Category Archives: Threat Research

IBM Security X-Force Research Advisory: New Destructive Malware Used In Cyber Attacks on Ukraine

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This post was written with contributions from IBM Security X-Force’s Anne Jobmann, Claire Zaboeva and Richard Emerson. On February 23, 2022, open-source intelligence sources began reporting detections of a wiper malware — a destructive family of malware designed to permanently destroy data from the target — executing on systems belonging to Ukrainian organizations. IBM Security […]

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Ransomware Resilience Tops Findings in X-Force Threat Intelligence Index 2022

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For the third year in a row, ransomware was the top attack type globally in 2021, despite some successes last year by law enforcement to take down ransomware groups. This was among the top findings of IBM Security’s latest research published in the tenth annual X-Force Threat Intelligence Index, a comprehensive overview of the global […]

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TrickBot Gang Uses Template-Based Metaprogramming in Bazar Malware

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Malware authors use various techniques to obfuscate their code and protect against reverse engineering. Techniques such as control flow obfuscation using Obfuscator-LLVM and encryption are often observed in malware samples. This post describes a specific technique that involves what is known as metaprogramming, or more specifically template-based metaprogramming, with a particular focus on its implementation […]

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The Best Threat Hunters Are Human

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“You won’t know you have a problem unless you go and look.” Neil Wyler, who is known as ‘Grifter’ in the hacker community, made that statement as a precursor to an unforgettable story. An organization hired Grifter to perform active threat hunting. In a nutshell, active threat hunting entails looking for an attacker inside an […]

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Log4Shell Vulnerability Risks for OT Environments — and How You Can Better Protect Against Them

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You’d have to look far and wide to find an IT professional who isn’t aware of (and probably responding to) the Log4Shell vulnerability. The Operational Technology (OT) sector is no exception, yet the exact exposure the vulnerability poses to OT technology is yet to be fully uncovered.  The vulnerability was first made public earlier this […]

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Zero Trust and DNS Security: Better Together

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How many times have you heard the popular information security joke: “It’s always DNS”? It means that every time there’s a problem you can’t figure out, you will dig until you reach the conclusion that it’s always DNS. But DNS is also where a lot of issues can be caught early, and it should be […]

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Nation State Threat Group Targets Airline with Aclip Backdoor

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In March 2021, IBM Security X-Force observed an attack on an Asian airline that we assess was likely compromised by a state-sponsored adversary using a new backdoor that utilizes Slack. The adversary leveraged free workspaces on Slack, a legitimate messaging and collaboration application likely to obfuscate operational communications, allowing malicious traffic, or traffic with underlying […]

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How Log4j Vulnerability Could Impact You

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If you hadn’t heard of Apache Log4j, chances are it’s on your radar now. In fact, you may have been using it for years. Log4j is a logging library. Imagine writing your daily activities into a notebook. That notebook is Log4j. Developers and programmers use it to take notes about what’s happening on applications and […]

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Understanding the Adversary: How Ransomware Attacks Happen

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IBM Security X-Force Incident Response (IR) has responded to hundreds of ransomware incidents across every geography and industry. As we have taken time to analyze these incidents, a clear pattern has emerged. Although we observe dozens of ransomware groups in operation across the globe, many with multiple affiliate groups working under them, most ransomware actors […]

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BrazKing Android Malware Upgraded and Targeting Brazilian Banks

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Nethanella Messer and James Kilner contributed to the technical editing of this blog. IBM Trusteer researchers continually analyze financial fraud attacks in the online realms. In recent research into mobile banking malware, we delved into the BrazKing malware’s inner workings following a sample found by MalwareHunterTeam. BrazKing is an Android banking Trojan from the overlay […]

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