Cybercriminals are increasingly abusing popular cloud apps to deliver malware to their victims. In 2020, more than half of all the malware downloads detected and blocked by the Netskope Security Cloud platform originated from cloud apps. Cloud apps are commonly abused to deliver Trojans, with attackers attempting to exploit the trust placed in the app used for delivery. Increasingly, cloud apps are also abused for next-stage downloads, with attackers attempting to blend in with benign traffic.

The trove of 1.3 million RDP credentials leaked recently is yet again proof that, In the underground economy, initial access brokerage is a flourishing market. Cybercriminals are outsourcing the initial access stage of the attack, so they can better focus on the execution and act more quickly.

“Where’s your app? Where’s your data?” For a long time, if you needed to know where your applications or data were, the answer was clear: it was always either on-premises or in a branch. Universally, almost regardless of organization size, infrastructures were contained, and visible within a defined boundary—you have a data center, a network, a branch, a user.

Best practices for securing an AWS environment have been well-documented and generally accepted, such as AWS’s guidance. However, organizations may still find it challenging on how to begin applying this guidance to their specific environments. In this blog series, we’ll analyze anonymized data from Netskope customers that include security settings of 650,000 entities from 1,143 AWS accounts across several hundred organizations.

Gartner recently published the 2021 Strategic Roadmap for SASE Convergence, outlining key challenges that are driving shifts to Secure Access Services Edge (SASE) architecture. Not surprisingly, chief among these challenges are consistency, simplicity, transparency, and efficacy—all of which a properly implemented SASE architecture is positioned to solve. But knowing what the challenges are, how do we then get to SASE? Has your journey already started? What are the right moves?

BazarLoader is a malicious dropper used in multiple campaigns, including the massive wave of attacks targeting US Hospitals with the Ryuk ransomware during October 2020. The primary purpose of BazarLoader is to download and execute additional malware payloads, and one of the key characteristics is its delivery mechanism, which exploits legitimate cloud services like Google Docs to host the malicious payload.

Netskope is proud to have contributed once again to Verizon’s annual Mobile Security Index —one of the most influential reports in the industry for evaluating mobile security trends. This report is based on a survey of hundreds of professionals responsible for buying, managing, and securing mobile and IoT devices.

Intel 471 researchers have identified a new malicious document builder, dubbed “EtterSilent,” leveraged by various threat actor groups. One of the build options is a weaponized Microsoft Office document (maldoc) that uses malicious macros to download and execute an externally hosted payload. The maldocs pose as templates for DocuSign, a cloud-based electronic signature service.

‘More_eggs’ is a backdoor sold as a “malware-as-a-service” (MaaS) by a threat group known as “Golden Chickens” and predominantly used by three criminal groups: FIN6, Cobalt Group, and Evilnum. In the latest campaign, unearthed by researchers from eSentire and targeting a professional working in the healthcare technology industry, a threat actor is exploiting fake job offers on LinkedIn to deploy the ‘More_eggs’ backdoor on the victim’s machine.