Research Saturday

Tal Skverer from Astrix Security joins to discuss their work on "GhostToken – Exploiting GCP application infrastructure to create invisible, unremovable trojan app on Google accounts." Astrix’s Security Research Group revealed a 0-day flaw in Google’s Cloud Platform (GCP) on June 19, 2022, which was found to affect all Google users. The research states "The vulnerability, dubbed “GhostToken”, coul...

Dmitry Bestuzhev from Blackberry joins to discuss their work on "RomCom Resurfaces: Targeting Politicians in Ukraine and U.S.-Based Healthcare Providing Aid to Refugees from Ukraine." Research suggests that the RomCom threat team has been tracked carefully following the geopolitical events surrounding the war in Ukraine, and are now targeting politicians in Ukraine who are working closely with Wes...

Alex Delamotte from SentinelLabs joins Dave to discuss their work on "Cloudy With a Chance of Credentials | AWS-Targeting Cred Stealer Expands to Azure, GCP." As actors find more ways to profit from compromising services, SentinelLabs finds that cloud service credentials are becoming increasingly targeted. The lack of threats explicitly targeting Azure and GCP credentials up to this point means th...

Aleksandar Milenkoski from SentinelOne joins to discuss their work on "Kimsuky Strikes Again | New Social Engineering Campaign Aims to Steal Credentials and Gather Strategic Intelligence." Researchers have been tracking the North Korean APT group Kimsuky and their attempt at a social engineering campaign targeting experts in North Korean affairs. The research states "The campaign has the objective...

Ashlee Benge from ReversingLabs discussing their research titled "Operation Brainleeches: Malicious npm packages fuel supply chain and phishing attacks." Researchers recently discovered over a dozen malicious packages published to the npm open source repository. These packages are targeting Microsoft 365 users and appear to target application end users while also supporting email phishing campaign...

Joshua Miller from Proofpoint joins Dave to discuss findings on "Welcome to New York: Exploring TA453's Foray into LNKs and Mac Malware." In mid May, TA453, also known as Charming Kitten, APT42, Mint Sandstorm, and Yellow Garuda, was found sending a benign conversation lure masquerading as a senior fellow with the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI) to the public media contact for a nuclear sec...

Michael Clark from Sysdig joins with Dave to discuss their research on SCARLETEEL 2.0: Fargate, Kubernetes, and Crypto. New research from Sysdig threat researchers found that the group continues to thrive with improved tactics. Most recently, they gained access to AWS Fargate, a more sophisticated environment to breach, thanks to their upgraded attack tools. The research states "In their most rece...

Thomas Etheridge from CrowdStrike sits down to discuss their work on "Business as Usual: Falcon Complete MDR Thwarts Novel VANGUARD PANDA (Volt Typhoon) Tradecraft" In May of 2023, industry and government sources detailed China-nexus activity where they found the threat actor dubbed Volt Typhoon targeted U.S. based critical infrastructure entities. CrowdStrike's Intelligence team tracked this acto...

Daniel dos Santos, Forescout's Head of Security Research is sharing insights from a recent exercise his team conducted on AI-assisted attacks for OT and unmanaged devices. Using ChatGPT, Forescout’s research team converted an existing OT exploit developed in Python to run on Windows to demonstrate how easy it is to create an AI-assisted attack that converts the original exploit into alternative pr...

Ian Ahl from Permiso's PØ Labs joins Dave to discuss their research on "Unmasking GUI-Vil: Financially Motivated Cloud Threat Actor." First observing the group in 2021, they discovered GUI-vil is a financially motivated threat group primarily focused on unauthorized cryptocurrency mining activities. The research states "the group has been observed exploiting Amazon Web Services (AWS) EC2 instances...

Our guest, Johannes Ullrich from SANS Institute, joins Dave to discuss their research on "Machine Learning Risks: Attacks Against Apache NiFi." Using their honeypot network, researchers were able to collect some interesting data about a threat actor who is currently going after exposed Apache NiFi servers. Researchers state “On May 19th, our distributed sensor network detected a notable spike in r...

Our guest, Allen West from Akamai's SIRT team, joins Dave to discuss their research on "The Dark Frost Enigma: An Unexpectedly Prevalent Botnet Author Profile." Akamai found this new botnet was targeting the gaming industry, modeled after Qbot, Mirai, and other malware strains. The botnet has expanded to encompass hundreds of compromised devices. The research states "through reverse engineering an...

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 backdoo...

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 c...

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-specifi...

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...

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 Arab...

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...

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 de...

Scott Fanning, Senior Director of Product Management, Cloud Security at CrowdStrike, sits down to talk about the first-ever Dero cryptojacking operation targeting Kubernetes infrastructure. The research defines Dero as "a cryptocurrency that claims to offer improved privacy, anonymity and higher and faster monetary rewards compared to Monero, which is a commonly used cryptocurrency in cryptojackin...

Sahar Abdelnabi from CISPA Helmholtz Center for Information Security sits down with Dave to discuss their work on "A Comprehensive Analysis of Novel Prompt Injection Threats to Application-Integrated Large Language Models." There is currently a large advance in the capabilities of Large Language Models or LLMs, as well as being integrated into many systems, including integrated development environ...

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 thr...

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 maxim...

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...

Ron Masas of Imperva discusses their work, the "Google Chrome “SymStealer” Vulnerability. How to Protect Your Files from Being Stolen." By reviewing the ways the browser handles file systems, specifically searching for common vulnerabilities relating to how browsers process symlinks, the Imperva Red Team discovered that when files are dropped onto a file input, it’s handled differently. Dubbing it...