Research Saturday

Dick O'Brien from Symantec Threat Hunter team is discussing their research on “Graph: Growing number of threats leveraging Microsoft API.” The team observed an increasing number of threats that have begun to leverage the Microsoft Graph API, usually to facilitate communications with command-and-control (C&C) infrastructure hosted on Microsoft cloud services. The research states "the technique was...

Adam Marré, CISO at Arctic Wolf, is diving deep into geopolitical tension with China including APT31, iSoon and TikTok with Dave this week. They also discuss some of the history behind China cyber operations. Adam shares information on how different APT groups are able to create spear phishing campaigns, and provides info on how to combat these groups. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megap...

Christopher Doman, Co-Founder and CTO at Cado Security, is talking about their research on "Cerber Ransomware: Dissecting the three heads." This research delves into Cerber ransomware being deployed onto servers running the Confluence application via the CVE-2023-22518 exploit.  The research states "Cerber emerged and was at the peak of its activity around 2016, and has since only occasional campa...

Greg Lesnewich, senior threat researcher at Proofpoint, sits down to discuss "From Social Engineering to DMARC Abuse: TA427’s Art of Information Gathering." Since 2023, TA427 has directly solicited foreign policy experts for their opinions on nuclear disarmament, US-ROK policies, and sanction topics via benign conversation starting emails.  The research states "While our researchers have consisten...

Tomer Peled, a Security & Vulnerability Researcher from Akamai is sharing their work on "What a Cluster: Local Volumes Vulnerability in Kubernetes." This research focuses on a high-severity vulnerability in Kubernetes, allowing for remote code execution with system privileges on all Windows endpoints within a Kubernetes cluster. The research states "The discovery of this vulnerability led to the d...

Noah Pack, a SANS Internet Storm Center Intern, sits down to discuss research on "What happens when you accidentally leak your AWS API keys?" This research is a guest diary from Noah and shares a project he worked on after seeing an online video of someone who created a python script that emailed colleges asking for free swag to be shipped to him. The research states "In this article, I will share...

Elad, a Senior Security Researcher from Cycode is sharing their research on "Cycode Discovers a Supply Chain Vulnerability in Bazel." This security flaw could let hackers inject harmful code, potentially affecting millions of projects and users, including Kubernetes, Angular, Uber, LinkedIn, Databricks, DropBox, Nvidia, Google, and many more. The research states "We reported the vulnerability to G...

Liviu Arsene from CrowdStrike joins to discuss their research "HijackLoader Expands Techniques to Improve Defense Evasion." The research has found that HijackLoader continues to become increasingly popular among adversaries for deploying additional payloads and tooling. In their analysis of a recent HijackLoader sample, CrowdStrike researchers discovered new techniques designed to increase the def...

Robert Duncan from Netcraft is sharing their research on "Phishception - SendGrid abused to host phishing attacks impersonating itself." Netcraft has recently observed that criminals abused Twilio SendGrid’s email delivery, API, and marketing services to launch a phishing campaign impersonating itself.  Hackers behind this novel phishing campaign used SendGrid’s Tracking Settings feature, which al...

This week we are joined by Jamie MacColl and Dr. Pia Hüsch from RUSI discussing their work on "Ransomware: Victim Insights on Harms to Individuals, Organisations and Society." The research reveals some of the harms caused by ransomware, including physical, financial, reputational, psychological and social harms. Researchers state "Based on interviews with victims and incident responders, this pape...

This week we are joined by, Selena Larson from Proofpoint, who is discussing their research, "Bumblebee Buzzes Back in Black." Bumblebee is a sophisticated downloader used by multiple cybercriminal threat actors and was a favored payload from its first appearance in March 2022 through October 2023 before disappearing. After a four month hiatus, Proofpoint researchers found that the downloader retu...

Assaf Dahan and Daniel Frank from Palo Alto Networks Cortex sit down with Dave to talk about their research "Manic Menagerie 2.0: The Evolution of a Highly Motivated Threat Actor." From late 2020 to late 2022, Unit 42 researchers discovered an active campaign that targeted several web hosting and IT providers in the United States and European Union. The research states "They have further deepened...

Ori David from Akamai is sharing their research "Frog4Shell — FritzFrog Botnet Adds One-Days to Its Arsenal." FritzFrog takes advantage of the fact that only internet facing applications were prioritized for Log4Shell patching and targets internal hosts, meaning that a breach of any asset in the network by FritzFrog can expose unpatched internal assets to exploitation.  The research states "FritzF...

Jon DiMaggio, Chief Security Strategist for Analyst1, is discussing his research on "Ransomware Diaries Volume 4: Ransomed and Exposed - The Story of RansomedVC." While there is evidence to support that RansomedVC runs cybercrime operations, Jon questions the claims it made regarding the authenticity of the data it stole and the methods it used to extort victims. The research states "I uncovered s...

Johannes Ullrich from SANS talking about the Internet Storm Center and how they do research. Internet Storm Center was created as a mix of manual reports submitted by security analysts during Y2K and automated firewall collection started by DShield. The research shares how SANS used their "agile honeypots" to "zoom in" on events to more effectively collect data targeting specific vulnerabilities....

Jaron Bradley from Jamf Threat Labs is sharing their work on "Jamf Threat Labs discovers new malware embedded in pirated applications." Jamf Threat Labs has detected a series of pirated macOS applications that have been modified to communicate to attacker infrastructure. The research states "These applications are being hosted on Chinese pirating websites in order to gain victims." The discovery m...

Jon Williams from Bishop Fox is sharing their research on "It’s 2024 and Over 178,000 SonicWall Firewalls are Publicly Exploitable." SonicWall published advisories for CVE-2022-22274 and CVE-2023-0656 a year apart after finding that NGFW series 6 and 7 devices are affected by two unauthenticated denial-of-service vulnerabilities. The research states "Our research found that the two issues are fund...

Ryan Westman, Senior Manager, Threat Intelligence, eSentire's Threat Response Unit (TRU), is discussing their research "Two Russian-speaking cyber gangs attack employees from 23 different companies." They are using malicious Google ads, promoting popular business software such as Zoom, Slack, and Adobe. The customers targeted are companies in the manufacturing, software, legal, retail and healthca...

Guilherme Venere from Cisco Talos joins to discuss their research on "A deep dive into Phobos ransomware, recently deployed by 8Base group." Cisco Talos discovered that 8Base’s Phobos ransomware payload contains an embedded configuration, which is a significant difference between 8Base’s Phobos variant and other Phobos samples that have been observed in the wild since 2019.  In this 2-part researc...

Israel Barak, CISO from Cybereason, sits down with Dave to discuss their research, "Operation CuckooBees: Cybereason Uncovers Massive Chinese Intellectual Property Theft Operation." Cybereason researchers recently found an attack lurking beneath the surface which was assessed to be the work of Chinese APT Winnti. Cybereason briefed the FBI and the DOJ on the investigation into the malicious campai...

Dick O'Brien from Symantec's threat hunter team, joins Dave to discuss their work on "Stonefly: North Korea-linked spying operation continues to hit high-value targets." Stonefly specializes in mounting highly selective targeted attacks against targets that could yield intelligence to assist strategically important sectors. Symantec found that The attackers breached an engineering firm in February...

Host of the CyberWire Daily podcast segment Threat Vector, David Moulton sits down with Mike "Siko" Sikorski from Palo Alto Networks Unit 42 to discuss their research on "Fighting Ursa Aka APT28: Illuminating a Covert Campaign." Unit 42 just published new threat intelligence on Fighting Ursa (aka APT28), a group associated with Russia's military intelligence, on how they are exploiting a Microsoft...

Dana Behling, researcher from Carbon Black, sharing their work on "Hunting Vulnerable Kernel Drivers." The Carbon Black Threat Analysis Unit (TAU) discovered 34 unique vulnerable drivers, six of which allow kernel memory access, accepting firmware access. TAU reported the issues to the vendors whose drivers had valid signatures at the time of discovery, but only two vendors fixed the vulnerabiliti...

Ryan from Bishop Fox joins to describe their work on "Building an Exploit for FortiGate Vulnerability CVE-2023-27997." After Lexfo published details of a pre-authentication remote code injection vulnerability in the Fortinet SSL VPN, Bishop Fox worked up a proof of concept demo. This research share how they were able to create that proof-of-concept exploit, step by step. The researchers state "Our...

Larry Cashdollar, Principal Security Intelligence Response Engineer from Akamai Technologies, joins Dave to talk about their research on "KmsdBot: The Attack and Mine Malware." Akamai's Security Research team has found a new malware that infected their honeypot, which they have dubbed KmsdBot.  The research states "The malware attacks using UDP, TCP, HTTP POST, and GET, along with a command and co...