given that it is deployed only post-infection and that too only after a period of reconnaissance, once the malware operators have established that the target is of special interest. Following analysis of AnchorDNS samples published in recent reporting23, we have observed that the C2 communications protocol of AnchorDNS has changed ..read more

Overview TrickBot, a modular trojan, has been active in the malware scene since 2016. It is famously known for having a variety of modules in its attack toolkit, some of which are quite recent and some being actively developed. This brings us to its web injection module, injectDLL, that has been around since the malware was first discovered. The core purpose of the module still remains the same, which is injecting scripts into websites to exfiltrate information ..read more

There are a few interesting things to say about the current ransomware Petya. One thing is clear, there is no “kill-switch”. After some preliminary tracking of the domains which presumably deliver the payload for its RTF (Windows document exploit) delivery system and cross referencing it to passive intelligence about the domain name, we noticed the frequency of 2 million hits within an hour. The domains we tracked are not currently serving the payload and are down ..read more

Overview TrickBot is an established and widespread multi-purpose trojan. Active since 2016 and modular in nature, it can accomplish a variety of goals ranging from credential theft to lateral movement. Many of the malware’s capabilities come as self-contained modules, which the malware is instructed to download from the C2. Initially, TrickBot’s main focus was bank fraud, but this later shifted toward corporate targetted ransomware attacks, eventually resulting in the discontinuation of their fraud operation ..read more

Overview Active since 2016, TrickBot is one of the most prevalent modular banking trojans. The botnet’s modules carry out objectives such as credential harvesting, propagating via the network, web injection and others. Being an actively developed botnet, we often come across updated modules and in some cases new tools that are added as part of its arsenal. Recently we have discovered a relatively new module that goes by the name masrv ..read more

WannaCrypt, aka WannaCry, has been the Infosec story of the past couple of weeks. What was originally a humble ransomware became a newly retrofitted NSA-powered worm which spread recklessly, wreaking global havoc. Fortunately, the proliferation of WannaCry came to a standstill when one of our security researchers, MalwareTech, working to collect intelligence for the Vantage Breach Intelligence Feed, registered a domain associated to the malware, ultimately triggering its “kill switch ..read more

Last week the Network Security Research Lab at 360 released a blog post on an obfuscated backdoor written in Go named Blackrota. They claim that the Blackrota backdoor is available for both x86/x86-64 architectures which is no surprise given how capable Golang’s cross compilation is. For the last 4 years we have been using Golang for our internal services, and I can definitely see the allure that Golang has for malware authors ..read more