Securelist - Information about Viruses, Hackers and Spam

The Facebook malware that spread last week was dissected in a collaboration with Kaspersky Lab and Detectify. We were able to get help from the involved companies and cloud services to quickly shut down parts of the attack to mitigate it as fast as possible.

As a part of our Kaspersky APT Intelligence Reporting subscription, customers received an update in mid-February 2017 on some interesting APT activity that we called WhiteBear. It is a parallel project or second stage of the Skipper Turla cluster of activity documented in another private report. Like previous Turla activity, WhiteBear leverages compromised websites and hijacked satellite connections for command and control (C2) infrastructure.

In one of our previous articles, we analyzed the NeutrinoPOS banker as an example of a constantly evolving malware family. A week after publication, this Neutrino modification delivered up a new malicious program classified by Kaspersky Lab as Trojan-Banker.Win32.Jimmy.

Corporate information security services often turn out to be unprepared: their employees underestimate the speed, secrecy and efficiency of modern cyberattacks and do not recognize how ineffective the old approaches to security are. And if there is no clear understanding of what sort of incident it is, an attack cannot be repelled. We hope that our recommendations about identifying incidents and responding to them will help information security specialists create a solid foundation for reliable multi-level business protection.

During the preparation of the “IT threat evolution Q2 2017” report I found several common Trojans that were stealing money from users using WAP-billing. We hadn’t seen any Trojans like this in a while, but several of them appeared out of nowhere. Most of them had been under development since the end of 2016 / the beginning of 2017, but their prevalence increased only in the second half of Q2 2017. Therefore, I decided to take a closer look at these Trojans.

One good thing about having a lot of Facebook friends is that you simply act as a honey pot when your friends click on malicious things. A few days ago I got a message on Facebook from a person I very rarely speak to, and I knew that something fishy was going on.

In Q2 2017, the average share of spam in global email traffic amounted to 56.97%, which was only 1.07 p.p. more than in the previous quarter. One of the most notable events of this quarter – the WannaCry epidemic – did not go unnoticed by spammers: numerous mass mailings contained offers of assistance in combating the ransomware.

The Trojan-Banker.AndroidOS.Faketoken malware has been known about for already more than a year. Throughout the time of its existence, it has worked its way up from a primitive Trojan intercepting mTAN codes to an encrypter. Not so long ago, thanks to our colleagues from a large Russian bank, we detected a new Trojan sample, Faketoken.q, which contained a number of curious features.

In July 2017, during an investigation, suspicious DNS requests were identified in a partner’s network. The source of the queries was a software package produced by NetSarang. Our analysis showed that recent versions of the software had been surreptitiously modified to include an encrypted payload that could be remotely activated by a knowledgeable attacker.

The threat from ransomware continues to grow. Between April 2016 and March 2017, we blocked ransomware on the computers of 2,581,026 Kaspersky Lab customers. In May, we saw the biggest ransomware epidemic in history, called WannaCry.