Active Learning as a powerful tool in the Cyber Security arsenal

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When datasets are hard to label or highly skewed, Active Learning shows great potential to help both the algorithms and the analyst to make sense of data faster and more efficiently.

The promise of AI in cyber-security has long been that of helping humans to automate and simplify the daunting task of preventing data loss by detecting, tracking and blocking malicious software and intruders. AI is a tremendously powerful tool for such a task but, unlike what happens in other domains, gathering and labelling data to train any kind of engine/classifier is not only expensive but also hard.
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Spear-phishing campaign leveraging on MSXSL

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We have identified an ongoing spear-phishing campaign targeting a variety of entities with malicious RTF documents exploiting three different vulnerabilities: CVE-2017-8570, CVE-2017-11882 and CVE-2018-0802 and taking advantage of a misplaced trust binary, Microsoft’s msxsl, to run a JScript backdoor. The whole attack chain leverages on system’s signed components to remain under the radar as much as possible and it shares many similarities with previous campaigns from the Cobalt Group.
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A dive into MuddyWater APT targeting Middle-East

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MuddyWater is a threat actor that caught our attention for their extensive use of “Living off the Land” attacks in a targeted campaign aimed at the Middle East. During our investigation we reconstruct the evolution of the vectors used and how the group operates to  target their victims, evade detections and move laterally inside the compromised infrastructures.
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Locky Dropper Now Comes Embedded in the Loader

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We have noticed a change of behaviour in the latest spam email campaigns used by Locky. Since its first release Locky took advantage of compromised domains to download the dropper binary, while recently Locky dropper is being delivered embedded into the loader code itself. By tracking these campaigns we have also noticed that Locky’s authors have made several attempts at embedding the dropper into the loader.

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Dridex Downloader Tries New Sandbox-Evasion Techniques

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Dridex is currently one of the most active and widespread banking malwares. Like Locky ransomware also Dridex is dispatched through a massive spam mail campaign that uses the Necurs botnet. Our sensors have long been tracking these spam campaigns and recent captured emails contain a Word document that drops Dridex. In our latest samples we have observed a delay on execution of the downloader stage that wasn’t present before, we have further investigated to figure out whether Dridex’s authors were experimenting with new, even if basic, anti-sandbox techniques.

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RAA – An entirely new JS ransomware delivering Pony malware

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On 13th of June, while monitoring Twitter, we have observed an interesting tweet that reported a suspicious domain with an open directory listing. Among the listed files we found a zip archive containing a javascript. In this blogpost we will take a closer look at the javascript and we will show that it has ransomware capabilities, which we have dubbed RAA ransomware and that additionally delivers a dropping stage for the Pony malware.

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Locky new loader

Locky Ransomware Shipping With a New Loader

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ReaQta has been monitoring a new and massive worldwide Locky ransomware spam campaign. The attacks are carried out in the usual way: a javascript file attached to an email message delivered to the victims, although this is the first campaign we have tracked that shows a different deployment behaviour. The javascript downloader usually retrieves Locky’s dropper from a compromised website, while in this case the downloaded file is encoded making it harder for traditional protection solutions to spot the incoming threat.

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Uncovering a ransomware-distribution campaign part 2

Uncovering a ransomware distribution operation – Part 2

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In Part 1 we’ve analyzed a vast Crypt0L0cker ransomware distribution operation currently affecting continental Europe and ready to jump to new countries. In this second post we’ll analyze in detail the server side code used to dispatch the victims towards the correct websites, up to the ransomware itself. We’ll also analyze the ransomware behaviour and how it infects the victim’s computer.
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