Threat Research

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This blog post contains observations of Cognitive Intelligence Team over Gamaredon Group's activities during the month of March 2022

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By Nick Biasini, Edmund Brumaghin, and Jaeson Schultz. Emotet is one of the most heavily distributed malware families today. Cisco Talos observes large quantities of Emotet emails being sent to individuals and organizations around the world on an almost daily basis. These emails are typically sent automatically by previously infected systems   attempting to infect […]

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By Asheer Malhotra. Cisco Talos has observed a new version of a remote access trojan (RAT) family known as CRAT. Apart from the prebuilt RAT capabilities, the malware can download and deploy additional malicious plugins on the infected endpoint. One of the plugins is a ransomware known as “Hansom.” CRAT has been attributed to the Lazarus […]

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Attackers are constantly reinventing ways of monetizing their tools. Cisco Talos recently discovered a complex campaign employing a multi-modular botnet with multiple ways to spread and a payload focused on providing financial benefits for the attacker by mining the Monero online currency. The actor employs various methods to spread across the network, like SMB with […]

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By Asheer Malhotra. Cisco Talos has observed a malware campaign that utilizes military-themed malicious Microsoft Office documents (maldocs) to spread Cobalt Strike beacons containing full-fledged RAT capabilities. These maldocs use malicious macros to deliver a multistage and highly modular infection. This campaign appears to target military and government organizations in South Asia. Network-based detection, although […]

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Cisco Talos has discovered a new malware campaign based on a previously unknown family we’re calling “PoetRAT.” At this time, we do not believe this attack is associated with an already known threat actor. Our research shows the malware was distributed using URLs that mimic some Azerbaijan government domains, thus we believe the adversaries in […]

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By Vanja Svajcer. In one of our previous posts, we discussed the usage of default operating system functionality and other legitimate executables to execute the so-called “living-off-the-land” approach to the post-compromise phase of an attack. We called those binaries LoLBins. Since then, Cisco Talos has analyzed telemetry we received from Cisco products and attempted to […]

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By Nick Biasini and Edmund Brumaghin. Coronavirus is dominating the news and threat actors are taking advantage. Cisco Talos has found multiple malware families being distributed with Coronavirus lures and themes. This includes emotet and several RAT variants. Executive Summary Using the news to try and increase clicks and drive traffic is nothing new for […]

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By Chris Neal. Over the past several months, Cisco Talos has observed a malware campaign that utilizes websites hosting a new version of Loda, a remote access trojan (RAT) written in AutoIT. These websites also host malicious documents that begin a multi-stage infection chain which ultimately serves a malicious MSI file. The second stage document […]