The “Great Cannon” has been deployed again
The “Great Cannon” has been deployed again
Summary The Great Cannon is a distributed denial of service tool (“DDoS”) that operates by injecting malicious Javascript into pages served from behind the Great Firewall. These scripts, potentially served to millions of users across the internet, hijack the users’ connections to make multiple requests against the targeted site. These requests consume all the resources of the…
OTX is a Free STIX/TAXII Feed
Introduction The 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 feed/server. What Does That Mean? What is STIX/TAXII? STIX provides a formal…
Sharepoint vulnerability exploited in the wild
The CVE-2019-0604 (Sharepoint) exploit and what you need to know AT&T Alien Labs has seen a number of reports of active exploitation of a vulnerability in Microsoft Sharepoint (CVE-2019-0604). One report by the Saudi Cyber Security Centre appears to be primarily targeted at organisations within the kingdom. An earlier report by the Canadian Cyber Security Centre…
Internet of Termites
Termite is a tool used to connect together chains of machines on a network. You can run Termite on a surprising number of platforms including mobile devices, routers, servers and desktops. That means it can be used used to bounce a connection between multiple machines, to maintain a connection that otherwise wouldn’t be possible: Termite is a useful…
Delivery (Key)Boy
Introduction Below we’ve outlined the delivery phase of some recent attacks by KeyBoy, a group of attackers believed to operate out of China. They were first identified in 2013 targeting governments and NGOs in South East Asia. Their primary targeting continues to this day, though they have also been known to target more diverse victims such as the energy…
Malicious Documents from Lazarus Group Targeting South Korea
By Chris Doman, Fernando Martinez and Jaime Blasco We took a brief look at some documents recently discussed and reviewed by researchers in South Korea over the past week. The malware is linked to Lazarus, a reportedly North Korean group of attackers. One malicious document appears to be targeting members of a recent G20 Financial Meeting, seeking coordination of the…
More Details on an ActiveX Vulnerability Recently Used to Target Users in South Korea
Written By Chris Doman and Jaime Blasco Introduction Recently, an ActiveX zero-day was discovered on the website of a South Korea think tank that focuses on national security. Whilst ActiveX controls are disabled on most systems, they are still enabled on most South Korean machines due to mandates by the South Korean government.…
MassMiner Malware Targeting Web Servers
Written in collaboration wih Fernando Martinez One of the biggest malware-trends of 2018 has been the increasing variety of crypto-currency malware targeting servers. One family of mining malware, we’ve termed “MassMiner”, stands out as a worm that not only spreads itself through number of different exploits, but also brute-forces access to Microsoft SQL Servers. It surprised us…
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’t the…
OTX Trends Part 3 - Threat Actors
By Javvad Malik and Chris Doman This 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 concerned…
OTX Trends Part 2: Malware
By Javvad Malik and Christopher Doman This 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 security…
OTX Trends Part 1- Exploits
By Javvad Malik and Christopher Doman Introduction Every 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 provide a blueprint…
