Introduction Attackers always find creative ways to bypass defensive features and accomplish their goals. This can be done with packers, crypters, and code obfuscation. However, one of the best ways of evading detection, as well as maximizing compatibility, is to use the operating system’s own features. In the context of ransomware threats, one notable...

A journey into forgotten Null Session and MS-RPC interfaces (PDF) It has been almost 24 years since the null session vulnerability was discovered. Back then, it was possible to access SMB named pipes using empty credentials and collect domain information. Most often, attackers leveraged null sessions for gathering domain users through techniques such...

Introduction Stealers are a prominent threat in the malware landscape. Over the past year we published our research into several stealers (see here, here and here), and for now, the trend seems to persist. In the past months, we wrote several private reports on stealers as we discovered Acrid (a new stealer), ScarletStealer (another new stealer) and...

In early April 2024, we decided to take a closer look at the Windows DWM Core Library Elevation of Privilege Vulnerability CVE-2023-36033, which was previously discovered as a zero-day exploited in the wild. While searching for samples related to this exploit and attacks that used it, we found a curious document uploaded to VirusTotal on April 1, 2024....

Incident response analyst report 2023 As an information security company, our services include incident response and investigation, and malware analysis. Our customer base spans Russia, Europe, Asia, South and North America, Africa and the Middle East. Our annual Incident Response Report presents anonymized statistics on the cyberattacks we investigated...

For more than six years, the Global Research and Analysis Team (GReAT) at Kaspersky has been publishing quarterly summaries of advanced persistent threat (APT) activity. These summaries are based on our threat intelligence research. They provide a representative snapshot of what we have published and discussed in greater detail in our private APT reports....