Cyware Weekly Threat Intelligence - December 20–24

Weekly Threat Briefing • December 24, 2021
Weekly Threat Briefing • December 24, 2021
The Good
As 2021 comes to an end, it is time to celebrate all the positive developments we saw this year in the cybersecurity world. Check out our compilation of the best of cybersecurity in 2021. This week, the U.S. federal agencies provided new guidance and a special tool to help counter the tide of Log4j attacks. Meanwhile, the shutdown of yet another dark web marketplace gave us a reason to cheer up.
The Bad
While there are always reasons to celebrate, there were also bad incidents this week that gave us a pause. A business email compromise at a hospital system in West Virginia resulted in a data breach for thousands of patients, staff members, and contractors. In a series of unfortunate data leaks, the personal details of hundreds of thousands of citizens of Albania and Ghana were revealed online. In a shocking revelation, a massive global phishing campaign was also found raking in up to $80 million a month through fake surveys and giveaways.
New Threats
The week also saw the discovery of several new and resurgent malware strains. This included the JavaScript and C# based trojan called DarkWatchman, a surprisingly simple ransomware named TimeTime, the TellYouPass ransomware that came back from the dead, and the Dridex banking trojan that appeared in an employee termination malspam campaign and in attacks exploiting the Log4Shell vulnerability.
This week, a new malware named DarkWatchman was revealed in the cybercrime landscape. The malware, which was first spotted in early November, is being distributed via phishing emails containing malicious ZIP attachments. The malware is a highly-capable JavaScript-based remote access trojan that is paired with a C# keylogger.
Researchers at Sophos and Curated Intelligence this week confirmed that a second ransomware family after Khonsari –TellYouThePass – has been exploiting the Apache Log4j vulnerability. The ransomware, which had remained inactive since the summer of 2020, resurfaced to target both Linux and Windows systems.
Microsoft notified Azure users about source code leaks due to a serious security vulnerability in the Azure App service. The flaw affected hundreds of source code repositories belonging to Azure users who deployed applications using Local Git after files were created or modified in the content root directory. Following the disclosure, the company has taken steps to fix the issue.
Researchers from the New York University Abu Dhabi discovered security vulnerabilities in handover, a fundamental mechanism used by all modern cellular networks. These flaws could be exploited by attackers to launch denial-of-service and man-in-the-middle attacks using low-cost equipment. All generations of mobile networks since 2G (GSM) are affected by these security issues.
A new ransomware strain, dubbed TimeTime, was discovered recently. Curiously enough, the TimeTime ransomware is written in C#, does not use any obfuscation techniques, and contains well documented code with meaningful function names. It encrypts victims’ files with a simple algorithm and asks them to pay 100 Euro via PaysafeCard in ransom.
In a new phishing campaign, attackers send fake termination letters to employees via emails to scare them into opening a malicious Excel attachment. The Excel file trolls the victim with a season's greeting message and infects them with Dridex banking trojan. Dridex also made an appearance in another campaign exploiting the Log4j vulnerability to distribute the malware on Windows and Linux systems with Meterpreter. The malware has the capability to install additional payloads and take screenshots, among other malicious actions.
In a recent phishing campaign, attackers were found bypassing the patch for a flaw in MSHTML to deliver the Formbook malware to Windows systems. The vulnerability in question, tracked as CVE-2021-40444, relates to a remote code execution flaw in MSHTML that could be exploited using specially crafted Microsoft Office documents.
Two severe vulnerabilities affecting the ‘All in One SEO’ plugin put more than three million WordPress websites at risk of cyberattacks. The two flaws, described as a privilege escalation bug (CVE-2021-25036) and an SQL injection bug (CVE-2021-25037), were addressed with the release of a new version 4.1.5.3 of the plugin.
A relatively new AvosLocker ransomware was found actively targeting its victims using a bunch of new evasion techniques. It now uses the AnyDesk remote IT administrator tool in Windows Safe Mode. One of the other clever techniques used by it is the targeting of VMware ESXi servers by killing the virtual machines and then encrypting the files.
Microsoft released an alert on two Active Directory vulnerabilities and urged customers to install the available patches as soon as possible, to prevent potential compromise. Tracked as CVE-2021-42287 and CVE-2021-42278, the two security flaws can be used in an attack chain to impersonate domain controllers and gain administrative privileges on Active Directory.