Research Saturday

Asheer Malhotra from Cisco Talos discussing their research and findings on "Kazakhstan-associated YoroTrooper disguises origin of attacks as Azerbaijan." Cisco Talos' research team, released research attributing the work of the espionage-focused threat actor, YoroTrooper, to individuals based in Kazakhstan. The research states "YoroTrooper attempts to obfuscate the origin of their operations, empl...

Jeremy Kennelly and Sulian Lebegue from Mandiant sit down with Dave to discuss their research "From RM3 to LDR4: URSNIF Leaves Banking Fraud Behind? One of the oldest and most successful banking fraud malwares, URSNIF, which caused an estimated “tens of millions of dollars in losses”, has been discovered by researchers to have been re-tooled into a generic backdoor, dubbed “LDR4”. This new variant...

Aleksandar Milenkoski and JAGS from SentinelOne sits down to share their work on "Sandman APT | A Mystery Group Targeting Telcos with a LuaJIT Toolkit." After observing a new threat activity cluster by an unknown threat actor in August of this year, SentinelLabs dubbed it Sandman. The research states "Sandman has been primarily targeting telecommunication providers in the Middle East, Western Euro...

Danny Adamitis from Lumen's Black Lotus Labs sits down to discuss their work on "No Rest For The Wicked: HiatusRAT Takes Little Time Off In A Return To Action." Last March Lumen's Black Lotus Lab researchers discovered a novel malware called HiatusRAT that targeted business-grade routers. The research states "In the latest campaign, we observed a shift in reconnaissance and targeting activity; in...

Sysdig's Alessandro Brucato and Michael Clark join Dave to discuss their work on "AWS's Hidden Threat: AMBERSQUID Cloud-Native Cryptojacking Operation." Attackers are targeting what are typically considered secure AWS services, like AWS Fargate and Amazon SageMaker. This means that defenders generally aren’t as concerned with their security from end-to-end. The research states "The AMBERSQUID oper...

Amit Malik from Uptycs joins us to discuss their research titled "Unwanted Guests: Mitigating Remote Access Trojan Infection Risk." Uptycs threat research team identified a new threat referred to as QwixxRAT. The Uptycs team discovered this tool being widely distributed by the threat actor through Telegram and Discord platforms. The research states "QwixxRAT is meticulously designed to harvest an...

Deepen Desai from Zscaler joins to take a look into their research about "DuckTail." In May of 2023, Zscaler ThreatLabz began an intelligence collection operation to decode DuckTail’s maneuvers. Through an intensive three-month period of monitoring, Zscaler was able obtain unprecedented visibility into DuckTail’s end-to-end operations, spanning the entire kill chain from reconnaissance to post-com...

David Liebenberg from Cisco Talos joins to discussing Talos' discovery of cracked Microsoft Windows software being downloaded by enterprise users across the globe. Downloading and running this compromised software not only serves as an entry point for threat actors, but can serve as a gateway to access control systems and establish backdoors. Talos identified additional malware, including RATs, on...

Maxim Zavodchik from Akamai joins Dave to discuss their research on "Xurum: New Magento Campaign Discovered." Akamai researchers have discovered an ongoing server-side template injection campaign that is exploiting digital commerce websites. This campaign targets Magento 2 shops, and was dubbed Xurum in reference to the domain name of the attacker’s command and control (C2) server.  The research s...

Guest Manuel Hepfer from ISTARI shares his research on cyber resilience which includes discussions with 37 CEOs to gain insight into how they manage cybersecurity risk. ISTARI and Oxford University's Saïd Business School dive into the minds and experiences of CEOs on how they manage cybersecurity risk. Ask any CEO to name the issues that keep them awake at night and cybersecurity risk is likely ne...

This week, our guest is Reece Baldwin from Kasada discussing their work on "No Honour Amongst Thieves: Unpacking a New OpenBullet Malware Campaign." The Kasada Threat Intelligence team has recently identified a malware campaign targeting users of OpenBullet, a tool popular within criminal communities to conduct credential stuffing attacks. This malware campaign was first uncovered when the team wa...

Kristopher Russo and Stephanie Regan from Palo Alto Networks Unit 42 join Dave to talk about Threat Group Assessment: Muddled Libra. With an intimate knowledge of enterprise information technology, this threat group presents a significant risk even to organizations with well-developed legacy cyber defenses. Posing threats to organizations in the software automation, BPO, telecommunications and tec...

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...