This weekend on security news in review, we have some new data on firmware attacks against global enterprises, insights into how much damage ransomware has caused the healthcare industry, and the Department of Homeland Security laying out a new cybersecurity strategy. 

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.

The Morphisec Labs team has prevented on our customers’ sites a massive Trickbot and Emotet phishing campaign during the 10th and 11th of September. Trickbot is one of the most advanced malware frameworks active today; it constantly evolves with more innovative methods to achieve its goals.

Morphisec Labs has tracked a massive maldoc campaign delivering the QakBot/QBot banking trojan, starting earlier this month. Qakbot leverages advanced techniques to evade detection and hamper manual analysis of the threat. In this post we will mention two of those interesting techniques.

The Morphisec Labs team has tracked an obfuscated VBScript package in campaigns since March 2020. Initially, the malware campaign was focused on targets within Germany, but has since moved on to additional targets--excluding any IP address within Russia or North Korea.

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.

Google, SpaceX, and even NASA, recently banning employee use of Zoom as they shift to work-from-home workforces in response to COVID-19 have shined a spotlight on the widely popular video conferencing tool’s security flaws. While “ZoomBombing” trolls can certainly be embarrassing, those types of breaches are only a harbinger for more sophisticated ransomware, zero-day attacks, and malware that can be carried out targeting Zoom’s current weaknesses.

During the first week of March, Morphisec intercepted and prevented an advanced Lokibot delivery campaign on some of its customers in the financial sector. While Lokibot has been lately reported to be delivered via impersonation of a known game launcher, previously it was also delivered through advanced AutoIt obfuscated Frenchy shellcode.

Guloader is a downloader that has been widely used from December 2019. Several security researchers have identified the downloader in the wild, signifying that it has quickly gained popularity among threat actors. When it first appeared, GuLoader was used to download Parallax RAT, but has been applied to other remote access trojans and info-stealers such as Netwire, FormBook, and Tesla.

Malware authors worldwide have targeted the fear around COVID-19 as a way to further their goals. This isn’t really a new method of enticing people to download and run their malware; threat actors have always used disasters as a way to deliver their payloads. From that perspective, the COVID-19 pandemic is only the latest in a long line of disasters that threat actors--both financially motivated and state-sponsored--leverage to achieve their goals.