Moving Target Defense Blog

Introduction

The developers of the Phobos ransomware have added new fileless and evasive techniques to their arsenal. Constantly keeping their attack up to date helps them bypass detection technologies through several distinct approaches, the latest of which we detail in this blog. 

Microsoft recently published details of an attack showing how a threat actor used zero-day exploits to access Microsoft Exchange Servers. The new exploit enabled access to email accounts and allowed the installation of additional malware to facilitate long-term access to victim environments.

Introducing egregor ransomware

Egregor is considered to be one of the most prolific ransomware threat groups. Yet it gained this reputation in a very short time due to its uncompromising double extortion methodology.

Introduction

The Agent Tesla information stealer has been around since 2014. During the last two to three years, it's also had a significant distribution growth factor partially due to the fact that cracked versions of it have been leaked.

Garmin has confirmed that the recent outage its users experienced was indeed the result of a successful ransomware attack. However, the extent of the damage done is still unclear. The attack, which compromised Garmin’s servers for five days, impacted millions of users globally and will likely end up costing Garmin millions of dollars in lost productivity and reputation alone. While Garmin says that no customer data was leaked, Garmin's call centers, web site, and cloud-based services such as Garmin Connect and FlyGarmin (a commercial aviation navigation service) were either taken offline or negatively impacted as a result of the attack.

The term “advanced persistent threats” describes the highly evolved nature of today’s cyberattacks. Hackers have developed sophisticated techniques – in-memory exploits, living-off-the-land attacks, remote access trojans, and more – that allow them to evade detection and attack in obscurity. However, as much as these techniques have changed over time, the underlying goal, or “tactic” as MITRE calls it in their ATT&CK framework, remains the same: stealing something valuable.

Since early March, the team at Morphisec Labs has been supporting enterprises as they shift to distributed workforces in response to COVID-19. From assisting hospitals with securing their remote workers to uncovering new weaknesses in collaboration applications that could pose a threat to business continuity, we’ve been working hand-in-hand with customers, counterparts at security companies, and authorities to stay ahead of defending against a rapidly evolving cyberattack landscape.

As part of a rapid change in the work environment during the COVID-19 pandemic, Morphisec Labs has been tracking the change in the attack trend landscape. This has included the evolution of adware, PUA, and fraudulent software bundle delivery beyond a consumer problem into a significant attack vector on enterprise employees.

The rise of fileless attacks in the past 10 years has stymied even the best antivirus software. Traditional AV is designed to detect known signatures of known malware and prevent it from executing. Fileless attacks lack a signature, which allows it to handily bypass traditional antivirus products. 

EDITOR'S NOTE: The previous version of this blog post mis-identified the source of this attack as the FIN7 group; GRIFFON and OSTAP are both very long javascripts that have many similarities. This caused the confusion in identifying the attack as coming from FIN7. This is still an important find though, as Trickbot is one of the most advanced malware frameworks. 

Over the past few weeks, Morphisec Labs researchers identified a couple dozen documents that execute the OSTAP javascript downloader.