A North Korean Monero Cryptocurrency Miner
North Korean Cyber-Attacks and Collateral Damage
WannaCry was incredibly destructive. The attackers made about $150,000 - but the total damage caused by WannaCry has been estimated in the billions of dollars.There is strong evidence linking WannaCry to a group of hackers known as ‘Lazarus’, reportedly operating out of the DPRK (North Korea). Whilst WannaCry is perhaps the most famous attack by Lazarus, it isn…
OTX Trends Part 3 - Threat Actors
By Javvad Malik and Chris DomanThis is the third of a three part series on trends identified by AlienVault in 2017.Part 1 focused on exploits and part 2 addressed malware. This part will discuss threat actors and patterns we have detected with OTX.Which threat actors should I be most concerned about?Which threat actors your organization should be most…
OTX Trends Part 2: Malware
By Javvad Malik and Christopher DomanThis is the second of a three part series on trends identified by AlienVault.Part 1 focused on the exploits tracked by OTX. This blog will talk about the malware, and Part 3 will discuss trends we’re seeing in threat actors.Which malware should I be most concerned about?Most security incidents that a…
OTX Trends Part 1- Exploits
By Javvad Malik and Christopher DomanIntroductionEvery year, AlienVault records billions of anonymised security events from our customers. This telemetry can be aggregated to establish macro trends. And for many years, we have also been comprehensively recording other vendors' threat reports in our Open Threat Exchange (OTX) platform.We have combined these two data-sets to help…
A North Korean Monero Cryptocurrency Miner
AlienVault labs recently analysed an application compiled on Christmas Eve 2017. It is an Installer for software to mine the Monero crypto-currency. Any mined currency is sent to Kim Il Sung University in Pyongyang, North Korea.The Installer copies a file named intelservice.exe to the system. The filename intelservice.exe is often associated with…
LockCrypt Ransomware Spreading via RDP Brute-Force Attacks
We previously reported on SamSam ransomware charging high ransoms for infected servers. But SamSam isn’t the only ransomware out there charging eye-watering amounts to decrypt business servers.Initial reports of a new variant of ransomware called LockCrypt started in June of this year. In October we saw an increase in infections.LockCrypt doesn’t have heavy code…
ARP Spoofing Used to Insert Malicious Adverts
Recently we came across a new variant of the malware ServStart. ServStart is primarily used by attackers located in China, in a mix of targeted and opportunistic attacks. The attackers are hosting the ServStart malware on a file server that is open for anyone to view.The open file server at http://222.186.11[.]182:9999The Rar ArchiveOne of the…
YARA Support and Other Recent Additions to OTX
AlienVault OTX now supports YARA rules!YARA rules are a great way of detecting, classifying and hunting for malware. We are happy to announce you can now develop, test and share YARA rules on AlienVault OTX.If you'd like to deploy these rules on your own network, here is a script to download the rules (and a big…
The Upgraded AlienVault OTX API & Ways to Score Swag!
We've made a number of improvements to the depth of data in OTX recently, which are now available via the free API tool.Some of the API functions now include:Malware anti-virus and sandbox reports (example) A Whois API, including reverse whois and reverse SSL (example) View IP addresses that our telemetry indicates a specific network signature has fired…
SamSam Ransomware Targeted Attacks Continue
Normally new variants of ransomware families aren't particularly interesting.SamSam, however, is different. Whereas most ransomware is automatically propagated, SamSam is deployed manually.In addition, the group behind SamSam charges very high ransoms because of the amount of effort invested in their operations, which made them the subject of two FBI Alerts last year.The attacks seem to peak…
MacronLeaks – A Timeline of Events
It's been a very familiar feeling reading about the documents leaked to impact the elections in France tomorrow.Often the best defence is to have a proper understanding of what has happened. A quick draft timeline of events from an analysis of document meta-data and forum posts is below.Attacks in March and AprilA number of domains, identified…
OTX Is Now a Free STIX/TAXII Server
IntroductionThe Open Threat Exchange (OTX) team has been hard at work and we wanted to update everyone on some new functionality that we believe will be very useful to you. We're happy to announce that Alienvault OTX is now a STIX/TAXII server.What Does That Mean? What is STIX/TAXII?STIX provides a formal way to…
