Security | Threat Detection | Cyberattacks | DevSecOps | Compliance

“Ransomware has become the enemy of the day; the threat that was first feared on Pennsylvania Avenue and subsequently detested on Wall Street is now the topic of conversation on Main Street.” Frank Dickson, Program Vice President, Cybersecurity Products at IDC.

With the rise of ransomware and cyber attacks, the term defense-in-depth has risen to the forefront, but what exactly does it mean? At its core, defense-in-depth is a protection mechanism for network security–an approach that involves layering or using multiple controls in series to protect against possible threats. This layered concept provides multiple redundancies in the event systems and data are compromised.

‍Ransomware attacks are dominating news headlines, with ransomware-as-a-service (RaaS) operators actively seeking to exploit network vulnerabilities and infect unsuspecting victims. The healthcare sector and financial industry are especially vulnerable to ransomware attacks, as they store valuable personally identifiable data (PII) which can be misused to carry out lucrative crimes, like identity theft and fraud.

Kroll has been tracking Emotet since it was first identified in 2014, especially during its transition from a banking Trojan designed to primarily steal credentials and sensitive information to a multi-threat polymorphic downloader for more destructive malware. Today, Emotet operators stand as one of the most prominent initial access brokers, providing cybercriminals with access to organizations for a fee.

The great thing about working in the world of cybersecurity is that there’s always something new. You may think you’ve seen it all, and then something comes along that completely surprises you. And that’s certainly true of the GoodWill ransomware, which security firm CloudSEK described this week.

Trustwave SpiderLabs in early April observed a Grandoreiro malware campaign targeting bank users from Brazil, Spain, and Mexico. The campaign exploits the tax season in target countries by sending out tax-themed phishing emails. Grandoreiro was first detected in 2016 is one of the largest banking trojan families developed to strike targets Latin America.

An adversary’s ability to live off the land — relying on the operating system’s built-in tooling and user-installed legitimate software rather than tooling that must be brought in — may allow them to navigate through a victim organization’s network relatively undetected. CrowdStrike Falcon OverWatch™ threat hunters are acutely aware of adversaries’ love of these living off the land binaries (LOLBins) and build their hunts accordingly.

AT&T Alien Labs™ has been tracking a new IoT botnet dubbed “EnemyBot”, which is believed to be distributed by threat actor Keksec. During our investigations, Alien Labs has discovered that EnemyBot is expanding its capabilities, exploiting recently identified vulnerabilities (2022), and now targeting IoT devices, web servers, Android devices and content management system (CMS) servers.