Research Saturday

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...

Alon Zahavi from CyberArk, joins Dave Bittner on this episode to discuss CyberArk's work in conjunction with Patch Tuesday. CyberArk published about how Docker inadvertently created a new vulnerability and what happens when it's exploited. CyberArk's research concluded that an attacker may execute files with capabilities or setuid files in order to escalate its privileges up to root level. CyberAr...

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...

Deepen Desai from Zscaler sits down with Dave to talk about the Crytox ransomware family. First observed in 2020, Crytox is a ransomware family consisting of several stages of encrypted code that has fallen under the radar compared to other ransomware families. While other groups normally use double extortion attacks where data is both encrypted and held for ransom, Crytox does not perform this wa...

Roya Gordon from Nozomi Networks sits down with Dave to discuss their work "UWB Real Time Locating Systems: How Secure Radio Communications May Fail in Practice." Ultra-wideband (UWB) is a rapidly-growing radio technology that, according to the UWB Alliance, is forecasted to drive sales volumes exceeding one billion devices annually by 2025. In an effort to strengthen the security of devices utili...

Federico Kirschbaum from Faraday Security sits down with Dave to discuss their research on "A vulnerability in Realtek's SDK for eCos OS: pwning thousands of routers." The team at Faraday found a vulnerability that made it to DEFCON 30, labeling it high severity. With more and more people working from home for their companies, the research team went looking for where there may be vulnerabilities a...

Dick O'Brien from Symantec's Threat Hunter team sits down with Dave to discuss their work on "Witchetty - Group Uses Updated Toolset in Attacks on Governments in Middle East." Their research has found that the group known as Witchetty aka LookingFrog, has been progressively updating its toolset, including the new tool, backdoor Trojan (Backdoor. Stegmap) to launch malware attacks on targets in the...

Brigid O Gorman from Symantec's Threat Hunter team joins Dave to discuss their research on "Noberus Ransomware - Darkside and BlackMatter Successor Continues to Evolve its Tactics." The research states that Noberus ransomware (aka BlackCat, ALPHV) is more dangerous than ever because attackers have been using new tactics, tools, and procedures in recent months. In the research, Symantec says, "Amon...

Jen Miller-Osborn from Palo Alto Networks' Unit 42 joins Dave to discuss their work on the Cloaked Ursa group, with a recent report released called "Russian APT29 Hackers Use Online Storage Services, DropBox and Google Drive." The research shares insights into an active campaign from Russia’s Foreign Intelligence Service, that is leveraging the use of trusted, legitimate cloud services including G...

David Prefer from SANS sits down with Dave to discuss how a new covert channel exfiltrates data via a browser's built-in bookmark sync. David goes on to describe how this research will "describe how the ability to synchronize bookmarks across devices introduces a novel vector for data exfiltration and other misuses." In the research, he shares how he tested his said hypothesis and goes on to descr...

Gafnit Amiga, Director of Security Research from Lightspin, joins Dave to discuss her team's research "AWS RDS Vulnerability Leads to AWS Internal Service Credentials." The research describes how the vulnerability was caught and right after it was reported, the AWS Security team applied an initial patch limited only to the recent Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS) and Aurora PostgreSQL engin...

Sam Crowther, CEO of Kasada join's Dave to discuss their work on "The New Way Fraudsters Bypass Bot Management." Kasada researchers recently discovered a new type of bot called Solver Services, which is used and created by bad actors to bypass the majority of bot management systems. The research states "Now it’s easier than ever for mainstream bot operators to scrape content, take over accounts, h...

Deepen Desai from Zscaler ThreatLabz joins Dave to discuss their work on "Return of the Evilnum APT with updated TTPs and new targets." Zscaler’s ThreatLabz team recently caught a new Evilnum APT attack campaign that uses the document template on MS Office Word to inject malicious payload to the victim's machine. There are three new instances used of the campaign, including updated tactics, techni...

Ryan Kovar from Splunk sits down with Dave to discuss their findings in "Truth in Malvertising?" that contradict the LockBit group's encryption speed claims. Splunk's SURGe team recently released a whitepaper, blog, and video that outlined the encryption speeds of 10 different ransomware families. During their research they cam across Lockbit doing the same thing. After completing the research, th...

Nick Ascoli from ForeTrace in a partnership with PIXM sits down with Dave to provide insight on their team's work on "Phishing tactics: how a threat actor stole 1 million credentials in 4 months." During routine analysis, researchers discovered the connection between the pages using PIXM’s deep html analysis feature, which enabled them to view and analyze the underlying code on the pages after the...

Dick O'Brien from Symantec, a part of Broadcom Software, joins Dave to discuss how the cyber-criminal operation, Clipminer Botnet, makes operators behind it at least $1.7 million. Symantec's research says "The malware being used, tracked as Trojan. Clipminer, has a number of similarities to another crypto-mining Trojan called KryptoCibule, suggesting it may be a copycat or evolution of that threat...

Ashley Taylor from SANS.edu, joins Dave to discuss fake job ads and methods to proactively detect these scams. The research shares how job seekers are under attack, with scammers posing as fake job recruiters to steal information from people who are interested in the job posting. The brands being impersonated as are at risk of losing credibility to their brand identity. The research shares exactly...

Deepen Desai from Zscaler's ThreatLabz joins Dave to discuss how APTs, like Lyceum Group, create tactics and malware to carry out attacks against their targets. The Lyceum group has been active since 2017 and is a state-sponsored Iranian APT group. This group targets Middle Eastern organizations most notably in the energy and telecommunication sectors, and they rely heavily on .NET based malwares....

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...

Rob Pantazopoulos from Secureworks, joins Dave to discuss their work on "REvil Development Adds Confidence About GOLD SOUTHFIELD Reemergence." Secureworks researchers published a new analysis on what can be considered the ‘first’ set of ransomware samples associated with the reemergence. These updated samples indicate that GOLD SOUTHFIELD has resumed operations. The research states "The identifica...

Chad Seaman, Team Lead at Akamai SIRT joins Dave to discuss their research about a record-breaking DDoS Attack. The research says "A new reflection/amplification distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) vector with a record-breaking potential amplification ratio of 4,294,967,296:1 has been abused by attackers in the wild to launch multiple high-impact DDoS attacks." Starting in mid-February 2022, secu...

Alden Wahlstrom, senior analyst on Mandiant's Information Operations Team, shares a comprehensive overview and analysis of the various information operations activities they’ve seen while responding to the Russian invasion. While the full extent of the Russia-Ukraine war has yet to come to light, more than two months after the start of the invasion, Mandiant has identified activity that they belie...

Larry Cashdollar from Akamai, joins Dave to discuss their research on a DDoS campaign claiming to be REvil. The research shares that Akamai's team was notified last week of an attack on one of their hospitality customers that they called "Layer 7" by a group claiming to be associated with REvil. In the research, they dive into the attack, as well as comparing it to other similar attacks that have...

Alan Neville, a Threat Intelligence Analyst from Symantec Broadcom, joins Dave to discuss their research "Lazarus Targets Chemical Sector." Symantec has observed the North Korea-linked threat group known as Lazarus conducting an espionage campaign targeting organizations operating within the chemical sector. The campaign appears to be a continuation of the group's activity called Operation Dream J...

Edward Wu, senior principal data scientist at ExtraHop, joins Dave to discuss the company's research, "A Technical Analysis of How Spring4Shell Works." ExtraHop first noticed chatter from social media in March of 2022 on a new remote code execution (RCE) vulnerability and immediately started tracking the issue. In the research, it describes how the exploit works and breaks down how the ExtraHop te...