When people imagine threat actors tricking victims into installing malware, the first thing that comes to mind is probably email phishing or typosquatted domains. These days, digital attack vectors are so easy to deploy that physical vectors may even get a chance to fly under the radar.

In a recent campaign uncovered by Trustwave, the criminal threat group FIN7 mailed USB drives serving an unknown malware strain disguised as a free Best Buy gift card offering. The letter mailed with the USB drive states that the retail giant is sending out gift cards to its loyal customers, and the gifted credit can be used to buy products from a specific list that is found on the enclosed USB stick.

In the coming days, CrowdStrike will formally end-of-life their DNS service that many customers are using. This service takes Crowdstrike intelligence and puts it into a CrowdStrike-managed DNS resolver to protect against advanced threats that they are tracking. When this service is retired, you will no longer have protection at that layer. As an important note, there are many classes of devices that endpoint protection do not work on (medical devices, IoT, etc) but by using DNS, you can still provide a strong layer of protection.

Photo Cred: Forbes

Many companies have gone completely remote, and had to do it quickly in light of current events, but that doesn’t mean the need to secure company data has diminished. As more workers are accessing secure files and applications from home, there is an increased need for organizations to be thinking about how to secure those devices that are accessing that information. We have already seen evidence that criminals are trying to take advantage of this situation to launch attacks against companies, and employees working from home without the security protections of the company network are targets for opportunistic attacks.

With the Coronavirus death toll constantly on the rise, people are becoming more and more panicked. It seems that almost everyone these days is thirsty for any information they can get on how to avoid the deadly virus, creating a tremendous opportunity for cyber attackers to exploit these fears and steal personal information and credentials.

Most malware is often delivered from otherwise legitimate sites. Sometimes this occurs via compromising existing websites, but more often than not, it is by using existing advertising networks as a means to ultimately deliver malware. Quite simply, the attacker buys impressions via existing channels and uses a variety of malvertising tricks to either directly compromise the web browser, or at the least trick the user to installing the malware. This specialized form of malware delivery requires a specialized collection methodology to detect such attacks.

Malicious emails are one of the cyber realm’s most widespread epidemics. Over 215 billion business and consumer emails are received daily, and with such an overwhelming flow of emails arises a very attractive opportunity for threat actors to easily penetrate victims’ online activity and lure them in to giving up credentials, downloading malware and more. According to the Symantec Internet Threat Security Report, one out of 412 emails contains a malware attack.

Although it seems as though cyber awareness is somewhat increasing due to the attempt to keep up with rapid advances in attack techniques, preying on human error continues to be extremely rewarding for threat actors. In retrospect, many email attack victims are dumbfounded when they realize that the email they so willingly acted upon is quite obviously suspicious upon second look. On top of that are highly thought out, sometimes tailored malicious emails, which do not even alert relatively cyber-aware people.

While it does not boast any special or complex installation tactics, Shlayer’s distribution vector has made it a tremendous success - the malware has been the most prevalent MacOS strain since its debut two years ago, never falling off its leading spot. Shlayer uses a well-known infection tactic – pressing on a bad link directs the victim to a fake Adobe Flash update.

One of the chief problems in cybersecurity is the inherent reactivity of most forms of defense. An attack has to be observed, analyzed and reverse-engineered. THEN, protection can be developed. This means attackers are successful, and inside environments, for a period of time before the attack is noticed, before the indicators for that attack can be extracted, and before a policy can be disseminated to stop it.

There has been a wide variety of research in recent years around this problem. How to speed up the cycle to recognize attacks and to potentially get out in front of attackers to block them before the attacks start. Both my own PhD research and other researchers have noticed that one attribute that is overwhelmingly an indicator of maliciousness in DNS is “newness,” that is to say, the newer a domain is, the more likely that it is bad. More importantly, when a domain is new and otherwise benign, it is rarely in meaningful use except by the organization that’s setting up whatever will go there.

Photo Cred: Forbes

Last week, I had the pleasure of speaking at Virus Bulletin on the recent news of iPhone (first reported on by Google Project Zero) and Android (first reported on by Volexity) mobile malware being used to target Tibetans (as reported by Citizen Lab) and Uighur Muslims inside and outside the People’s Republic of China. Lots of great research is linked above and you should definitely read it.

Whenever events like these occur, researchers from many organizations are researching pieces of it. If you are interested in Chinese APT attacks against these groups, certainly take a look.

One of the most interesting things to me when looking into these attacks is the sophistication and persistence of the adversary. As vulnerabilities got patched, they reused what pieces they could from their attacks and discovered new vulnerabilities to maintain their ability to action on the surveillance objectives. Some of the tools used indicate relationships to other Chinese APT groups, and certainly these types of attacks could be used against truly foreign adversaries as well.