Cyware Weekly Threat Intelligence, September 21 - 25, 2020

Weekly Threat Briefing • September 25, 2020
Weekly Threat Briefing • September 25, 2020
The Good
When it comes to cybersecurity, keeping up with the latest protection and prevention strategies is crucial for organizations. Therefore, government agencies are always on their toes to identify cybersecurity best practices and new methods to tackle cyberattacks. Taking steps in this direction, NIST released a new set of guidelines to protect the integrity of data from malware and other disruptive attacks. Moreover, the agency came up with a new method called Phish Scale to help organizations analyze why employees fall prey to phishing attacks.
The Bad
It’s raining ransomware and this week’s targeted victim companies include the names of Tyler Technologies, Luxottica, and IP Photonics. Unsecured databases leaking a trove of personal data also grabbed the attention of security researchers. The leaky databases belonged to Midwest Property Management and Town Sports International.
New Threats
In new threats, researchers discovered a variety of new malware such as the Taurus Project infostealer, Alien Android trojan, and TinyCryptor ransomware. In addition to these, several notorious malware such as Emotet, LokiBot, and Zebrocy made their comeback in different attack campaigns.
This week’s list of newly discovered malware includes the likes of Taurus Project, Alien Android trojan, and TinyCryptor ransomware. While the new Taurus Project information stealer was observed in a malspam campaign targeting users in the U.S, the Alien trojan came with the capabilities to steal credentials from 226 Android applications. On the other hand, TinyCryptor is a creation of the OldGremlin hacking group that recently launched a successful attack on a Russian medical company.
A new ransomware operation named Mount Locker was found to be active since July 2020, stealing victims’ files before encrypting them, and then demanding multi-million dollar ransoms. The ransomware uses ChaCha20 and RSA-2048 to encrypt files.
Microsoft removed 18 Azure Active Directory applications from its Azure portal that were created and abused by a Chinese state-sponsored hacker group. These apps were a part of a spear-phishing campaign that used COVID-19 themes to target organizations.
The return of Zebrocy and Emotet, in different cyberespionage campaigns, was also reported by researchers and federal agencies. While the Zebrocy campaign leveraged fake NATO documents to target government bodies in specific countries, the Emotet trojan made use of legitimate email threads to evade detection. Additionally, security agencies in Italy and the Netherlands issued an advisory on the uptick in Emotet’s activities. Meanwhile, the recently discovered AgeLocker ransomware was also uncovered targeting QNAP NAS devices and in some cases, stealing files from victims.
Talking more about the return of certain malware strains, the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) warned of an uptick in attacks using LokiBot information-stealer. The alert issued by the agency highlighted its intrusion, detection, and prevention methods.
In a recent report, IBM revealed that the Mozi botnet accounted for 90% of the attacks on IoT devices between October 2019 and June 2020. The targeted devices included Netgear, D-Link, and Huawei routers.