See how these novel, sophisticated, or creative threats used techniques such as living off the land to evade detection from traditional defensive measures — but were busted by AI.

We're now halfway through 2022, and already we have seen a range of cyberattacks, familiar and unfamiliar, disrupting organizations. However, we have also seen uplifting stories of successful threat detection efforts, as well.

In this article, we will look at five novel, sophisticated, or creative threats that used techniques such as "living off the land" to evade detection by traditional defensive measures. These threats were all discovered by artificial intelligence (AI) technology, which can spot subtle deviations in device and user behavior and autonomously enforce "normal," stopping a threat in its tracks.

**1\. Leading Laboratory Interrupts Dark Web Insider Threat With AI**

Cyberattacks against the healthcare sector hit record highs last year, and for these organizations cyber threats can have severe real-world consequences. One of Darktrace's healthcare clients is a company specializing in the research, development, and manufacturing of innovative in vitro diagnostic tests for disease, conditions, and infections.

In March, this company was targeted by a malicious insider threat. An employee was looking to exploit their access within the organization to sell proprietary intellectual property, perhaps even medical supplies, on the Dark Web. The employee was detected using Tor on a company device to connect to a Dark Web pharmaceutical market forum.

Malicious or compromised insiders can be difficult to identify because their privileged access and knowledge of company workings allow them to evade detection by traditional security tools. In order to protect intellectual property from insider threat, organizations need to augment security teams with AI-powered technology to stop malicious activity in real time.

In this case, given that no other company device had visited the Tor network in the past, Darktrace's AI flagged the activity to the security team, who were then able to investigate the employee and discover their malicious intentions.

**2\. Babuk Double-Extortion Ransomware Neutralized at a Technology Manufacturer**

Babuk is a double-extortion ransomware strain that has successfully attacked high-value organizations around the world since 2021. In February 2022, however, it targeted a multinational technology manufacturer that had deployed AI cybersecurity. The targeted company facilitates the adoption of smart medical devices as well as electric and autonomous vehicles. This means uptime is important, and ransomware poses a significant risk.

The first sign of a threat came in the early hours of the morning, when the AI detected a company device performing network scanning and making unusual connections to other internal devices. Based on its understanding of the device's usual "pattern of life," the AI identified this out-of-the-ordinary behavior as malicious and calculated a response.

The AI was able to stop this attack without interfering with normal business operations in the company's office or on the manufacturing floor. It blocked only the malicious connections, while allowing the rest of the compromised device's operations to continue.

Once the attack had been stopped, a post-compromise analysis conducted by the AI revealed that the compromised device had indeed been attempting to distribute files with "babyk" extensions. These attacks often strike out of hours, so defenders of critical infrastructure should consider using artificial intelligence to allow their organizations to self-defend against advanced threats.

**3\. HR-Spoofing Attack Targets Employees at Private Equity Firm**

Phishing and spoofing emails continue to be the favorite initial entry point for cyberattackers. Earlier this year, a private equity firm looking to bolster its email security efforts trialed an AI email security solution and detected a targeted spoofing attack almost immediately.

The attackers had tailored their email to imitate the company's internal HR communications, titling it "Q3 Commission 2021 and Agenda" and designing it to look like a SharePoint Microsoft document. To a company employee, this email would not have looked at all out of place in their inbox.

Further investigation showed the email to be part of a wider trend of targeted phishing campaigns that use fake Microsoft branding to trick employees. The exact motivations of this attack are unknown because it was stopped in its earliest stages, but attacks like it are often launched with the aim of causing operational disruption or conducting IP and financial theft.

**4\. Ransomware Attack Against a Financial Services Provider Halted**

In March 2022, a South African financial services firm decided to try out Darktrace's technology and immediately uncovered an in-progress ransomware attack attempting to encrypt its most valuable data.

The first sign of compromise was a company mail server making unusual HTTP connections to an external endpoint and communicating with a malicious server via the Internet. Its understanding of the business and this particular mail server's normal behavior allowed the AI to identify the threatening activity.

The compromised server was then seen attempting to perform network reconnaissance and lateral movement to increase its presence within the organization. Further investigation revealed that attackers had obtained the credentials of 11 employees, including several C-level executives. With the attack spreading fast, more and more company devices began attempting to communicate with the malicious external server.

The AI quickly interrupted further attempts at communication with the malicious server but allowed normal business operations to continue. With the attack safely contained, Darktrace helped the company's security team to conduct a full investigation and ensure that the attack had been completely neutralized.

**5\. AI Stops Log4j Exploit at a Global Financial Services Provider**

The Log4Shell vulnerability that went public at the end of 2021 is one of the most serious and widespread exploits on record. It is thought by some to have affected hundreds of millions of devices and, as a zero-day, it has evaded lots of traditional security tools.

Fortunately, AI security has been able to mitigate the effects of Log4Shell for many of the organizations it protects. One of these, a global financial services provider with assets of over $5 billion, was targeted in March 2022.

The attackers used a Log4j vulnerability to gain access to one of the company's virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) servers, from which they attempted to scan the surrounding network and spread throughout the enterprise. The server began downloading a shell script from a suspicious external endpoint, prompting an immediate alert from the company's AI-driven security measures.

Convinced of the severity of the threat by the alert, the company's security team promptly deployed AI technology to take precise action against the threat and maintain the regular business activities on the VDI server.

Fast action from this AI-driven response technology blocked the malicious connections and prevented the threat from progressing further, very likely saving the company from a ransomware attack.

5 Surprising Cyberattacks AI Stopped This Year

Team behind Abuse.ch and ThreatFox launch new hub for scanning and hunting files using YARA

Team behind Abuse.ch and ThreatFox launch new hub for scanning and hunting files using YARA

Security teams have a new tool to hunt for malware, using open source YARA rules.

YARAify can scan files using public YARA rules, integrate public and non-public YARA rules from Malpedia, operated by Germany’s Fraunhofer Institute, and scan using open and commercial ClamAV signatures.

Researchers can set up hunting rules to match both YARA rules and ClamAV signatures, and link YARAify to other tools via APIs.

**Pattern matching**

YARAify was developed by security researchers at Abuse.ch, a project from the Institute for Cybersecurity and Engineering (ICE) at the University of Applied Sciences at Bern, Switzerland.

According to founder Roman Hüssy, YARA rules are powerful but difficult to handle.

For example, rules are spread across platforms and git repositories, and there is no simple way to share them. Nor is there a single, consistent naming convention for YARA rules, leading to duplication and difficulties in rule handling.

Hüssy has added both a unique identity, , and YARAhub to help researchers share rules.

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Rule authors can also set up TLP classifications on YARAhub to allow others to use the YARA rule to hunt for threats, without seeing the rule itself.

“YARA is an open source tool for pattern matching,” Hüssy told _The Daily Swig_. “It allows anyone, usually security researchers or vendors of security software, to write their own rules to detect \[issues\] such as malicious or suspicious files.

“We decided to launch the YARAify platform to the public to allow anyone to share their YARA rules with the community in a structured way and to use those to hunt for suspicious and malicious files seen within the Abuse.ch universe.”

Hüssy hopes that YARAify will become the default platform for security researchers to share YARA rules. The response so far has been overwhelmingly positive, he said.

**Threat intel**

Security vendors are increasingly supporting YARA rules in their own applications, and YARA rules are used widely by SOCs and in threat hunting and threat intelligence.

Data protection and resilience vendor Rubrik, for example, has built support for YARA rules into its tools, to help IT teams with incident containment, and with threat hunting, especially to prevent a firm reinfecting its systems from compromised backups.

"When talking about YARA it is important to distinguish between YARA the tool and YARA rules,” James Blake, field CISO at Rubrik, told _The Daily Swig_.

“YARA rules are the descriptions of malware that the YARA tool creates when given a file to analyse. The adoption of YARA rules in open source and commercial preventative and detective controls, other standards such as STIX for threat intelligence exchange, as well as in threat intelligence platforms, have now extended way beyond just the YARA tool.”

Check out more of the latest hacking tools

YARA rules can be used to “allow a net to be cast wide and then gradually refined” during threat hunting, as researchers focus in on particular malware strains. But YARA rules are powerful because they can describe not just the content of an executable, but also its behavior. This helps researchers track malware families, even as they adapt.

“YARA rules are extensively used in mature SOCs and mature service provider organizations to improve detection and prevent some of the noise that’s generated by more simplified hash-based detections,” Martin Riley, director of managed security services at consulting firm Bridewell, told _The Daily Swig_.

Bridewell uses YARA rules to identify trends and carry out reverse map engineering on some malware.

“YARA rules essentially replace hash values of files, which can be easily manipulated by attackers,” Riley said.

“YARA rules provide a higher fidelity and more valuable detection mechanism for malicious objects within a network.” YARAify, he suggested, provides researchers with an alternative to tools such as Google’s VirusTotal.

**DON’T MISS** Rise in off-the-shelf ransomware kits continues

YARAify: Defensive tool scans suspicious files against a large repository of YARA rules

Marval MSM v14.19.0.12476 is vulnerable to Cross Site Request Forgery (CSRF). An attacker can disable the 2FA by sending the user a malicious form.

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CVE-2022-31886: Future Proof your IT Service Management

Researchers this week said they had observed criminals using a new and improved version of the prolific malware, barely three months after its authors announced they were quitting.

The authors of "Raccoon Stealer," one of the most prolific information stealers of 2021, have released a new and improved version of the malware just three months after shutting down operations following the death of its lead developer in Ukraine.

Researchers from French cybersecurity vendor Sekoia this week reported stumbling upon active servers hosting Raccoon Stealer files while searching for signs of the malware earlier this month. Sekoia's subsequent investigation showed the authors of the malware had been selling the new version via their Telegram channel since at least May 17.

Sekoia said its analysis showed the authors of Raccoon Stealer have rewritten the malware and administrative panel for it, from scratch. The focus of the effort appears to have been on improving the stealer’s performance and efficiency. At its core, the new Raccoon Stealer remains a classic information stealer, with an extra focus on cryptocurrency wallets. It is designed to steal passwords, cookies, credit card data, and autofill forms from most modern browsers. The malware can steal from a wide range of desktop crypto wallets including Electrum, Exodus, MetaMask, and Coinomi.

**New and Improved**

Sekoia found Raccoon Stealer V2 to also feature capabilities — such as a file grabber for all disks and a built-in file downloader — for exfiltrating files for compromised systems and loading other software on the systems. Additional capabilities include screenshot capturing, keystroke logging, and application enumeration. "It's worth noting that the malware implements almost no defense evasion techniques, such as anti-analysis \[or\] obfuscation,” Sekoia said in a report summarizing its analysis this week. However, expect the malware authors to add those capabilities soon, the security vendor said.

Several security researchers had fully expected Raccoon Stealer to resurface when its developers announced they were stopping operations on March 25. The malware, which first surfaced in 2019, is widely regarded as one of the most effective information stealers in recent memory. Racoon Stealer's developers initially distributed it via a malware-as-a-service model that allowed other criminals to rent and use the stealer for a portion of the profits.

Over time, criminals began distributing it in other ways as well, including by planting it on websites selling pirated software. Last August, researchers from Sophos reported criminals dropping the malware from sites that were optimized to surface high on Google search engine results when people searched for sources of pirated software. In that campaign, Sophos concluded the criminals distributing Raccoon Stealer were likely using "droppers-as-a-service" to distribute the malware. Sophos researchers also observed attackers using a Telegram channel to deliver the address of the command-and-control gateway to systems infected with Raccoon Stealer. The security vendor surmised that Raccoon Stealer attackers had begun using the Telegram channel to make it harder to locate the malware's command and control infrastructure.

**Resurfacing on Cue**

In January 2022, Bitdefender's Cyber Threat Intelligence Lab observed the operators of the widely used RIG Exploit Kit include Raccoon Stealer in their kit. However, when Raccoon Stealer's developers announced they were quitting, the authors of RIG quickly swapped out the malware for the older but still popular Dridex banking Trojan. Recently, criminals have also used fake installers for legitimate software — such as VPNs from F-Secure and Proton — to distribute Raccoon Stealer.

In a report last week, Bitdefender predicted that Raccoon Locker would return despite the setback that pushed the developers to ceasing operations in March. It's an assessment that Sekoia shared this week. "We expect a resurgence of Raccoon Stealer v2 as developers implemented a version tailored to the needs of cybercriminals and scaled their backbone servers to handle large loads," Sekoia said.

'Raccoon Stealer' Scurries Back on the Scene After Hiatus

On December 7, 2021, Google announced it had sued two Russian men allegedly responsible for operating the Glupteba botnet, a global malware menace that has infected millions of computers over the past decade. That same day, AWM Proxy -- a 14-year-old anonymity service that rents hacked PCs to cybercriminals -- suddenly went offline. Security experts had long seen a link between Glupteba and AWM Proxy, but new research shows AWM Proxy's founder is one of the men being sued by Google.

On December 7, 2021, **Google** announced it was suing two Russian men allegedly responsible for operating the **Glupteba** botnet, a global malware menace that has infected millions of computers over the past decade. That same day, **AWM Proxy** — a 14-year-old anonymity service that rents hacked PCs to cybercriminals — suddenly went offline. Security experts had long seen a link between Glupteba and AWM Proxy, but new research shows AWM Proxy’s founder is one of the men being sued by Google.

AWMproxy, the storefront for renting access to infected PCs, circa 2011.

Launched in March 2008, AWM Proxy quickly became the largest service for crooks seeking to route their malicious Web traffic through compromised devices. In 2011, researchers at **Kaspersky Lab** showed that virtually all of the hacked systems for rent at AWM Proxy had been compromised by **TDSS** (a.k.a TDL-4 and Alureon), a stealthy “rootkit” that installs deep within infected PCs and loads even before the underlying Windows operating system boots up.

In March 2011, security researchers at **ESET** found TDSS was being used to deploy Glupteba, another rootkit that steals passwords and other access credentials, disables security software, and tries to compromise other devices on the victim’s network — such as Internet routers and media storage servers — for use in relaying spam or other malicious traffic.

A report from the Polish computer emergency response team (CERT Orange Polksa) found Glupteba was by far the biggest malware threat in 2021.

Like its predecessor TDSS, Glupteba is primarily distributed through “pay-per-install” or PPI networks, and via traffic purchased from traffic distribution systems (TDS). Pay-per-install networks try to match cybercriminals who already have access to large numbers of hacked PCs with other crooks seeking broader distribution of their malware.

In a typical PPI network, clients will submit their malware—a spambot or password-stealing Trojan, for example —to the service, which in turn charges per thousand successful installations, with the price depending on the requested geographic location of the desired victims. One of the most common ways PPI affiliates generate revenue is by secretly bundling the PPI network’s installer with pirated software titles that are widely available for download via the web or from file-sharing networks.

An example of a cracked software download site distributing Glupteba. Image: Google.com.

Over the past decade, both Glupteba and AWM Proxy have grown substantially. When KrebsOnSecurity first covered AWM Proxy in 2011, the service was selling access to roughly 24,000 infected PCs scattered across dozens of countries. Ten years later, AWM Proxy was offering 10 times that number of hacked systems on any given day, and Glupteba had grown to more than one million infected devices worldwide.

There is also ample evidence to suggest that Glupteba may have spawned **Meris**, a massive botnet of hacked Internet of Things (IoT) devices that surfaced in September 2021 and was responsible for some of the largest and most disruptive distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks the Internet has ever seen.

But on Dec. 7, 2021, Google announced it had taken technical measures to dismantle the Glupteba botnet, and filed a civil lawsuit (PDF) against two Russian men thought to be responsible for operating the vast crime machine. AWM Proxy’s online storefront disappeared that same day.

AWM Proxy quickly alerted its customers that the service had moved to a new domain, with all customer balances, passwords and purchase histories seamlessly ported over to the new home. However, subsequent takedowns targeting AWM Proxy’s domains and other infrastructure have conspired to keep the service on the ropes and frequently switching domains ever since.

Earlier this month, the United States, Germany, the Netherlands and the U.K. dismantled the “**RSOCKS**” botnet, a competing proxy service that had been in operation since 2014. KrebsOnSecurity has identified the owner of RSOCKS as a 35-year-old from Omsk, Russia who runs the world’s largest forum catering to spammers.

The employees who kept things running for RSOCKS, circa 2016.

Shortly after last week’s story on the RSOCKS founder, I heard from **Riley Kilmer**, co-founder of Spur.us, a startup that tracks criminal proxy services. Kilmer said RSOCKS was similarly disabled after Google’s combined legal sneak attack and technical takedown targeting Glupteba.

“The RSOCKS website gave you the estimated number of proxies in each of their subscription packages, and that number went down to zero on Dec. 7,” Kilmer said. “It’s not clear if that means the services were operated by the same people, or if they were just using the same sources (i.e., PPI programs) to generate new installations of their malware.”

Kilmer said each time his company tried to determine how many systems RSOCKS had for sale, they found each Internet address being sold by RSOCKS was also present in AWM Proxy’s network. In addition, Kilmer said, the application programming interfaces (APIs) used by both services to keep track of infected systems were virtually identical, once again suggesting strong collaboration.

“One hundred percent of the IPs we got back from RSOCKS we’d already identified in AWM,” Kilmer said. “And the IP port combinations they give you when you access an individual IP were the same as from AWM.”

In 2011, KrebsOnSecurity published an investigation that identified one of the founders of AWM Proxy, but Kilmer’s revelation prompted me to take a fresh look at the origins of this sprawling cybercriminal enterprise to determine if there were additional clues showing more concrete links between RSOCKS, AWM Proxy and Glupteba.

**IF YOUR PLAN IS TO RIP OFF GOOGLE…**

Supporting Kilmer’s theory that AWM Proxy and RSOCKS may simply be using the same PPI networks to spread, further research shows the RSOCKS owner also had an ownership stake in **AD1\[.\]ru**, an extremely popular Russian-language pay-per-install network that has been in operation for at least a decade.

Google took aim at Glupteba in part because its owners were using the botnet to divert and steal vast sums in online advertising revenue. So it’s more than a little ironic that the critical piece of evidence linking all of these operations begins with a Google Analytics code included in the HTML code for the original AWM Proxy back in 2008 (**UA-3816536**).

That analytics code also was present on a handful of other sites over the years, including the now-defunct Russian domain name registrar **Domenadom\[.\]ru**, and the website **web-site\[.\]ru**, which curiously was a Russian company operating a global real estate appraisal business called American Appraisal.

Two other domains connected to that Google Analytics code — Russian plastics manufacturers **techplast\[.\]ru** and **tekhplast.ru** — also shared a different Google Analytics code (**UA-1838317**) with web-site\[.\]ru and with the domain “**starovikov\[.\]ru**.”

The name on the WHOIS registration records for the plastics domains is an “**Alexander I. Ukraincki**,” whose personal information also is included in the domains tpos\[.\]ru and alphadisplay\[.\]ru, both apparently manufacturers of point-of-sale payment terminals in Russia.

Constella Intelligence, a security firm that indexes passwords and other personal information exposed in past data breaches, revealed dozens of variations on email addresses used by Alexander I. Ukraincki over the years. Most of those email addresses start with some variation of “**uai@**” followed by a domain from one of the many Russian email providers (e.g., yandex.ru, mail.ru). \[Full disclosure: Constella is currently an advertiser on this website\].

But Constella also shows those different email addresses all relied on a handful of passwords — most commonly “**2222den**” and “**2222DEN**.” Both of those passwords have been used almost exclusively in the past decade by the person who registered more than a dozen email addresses with the username “**dennstr**.”

The dennstr identity leads to several variations on the same name — Denis Strelinikov, or Denis Stranatka, from Ukraine, but those clues ultimately led nowhere promising. And maybe that was the point.

Things began looking brighter after I ran a search in DomainTools for web-site\[.\]ru’s original WHOIS records, which shows it was assigned in 2005 to a “private person” who used the email address **lycefer@gmail.com**. A search in Constella on that email address says it was used to register nearly two dozen domains, including starovikov.ru and **starovikov\[.\]com**.

A cached copy of the contact page for Starovikov\[.\]com shows that in 2008 it displayed the personal information for a **Dmitry Starovikov**, who listed his Skype username as “lycefer.”

Finally, Russian incorporation documents show the company LLC Website (web-site\[.\]ru)was registered in 2005 to two men, one of whom was named **Dmitry Sergeevich Starovikov**.

Bringing this full circle, Google says Starovikov is one of the two operators of the Glupteba botnet:

The cover page for Google’s lawsuit against the alleged Glupteba botnet operators.

Mr. Starovikov did not respond to requests for comment. But attorneys for Starovikov and his co-defendant last month filed a response to Google’s complaint in the Southern District of New York, denying (PDF) their clients had any knowledge of the scheme.

Despite all of the disruption caused by Google’s legal and technical meddling, AWM is still around and nearly as healthy as ever, although the service has been branded with a new name and there are dubious claims of new owners. Advertising customer plans ranging from $50 a day to nearly $700 for “VIP access,” AWM Proxy says its malware has been running on approximately 175,000 systems worldwide over the last 24 hours, and that roughly 65,000 of these systems are currently online.

AWM Proxy, as it exists today.

Meanwhile, the administrators of RSOCKS recently alerted customers that the service and any unspent balances will soon be migrated over to a new location.

Many people seem to equate spending time, money and effort to investigate and prosecute cybercriminals with the largely failed war on drugs, meaning there is an endless supply of up-and-coming crooks who will always fill in any gaps in the workforce whenever cybercriminals face justice.

While that may be true for many low-level cyber thieves today, investigations like these show once again how small the cybercriminal underground really is. It also shows how it makes a great deal of sense to focus efforts on targeting and disrupting the relatively small number of established hackers who remain the real force multipliers of cybercrime.

The Link Between AWM Proxy & the Glupteba Botnet

The previously unknown state-sponsored group is compromising industrial targets with the ShadowPad malware before burrowing deeper into networks.

A previously unknown Chinese-speaking advanced persistent threat (APT) is exploiting the ProxyLogon Microsoft Exchange vulnerability to deploy the ShadowPad malware, researchers said — with the end goal of taking over building-automation systems (BAS) and moving deeper into networks.

That's according to researchers at Kaspersky ICS CERT, who said that the infections affected industrial control systems (ICS) and telecom firms in Afghanistan and Pakistan, as well as a logistics and transport organization in Malaysia. The attacks came to light in October but appear to date back to March 2021.

"We believe that it is highly likely that this threat actor will strike again and we will find new victims in different countries," according to Kaspersky's Monday analysis.

In this specific spate of attacks, Kaspersky observed a unique set of tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs) linking the incidents together, including attackers compromising BAS engineering computers as their initial access point. Researchers noted this is an unusual move for an APT group, despite proof-of-concept malware being available for such platforms.

"Building-automation systems are rare targets for advanced threat actors," said Kirill Kruglov, security expert at Kaspersky ICS CERT, in the alert. "However, those systems can be a valuable source of highly confidential information and may provide the attackers with a backdoor to other, more secured, areas of infrastructures."

The attacks also threaten the physical integrity of buildings, researchers warned. BAS infrastructure unites operational features, such as electricity, lighting, HVAC systems, fire alarms, and security cameras, so they can be managed from a single management console.

"Once a BAS is compromised, all processes within that are at risk, including those relating to information security," according to Kaspersky's alert about the attacks.

In a real-world example of this rare kind of attack, last December a building automation engineering firm suddenly lost contact with hundreds of its BAS devices, including light switches, motion detectors, shutter controllers, and others — after being locked down with the system's own digital security key, which the attackers hijacked. The firm had to revert to manually flipping on and off the central circuit breakers in order to power on the lights in the building.  

**ProxyLogon Leads to ShadowPad Malware in Stealthy Infections**

In many cases, the cyberattackers exploited the ProxyLogon remote code-execution (RCE) vulnerability in MS Exchange (CVE-2021-26855), the firm added. When used in an attack chain, the exploits for these ProxyLogon could allow an attacker to authenticate as the Exchange server and deploy a Web shell so they can remotely control the target server.

ProxyLogon was disclosed in March 2021 after being exploited as a zero-day bug by a Chinese state-sponsored group that Microsoft calls Hafnium — but soon a dizzying array of threat groups piled on to exploit the issue to enable different kinds of attacks.

In this case, once in, the APT deploys the ShadowPad remote access Trojan (RAT) — a popular backdoor and loader used by various Chinese APTs. According to previous analysis from Secureworks, ShadowPad is advanced and modular, first deployed by the "Bronze Atlas" threat group in 2017. "A growing list of other Chinese threat groups have deployed it globally since 2019 in attacks against organizations in various industry verticals," the report noted.

Kaspersky researchers said that in the BAS attacks, "The ShadowPad backdoor was downloaded onto the attacked computers under the guise of legitimate software."

Specifically, the malware originally masqueraded as the mscoree.dll file, which is a Microsoft library file essential for the execution of "managed code" applications written for use with the .NET Framework. As such, the malware was launched by the legitimate AppLaunch.exe application, which itself was executed by creating a task in the Windows Task Scheduler. Last fall, the attackers switched to using the DLL-hijacking technique in legitimate software for viewing OLE-COM objects (OleView). The Windows Task Scheduler is also used in the newer approach. In both cases, using such living-off-the-land tools (i.e., legitimate native software) means that the activity is unlikely to raise any system-intrusion flags.

After the initial infection, the attackers first sent commands manually, then automatically, to deploy additional tools. Researchers said those included the following:

*   The CobaltStrike framework (for lateral movement)
*   Mimikatz (for stealing credentials)
*   The well-known PlugX RAT
*   BAT files (for stealing credentials)
*   Web shells (for remote access to the Web server)
*   The Nextnet utility (for scanning network hosts)

"The artifacts found indicate that the attackers stole domain-authentication credentials from at least one account in each attacked organization (probably from the same computer that was used to penetrate the network)," according to Kaspersky. "These credentials were used to further spread the attack over the network … we do not know the ultimate goal of the attacker. We think it was probably data harvesting."

**How to Protect Against APT Attacks Targeting BAS, Critical Infrastructure**

The attacks develop "extremely rapidly," Kaspersky said, so early-state detection and mitigation is key to minimizing damage. The researchers recommended the following best practices to protect industrial infrastructure, including BAS footprints:

*   Regularly update operating systems and any application software that are part of the enterprise's network. Apply security fixes and patches to operational-technology (OT) network equipment such as BAS, as soon as they are available.
*   Conduct regular security audits of OT systems to identify and eliminate possible vulnerabilities.
*   Use OT network traffic monitoring, analysis, and detection solutions for better protection from attacks that potentially threaten OT systems and main enterprise assets.
*   Provide dedicated OT security training for IT security teams and OT engineers.
*   Provide the security team responsible for protecting ICS with up-to-date threat intelligence.
*   Use layered security solutions for OT endpoints and networks.

China-Backed APT Pwns Building-Automation Systems with ProxyLogon

Like a hydra, every time one ransomware gang drops out (REvil or Conti), plenty more step up to fill the void (Black Basta).

After a 2021 beleaguered by ransomware, attack volumes continue to balloon in 2022. In fact, a report issued Tuesday indicates that in just the first three months of this year, the volume of ransomware detections almost doubled the total volume reported for all of last year. 

The increasingly high numbers came in spite of what appeared to be the downfall of a major ransomware group at the end of 2021: REvil. This serves as a testament to the persistence of criminal actors in reforming, rebranding, and regrouping their criminal gangs to profit handsomely off of ransomware tactics.

This persistence has been studied most recently by security researchers who have noted the rapid rise of the Black Basta ransomware gang in the past two months, quickly following the emergence of the LAPSUS$ group earlier in the year.

**Ransomware 2022 Volumes: Up, Up, Up**

The numbers today come by way of the quarterly "Internet Security Report" from WatchGuard Threat Lab, which examines Q1 2022 threat trends. Researchers with the firm report that unique ransomware detections in the first three months of the year were triple the volume of the same time period in 2021. Meantime, Q1 2022 ransomware volume equaled more than 80% of the total volume recorded in all of 2021.

“Based on the early spike in ransomware this year and data from previous quarters, we predict 2022 will break our record for annual ransomware detections,” says WatchGuard chief security officer Corey Nachreiner, noting that the last annual high-water mark for ransomware volume came back in 2018.

**LAPSUS$ Steps Up in the Underground Economy**

The report from his team explains that even in the face of high-profile arrests and charges made by US and Russian authorities in late 2021 and early 2022 that resulted in the disruption of the prolific REvil ransomware gang, the ransomware hits keep coming. Their analysis shows that REvil’s disruption “opened the door” for LAPSUS$ to emerge in a big way.

“The LAPSUS$ group made global headlines with their double-extortion ransomware techniques that caused cybersecurity decision-makers to take notice,” the report states. “The group was known to hire employees of organizations to steal information from the inside and then use extortion techniques to blackmail victim organizations. Their victim list also put decision makers on notice. Microsoft, Nvidia, Samsung, Ubisoft, Okta, and T-Mobile are all victims of LAPSUS$.”

This kind of resurgence of new groups should dampen security teams' celebrations of the demise of groups like REvil and Conti, which in May were reported to have shut down their operations. Stats from NCC Group show a slight dip in attacks that month, with a warning that other heads of the ransomware gang Hydra were already starting to emerge.

**Black Basta: New Kid on the Ransomware Block**

Most recently, the Black Basta ransomware gang has surged into the scene. Earlier in the month, two separate reports from Uptycs and NCC Group showed that Black Basta was targeting ESXi-based systems and servers among other victims, and leveraging the Qbot malware family (aka Qakbot) to maintain persistence on networks it goes after. 

"While Black Basta isn't the first to develop capabilities against ESXi (LockBit, Hive, and Cheerscrypt already have demonstrated ESXi capabilities), this shows the relative sophistication of the teams working under Black Basta performing the ransomware operations," said Jake Williams, executive director of cyber threat intelligence at SCYTHE, in a statement provided to Dark Reading. "Use of commodity malware like Qakbot demonstrates that there is no such thing as a 'commodity' malware infection. Organizations must treat every malware detection as an opportunity for a threat actor to deploy ransomware."

Meantime, an advisory report from the Cybereason Nocturnus research team last week offered further details about Black Basta’s tactics, techniques, and procedures. They deemed the threat from the group to be highly severe, as it has victimized more than 50 companies in English-speaking countries worldwide since April. Researchers said the hallmark of the firm is its use of double extortion – i.e., stealing sensitive files and information and using it to extort victims by threatening publication of the details unless a ransom is paid. The amounts asked for are often in the millions.

The sudden rise of Black Basta has some speculating that the group is actually just a regrouping of the two most recently disbanded groups.

“Due to their rapid ascension and the precision of their attacks, Black Basta is likely operated by former members of the defunct Conti and REvil gangs, the two most profitable ransomware gangs in 2021,” says Lior Div, CEO of Cybereason.

Ransomware Volume Nearly Doubles 2021 Totals in a Single Quarter

A never-before-seen remote access trojan dubbed ZuoRAT has been singling out small office/home office (SOHO) routers as part of a sophisticated campaign targeting North American and European networks.
The malware "grants the actor the ability to pivot into the local network and gain access to additional systems on the LAN by hijacking network communications to maintain an undetected foothold,"

A never-before-seen remote access trojan dubbed **ZuoRAT** has been singling out small office/home office (SOHO) routers as part of a sophisticated campaign targeting North American and European networks.

The malware "grants the actor the ability to pivot into the local network and gain access to additional systems on the LAN by hijacking network communications to maintain an undetected foothold," researchers from Lumen Black Lotus Labs said in a report shared with The Hacker News.

The stealthy operation, which targeted routers from ASUS, Cisco, DrayTek, and NETGEAR, is believed to have commenced in early 2020 during the initial months of the COVID-19 pandemic, effectively remaining under the radar for over two years.

"Consumers and remote employees routinely use SOHO routers, but these devices are rarely monitored or patched, which makes them one of the weakest points of a network's perimeter," the company's threat intelligence team said.

Initial access to the routers is obtained by scanning for known unpatched flaws to load the remote access tool, using it gain access to the network and drop a next-stage shellcode loader that's used to deliver Cobalt Strike and custom backdoors such as CBeacon and GoBeacon that are capable of running arbitrary commands.

In addition to enabling in-depth reconnaissance of target networks, traffic collection, and network communication hijacking, the malware has been described as a heavily modified version of the Mirai botnet, whose source code leaked in October 2016.

"ZuoRAT is a MIPS file compiled for SOHO routers that can enumerate a host and internal LAN, capture packets being transmitted over the infected device, and perform person-in-the-middle attacks (DNS and HTTPS hijacking based on predefined rules)," the researchers said.

Also included is a function to harvest TCP connections over ports 21 and 8443, which are associated with FTP and web browsing, potentially enabling the adversary to keep tabs on the users' internet activity behind the compromised router.

Other capabilities of ZuoRAT allow the attackers to monitor DNS and HTTPS traffic with an aim to hijack the requests and redirect the victims to malicious domains using preset rules that are generated and stored in temporary directories in an attempt to resist forensic analysis.

That's not the only step taken by the hackers to conceal its activities, for the attacks rely on an obfuscated, multi-stage C2 infrastructure that involves utilizing a virtual private server to drop the initial RAT exploit and leveraging the compromised routers themselves as proxy C2 servers.

To further avoid detection, the staging server has been spotted hosting seemingly innocuous content, in one instance mimicking a website called "muhsinlar.net," a propaganda portal set up for the Turkestan Islamic Party (TIP), a Uyghur extremist outfit originating from China.

The identity of the adversarial collective behind the campaign remains unknown, although an analysis of the artifacts has revealed possible references to the Chinese province of Xiancheng and the use of Alibaba's Yuque and Tencent for command-and-control (C2).

The elaborate and evasive nature of the operation coupled with the tactics used in the attacks to remain undercover point toward potential nation-state activity, Black Lotus Labs noted.

"The capabilities demonstrated in this campaign — gaining access to SOHO devices of different makes and models, collecting host and LAN information to inform targeting, sampling and hijacking network communications to gain potentially persistent access to in-land devices and intentionally stealth C2 infrastructure leveraging multistage siloed router to router communications — points to a highly sophisticated actor," the researchers concluded.

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ZuoRAT Malware Hijacking Home-Office Routers to Spy on Targeted Networks

Abuse primitives have a longer shelf life than bugs and zero-days and are cheaper to maintain. They're also much harder for defenders to detect and block.

Microsoft's cloud services revenue grew 46% in the first quarter of 2022, and its cloud market share has increased by almost 9% since 2017. With Azure finally being used in earnest by the mainstream, now is the ideal time to get involved in Azure abuse research. There are many undiscovered abuse primitives out there, a lot of misconfiguration debt built up, and growing numbers of adversaries starting to target Azure more seriously.

Why spend time looking for abuse primitives rather than bugs or software exploits? Abuses have a much longer shelf life than bugs and zero-days, and they're cheaper to maintain. More importantly for attackers, they exist in nearly all implementations of the software in question and are much harder for defenders to detect and block. That's why it's vital for researchers to uncover new abuse options so they can be fixed or mitigated.

Here's my five-step process for researching a specific system within Azure and trying to find new attack primitives. Following this approach will help you save time, stay on track, and produce better results.

**Step One: Begin With the End in Mind**

First, you'll need to gain an understanding of how your system of choice works, how it interacts with other systems in Azure, and how it can be abused. Beyond that, think about what your final product will be — a blog post? A conference session? Defensive remediation guidelines or updates to an open source tool? Determine what's needed to create these assets. Consider producing audit code as well, so defenders can check for these dangerous configurations, and abuse code, too, so others can easily verify how these configurations can be abused. These are the "success criteria" for your research that will help you maintain focus, avoid unnecessary rabbit holes, and ensure a valuable end result.

**Step Two: Study the Intent and Design of the System**

Once you know exactly what you need to discover, begin research just like anyone else would — doing Google searches and reading official documentation. Look for anything that seems abusable (like the ability to reset passwords and permissions required), dig further into those, and take notes as you go.

Use LinkedIn to identify any product architects or other Microsoft staff involved in creating the subject of your study. Review their LinkedIn and Twitter feeds and look for the resources they've authored or reposted (blog posts, conference presentations, etc.). Delve into community resources like forums or GitHub repositories associated with this service, as these user groups are generally much more open in their discourse around problems and weaknesses than the Microsoft folks. Keep taking notes on the system. Once you can speak intelligently about the architecture and intent of the system and write a highly accurate, nontechnical brief about it, you're ready to move on.

**Step Three: Explore the System**

Documentation can only take you so far — it doesn't keep up with changes in Azure and there are almost always hidden connections that go undocumented. It's tempting to jump straight into this step, but without the context on the system that you built through research, you'll probably waste a lot of time.

Start exploring the system with the easiest interface — often this is the Azure portal GUI. If you bring up the Developer tools in the Chrome browser, you can see all the API requests that the browser is making. Copy them to PowerShell and you'll have a good start to building your own client. Use the official CLI tools in Azure (az binary, the Az PowerShell module, and Azure AD PowerShell module).  

When you’ve explored enough that you can build your own basic client to interact with the system, it’s time to proceed. This provides a foundation for a more mature client, and for automating the process of testing abuse capabilities.

**Step Four: Catalog Abuse Capabilities**

Now you can use your client to enumerate all the permissions that that system can assign, and test the abuse primitives you already know about against each of those permissions (e.g., can you promote yourself to global admin or change a global admin’s password?). Keep an eye out for other abuse primitives that might present themselves during your research — and test them as well to reveal any discrepancies between what the official documentation says and how things work in reality.

Realistically, you’ll need to automate this process. When I went through this research methodology examining the Azure Graph API, I had a list of about 175 permissions and a dozen abuse primitives to test against each of them … you do the math.

**Step Five: Share Findings**

The final step is to help others learn from your work. Write a blog post, do a talk and/or share your code. The point is to help others save time and expand or add on to your work. Think of it as writing the blog post you needed at the start of your research.

To learn more, watch a talk I gave on this topic (and access the accompanying deck). Inspired to start researching Azure abuses? Here are some useful websites to find technical content around Azure security: The Lazy Administrator, Good Workaround!, AZAdvertizer, Thomas Van Laere, and Microsoft Portals.

How to Find New Attack Primitives in Microsoft Azure

Entities located in Afghanistan, Malaysia, and Pakistan are in the crosshairs of an attack campaign that targets unpatched Microsoft Exchange Servers as an initial access vector to deploy the ShadowPad malware.
Russian cybersecurity firm Kaspersky, which first detected the activity in mid-October 2021, attributed it to a previously unknown Chinese-speaking threat actor. Targets include

Entities located in Afghanistan, Malaysia, and Pakistan are in the crosshairs of an attack campaign that targets unpatched Microsoft Exchange Servers as an initial access vector to deploy the ShadowPad malware.

Russian cybersecurity firm Kaspersky, which first detected the activity in mid-October 2021, attributed it to a previously unknown Chinese-speaking threat actor. Targets include organizations in the telecommunications, manufacturing, and transport sectors.

"During the initial attacks, the group exploited an MS Exchange vulnerability to deploy ShadowPad malware and infiltrated building automation systems of one of the victims," the company said. "By taking control over those systems, the attacker can reach other, even more sensitive systems of the attacked organization."

ShadowPad, which emerged in 2015 as the successor to PlugX, is a privately sold modular malware platform that has been put to use by many Chinese espionage actors over the years.

While its design allows users to remotely deploy additional plugins that can extend its functionality beyond covert data collection, what makes ShadowPad dangerous is the anti-forensic and anti-analysis technique incorporated into the malware.

"During the attacks of the observed actor, the ShadowPad backdoor was downloaded onto the attacked computers under the guise of legitimate software," Kaspersky said. "In many cases, the attacking group exploited a known vulnerability in MS Exchange, and entered the commands manually, indicating the highly targeted nature of their campaigns."

Evidence suggests that intrusions mounted by the adversary began in March 2021, right around the time the ProxyLogon vulnerabilities in Exchange Servers became public knowledge. Some of the targets are said to have been breached by exploiting CVE-2021-26855, a server-side request forgery (SSRF) vulnerability in the mail server.

Besides deploying ShadowPad as "mscoree.dll," an authentic Microsoft .NET Framework component, the attacks also involved the use of Cobalt Strike, a PlugX variant called THOR, and web shells for remote access.

Although the final goals of the campaign remain unknown, the attackers are believed to be interested in long-term intelligence gathering.

"Building automation systems are rare targets for advanced threat actors," Kaspersky ICS CERT researcher Kirill Kruglov said. "However, those systems can be a valuable source of highly confidential information and may provide the attackers with a backdoor to other, more secured, areas of infrastructures."

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