Moving Target Defense Blog

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. 

We’re in the middle of a shift between on-premises server workloads and cloud workloads. The shift started around 10 years ago and will likely continue for the next two decades. After the past decade of cloud adoption, according to 451 Research, 90 percent of all organizations are using cloud technology and 60 percent of all IT workloads are conducted in the cloud.

Recently, news came out about a CVE-2020-0674 vulnerability in Microsoft’s Internet Explorer scripting engine based on how the browser handles memory. More specifically, within the JScript component of the scripting engine is an unspecified memory corruption vulnerability. What this means in practice is that any application that supports embedding Internet Explorer or its scripting engine can be leveraged as an attack vector.

During the period of March to May 2019, Morphisec Labs observed a new, highly sophisticated variant of the ShellTea / PunchBuggy backdoor malware that attempted to infiltrate a number of machines within the network of a customer in the hotel-entertainment industry. It is believed that the malware was deployed as a result of several phishing attempts.

Hworm/njRAT is a Remote Access Tool (RAT) that first appeared in 2013 in targeted attacks against the international energy industry, primarily in the Middle East. It was soon commoditized and is now part of a constantly evolving family of RATs that pop-up in various new formats. Today we see this attack employed on a regular basis as part of widespread spam phishing campaigns - if successful, Hworm gives the attacker complete control of the victim’s system. Morphisec Labs recently observed a new version with a minor modification to its obfuscation technique.

Over the past year, Morphisec and several other endpoint protection companies have been tracking a resurgence in activity from the Cobalt Group. Cobalt is one of the most notorious cybercrime operations, with attacks against more than 100 banks across 40 countries

The cybersecurity attack landscape moves fast, really fast. Last year, not a week passed that didn’t bring about news on a new ransomware incident. Of course ransomware’s very nature lends itself to newsworthy headlines based on how incredibly damaging to businesses this class of attacks can be.

Fileless malware is a type of a malicious code execution technique that operates completely within process memory; no files are dropped onto the disk. Without any artifacts on the hard drive to detect, these attacks easily evade most security solutions.

A new highly sophisticated botnet incorporating numerous malicious, evasive techniques is quickly spreading its tentacles. Dubbed MyloBot, the botnet uses an usually complex chain attack and combines multiple anti-analysis techniques to make it more difficult to detect the payload and harder to analyze by security researchers. Initial research published by Deep Instinct points out that everything on the victim’s end takes place in memory, while the main business logic of the botnet is executed in an external process using code injection. This makes it even harder to detect and trace.

On March 21,2018, Morphisec Labs began investigating the compromised website of a leading Hong Kong Telecommunications company after being alerted to it by malware hunter @PhysicalDrive0. The investigation, conducted by Morphisec researchers Michael Gorelik and Assaf Kachlon, determined that the Telecom group's corporate site had indeed been hacked. Attackers added an embedded Adobe Flash file that exploits the Flash vulnerability CVE-2018-4878 on the main home.php page.