The Power of Community to Fight COVID-19 Cyber Threats
Cybercriminals are taking advantage of the fear and uncertainty surrounding the current global health and economic situation as well as sudden shifts and exposures in IT environments to launch COVID-19 related attack campaigns. The bad guys are moving full-steam ahead in their efforts to lure victims by playing on their fears. Fortunately, the security community is banding together to take…
Why should you use correlation rules on top of traditional signatures?
The AT&T Cybersecurity Alien Labs team is in charge of writing correlation rules and releasing threat intelligence updates on a day-to-day basis. When researchers in the team find new malware families or threats, we always try to find the best approach to keep our customers protected. In this blog, we will look into some of the differences between…
Alien Labs 2019 Analysis of Threat Groups Molerats and APT-C-37
In 2019, several industry analyst reports confused the threat groups Molerats and APT-C-37 due to their similarity, and this has led to some confusion and inaccuracy of attribution. For example, both groups target the Middle East and North Africa region (with a special emphasis on Palestine territories). And, they both approach victims through the use of phishing emails that contain decoy…
AT&T Alien Labs analysis of an active cryptomining worm
This blog post provides an overview of the AT&T Alien Labs™ technical analysis of the common malicious implants used by threat actors targeting vulnerable Exim, Confluence, and WebLogic servers. Upon exploitation, malicious implants are deployed on the compromised machine. While most of the attacks described below are historical, we at Alien Labs are continuing to see new…
Google Cloud Platform security monitoring with USM Anywhere™
According to a 2019 Cyber Security Report published by the International Information System Security Certification Consortium, 93 percent of organizations say they are concerned about cloud security and 28 percent admit to having experienced cloud security incidents during the past year. The reality is, most companies lack the specialized knowledge and skills needed to provide that customer data stored in the cloud is…
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…
A HIPAA Compliance Checklist for 2020
Five steps to ensuring the protection of patient data and ongoing risk management. Maintaining security and compliance with HIPAA, the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, is growing ever more challenging. The networks that house protected health information (PHI or ePHI) are becoming larger and more complex — especially as organizations move data to the cloud. At the same time,…
Security monitoring for managed cloud Kubernetes
Photo by chuttersnap on Unsplash Kubernetes (K8s) is an open-source system for automating deployment, scaling, and management of containerized applications. It has recently seen rapid adoption across enterprise environments. Many environments rely on managed Kubernetes services such as Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) and Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS) to take advantage of the benefits of both…
What’s new in OTX
AT&T Alien Labs and the Open Threat Exchange (OTX) development team have been hard at work, continuing our development of the OTX platform. As some of you may have noticed, we’ve added some exciting new features and capabilities this last year to improve understanding within the OTX community of evolving and emerging threats. Malware analysis to…
Entity extraction for threat intelligence collection
Introduction This research project is part of my Master’s program at the University of San Francisco, where I collaborated with the AT&T Alien Labs team. I would like to share a new approach to automate the extraction of key details from cybersecurity documents. The goal is to extract entities such as country of origin, industry targeted,…
Newly identified StrongPity operations
Summary Alien Labs has identified an unreported and ongoing malware campaign, which we attribute with high confidence to the adversary publicly reported as “StrongPity”. Based on compilation times, infrastructure, and public distribution of samples - we assess the campaign operated from the second half of 2018 into today (July 2019). This post details new malware and new infrastructure which is…
A peek into malware analysis tools
So, what is malware analysis and why should I care? With the commercialization of cybercrime, malware variations continue to increase at an alarming rate, and this is putting many a defender on their back foot. Malware analysis — the basis for understanding the inner workings and intentions of malicious programs — has grown into a complex mix of technologies in…
