• IT threat evolution in Q1 2023
• IT threat evolution in Q1 2023. Non-mobile statistics
• IT threat evolution in Q1 2023. Mobile statistics

Targeted attacks

BlueNoroff introduces new methods bypassing MotW

At the close of 2022, we reported the recent activities of BlueNoroff, a financially motivated threat actor known for stealing cryptocurrency. The threat actor typically exploits Word documents, using shortcut files for the initial intrusion. However, recently the group has adopted new methods to deliver its malware.

One of these, designed to evade the Mark-of-the-Web (MotW) flag, is the use of .ISO (optical disk image) and .VHD (virtual hard disk) file formats. MotW is a Windows security measure — the system displays a warning message when someone tries to open a file downloaded from the internet.

The threat actor also seems to be experimenting with new file types to deliver its malware. We observed a new Visual Basic script, a previously unseen Windows Batch file and a Windows executable.

Our analysis revealed more than 70 domains used by this group, meaning that they were very active until recently. They also created numerous fake domains that look like venture capital and bank domains: most of these imitate Japanese venture capital companies, indicating that the group has an extensive interest in Japanese financial entities.

Roaming Mantis implements new DNS changer

We continue to track the activities of Roaming Mantis (aka Shaoye), a well-established threat actor targeting countries in Asia. From 2019 to 2022, this threat actor mainly used ‘smishing’ to deliver a link to its landing page, with the aim of controlling infected Android devices and stealing device information, including user credentials.

However, in September 2022, we analyzed the new Wroba.o Android malware, used by Roaming Mantis, and discovered a DNS changer function that was implemented to target specific Wi-Fi routers used mainly in South Korea.

This can be used to manage all communications from devices using a compromised Wi-Fi router with the rogue DNS settings — for example, to redirect someone to malicious hosts and interfere with security product updates. People connect infected Android devices to free, public Wi-Fi in such places as cafes, bars, libraries, hotels, shopping malls, and airports. When connected to a targeted Wi-Fi model with vulnerable settings, the malware will compromise the router and affect other devices as well. As a result, it can spread widely in the targeted regions.

BadMagic: new APT related to the Russo-Ukrainian conflict

Since the start of the Russo-Ukrainian conflict, we have identified a significant number of geo-political cyber-attacks, as outlined in our overview of the cyber-attacks related to the conflict.

Last October, we identified an active infection of government, agriculture and transportation organizations located in Donetsk, Lugansk and Crimea. The initial vector of compromise is unclear, but the details of the next stage imply the use of spear-phishing or something similar. The targets navigated to a URL pointing to a ZIP archive hosted on a malicious web server. This archive contained two files: a decoy document (we discovered PDF, XLSX and DOCX versions) and a malicious LNK file with a double extension (e.g. PDF.LNK) which, when opened, results in infection.

In several cases, the contents of the decoy document were directly related to the name of the malicious LNK, to trick the user into activating it

The LNK file downloads and installs a PowerShell backdoor called “PowerMagic”, which in turn deploys a sophisticated modular framework called “CommonMagic”. We discovered CommonMagic plugins capable of stealing files from USB devices as well as taking screenshots and sending them to the threat actor.

During our initial analysis, we were unable to find anything to connect the samples we found and the data used in the campaign to any previously known threat actor. However, our continuing investigations revealed more information about this threat, including links to other APT campaigns. You can find the details here.

Other malware

Prilex targets contactless credit card transactions

Prilex has evolved from ATM-focused malware into the most advance PoS threat we have seen so far. The threat actor goes beyond the old memory scrapers seen in PoS attacks, to highly advanced malware that includes a unique cryptographic scheme, real-time patching of target software, forcing protocol downgrades, manipulating cryptograms, performing so-called “GHOST transactions” and credit card fraud — even on chip-and-PIN cards.

While investigating an incident, we discovered new Prilex samples, and one of the new features included the ability to block contactless transactions. These transactions generate a unique identifier that’s valid for just one transaction, making them worthless to cybercriminals. By blocking the transaction, Prilex tries to force the customer to insert their card to make a chip-and-PIN transaction instead, allowing the cybercriminals to capture data from the card using their standard techniques.

With contactless card transactions increasing, this is a valuable technique that allows the Prilex threat actor to continue stealing card information.

The threat actor uses social engineering to infect a PoS terminal. They try to convince employees of a retail outlet that they urgently need to update the terminal’s software and to allow a “technical specialist” to visit the store, or at least provide remote access to the terminal. It’s important that retail organizations are alert to the signs of infection — including repeated failed contactless transactions — and educate staff about the methods used by cybercriminals to gain entry to their systems.

For retail companies (especially large networks with many branches), it’s important to develop internal regulations and explain to all employees exactly how technical support and/or maintenance crews should operate. This should at least prevent unauthorized access to POS-terminals. In addition, increasing employee’s awareness of the latest cyberthreats is always a good idea: that way they’ll be much less susceptible to new social engineering tricks.

Stealing cryptocurrency using a fake Tor browser

We recently discovered an ongoing cryptocurrency theft campaign affecting more than 15,000 users across 52 countries. The attackers used a technique that has been around for more than a decade and was originally used by banking Trojans to replace bank account numbers. However, in the recent campaign, the attackers used a Trojanized version of the Tor Browser to steal cryptocurrency.

The target downloads the Trojanized version of the Tor Browser from a third-party resource containing a password protected RAR archive — the password is used to prevent it being detected by security solutions. Once the file is dropped onto the target’s computer, it registers itself in the system’s auto-start and masquerades as an icon for a popular application, such as uTorrent.

The malware waits until there is a wallet address in the clipboard and then replaces a portion of the entered clipboard contents with the cybercriminal’s own wallet address.

Our analysis of existing samples suggests that the estimated loss for those targeted in the campaign is at least $400,000, but the actual amount stolen could be much greater, as our research focused only on Tor Browser abuse. Other campaigns may use different software and malware delivery methods, as well as other types of wallets.

We haven’t been able to identify a single web site that hosts the installer, so it is probably distributed either via torrent downloads or some other software downloader. The installers coming from the official Tor Project are digitally signed and didn’t contain any signs of such malware. So, to stay safe, you should download software only from reliable and trusted sources. Even where someone has downloaded the Trojanized version, a good anti-virus product should be able to detect it.

There is also a way to check if your system is compromised with malware of the same class. Put the following “Bitcoin address” into Notepad:
bc1heymalwarehowaboutyoureplacethisaddress

Now press Ctrl+C and Ctrl+V. If the address changes to something else — the system is probably compromised by clipboard-injector malware and is dangerous to use.

We would recommend that you scan your system with security software. If you want to have full confidence that no hidden backdoors remain, once a system has been compromised, you should not trust it until it has been rebuilt.

It seems that everyone’s chatting about ChatGPT

Since OpenAI opened up its large GPT-3 language model to the general public through ChatGPT, interest in the project has soared, as people rushed to explore its possibilities, including writing poetry, engaging in dialogue, providing information, creating content for web sites and more.

There has also been a good deal of discussion about the potential impact of ChatGPT on the threat landscape.

Given ChatGPT’s ability to mimic human interaction, it’s likely that automated spear-phishing attacks using ChatGPT are already taking place. ChatGPT allows attackers to generate persuasive, personalized e-mails on an industrial scale. Moreover, any responses from the target of the phishing message can easily be fed into the chatbot’s model, producing a compelling follow-up in seconds. That said, while ChatGPT may make it easier for cybercriminals to churn out phishing messages, it doesn’t change the nature of this form of attack.

Cybercriminals have also reported on underground hacker forums how they have used ChatGPT to create new Trojans. Since the chatbot is able to write code, if someone describes a desired function (for example, “save all passwords in file X and send via HTTP POST to server Y”), they can create a simple infostealer without having any programming skills. However, such Trojans are likely to be primitive and could contain bugs that make it less effective. For now, at least, chatbots can only compete with novice malware writers.

We also uncovered a malicious campaign that sought to exploit the growing popularity of ChatGPT. Fraudsters created social network groups that mimicked communities of enthusiasts. These groups also contained fake credentials for pre-created accounts that purported to provide access to ChatGPT. The groups contained a plausible link inviting people to download a fake version of ChatGPT for Windows.

The malicious link installs a Trojan that steals account credentials stored in Chrome, Edge, Firefox, Brave and other browsers.

Since security researchers frequently publish reports about threat actors, including TTPs (Tactics, Techniques and Procedures) and other indicators, we decided to try to find out what ChatGPT already knows about threat research and whether it can help common malicious tools and IoCs (Indicators of Compromise), such as malicious hashes and domains.

The responses for host-based artifacts looked promising, so we instructed ChatGPT to write some code to extract various metadata from a test Windows system and then to ask itself whether the metadata was an IoC:

Since certain code snippets were handier than others, we continued developing this proof of concept manually: we filtered the output for events where the ChatGPT response contained a “yes” statement regarding the presence of an IoC, added exception handlers and CSV reports, fixed small bugs and converted the snippets into individual cmdlets, which produced a simple IoC scanner, HuntWithChatGPT.psm1, capable of scanning a remote system via WinRM.

While the exact implementation of IoC scanning may not currently be a very cost-effective solution at $15 to £20 per host for the OpenAI API, it shows interesting interim results, and reveals opportunities for future research and testing.

The impact of AI on our lives will extend far beyond the current capabilities of ChatGPT and other current machine learning projects. Ivan Kwiatkowski, a researcher in our Global Research and Analysis Team, recently explored the likely scope of the changes we can expect in the long term. These perspectives not only include the productivity gains offered by AI, but the social, economic and political implications of the changes it is likely to usher in.

Tracking our digital footprints

We’ve become used to service providers, marketing agencies and analytical companies tracking our mouse clicks, social media posts and browser and streaming services history. Companies do this for a number of reasons. They want to understand our preferences better, and suggest products and services that we’re more likely to buy. They do it to find out which images or text we focus on most. They also sell on our online behavior and preferences to third parties.

The tracking is done using web beacons (aka tracker pixels and spy pixels). The most popular tracking technique is to insert a tiny image –1×1 or even 0x0 pixels in size — into an e-mail, application, or web page. The e-mail client or browser makes a request to download the image from the server by transmitting information about you, which the server records. This includes the time, device, operating system, browser, and the page from which the pixel was downloaded. This is how the operator of the beacon learns that you opened the e-mail or web page, and how. Often a small piece of JavaScript inside the web page, which can collect even more detailed information, is used instead of a pixel. These beacons, placed on every page or application screen, make it possible for companies to follow you wherever you go on the web.

In our recent report on web trackers, we listed the 20 most common beacons found on web sites and in e-mail. The data for web beacons is based on anonymous statistics from the Do Not Track (DNT) component of Kaspersky consumer products, which blocks the loading of web site trackers. Most of the companies have at least some connection to digital advertising and marketing, including tech giants such as Google, Microsoft, Amazon and Oracle.

The data for e-mail beacons is from anonymized anti-spam detection data from Kaspersky mail products. The companies in the list are either e-mail service providers (ESP) or customer relationship management (CRM) companies.

The information collected using trackers is of value not just to legitimate companies, but also to cybercriminals. If they are able to obtain such information — for example, as result of a data leak — they can use it to hack online accounts or send fake e-mails. In addition, attackers make use of web beacons too. You can find information on how to protect yourself from tracking here.

Malvertising through search engines

In recent months, we have observed an increase in the number of malicious campaigns that use Google Advertising as a means of distributing and delivering malware. At least two different stealers, Rhadamanthys and RedLine, abused the search engine promotion plan in order to deliver malicious payloads to victims’ computers.

They seem to be using the same technique of mimicking a web site associated with well-known software, such as Notepad++ and Blender 3D. The threat actors create copies of legitimate software web sites and use “typosquatting” (using incorrectly spelled brands or company names as URLs) or “combosquatting” (as above, but adding arbitrary words as URLs) to make the sites look legitimate. They then pay to promote the site in the search engine in order to push it to the top of search results — a technique known as “malvertising”.

The distribution of malware that we have seen suggests that threat actors are targeting victims, both individual and corporate, across the globe.

Satacom downloader, also known as LegionLoader, is a renowned malware family that emerged in 2019. It is known to use the technique of querying DNS servers to obtain the base64-encoded URL in order to receive the next stage of another malware family currently distributed by Satacom. The Satacom malware is delivered via third-party websites. Some of these sites do not deliver Satacom themselves, but use legitimate advertising plugins that the attackers abuse to inject malicious ads into the webpages. The malicious links or ads on the sites redirect users to malicious sites such as fake file-sharing services.

In this report we cover a recent malware distribution campaign related to the Satacom downloader. The main purpose of the malware that is dropped by the Satacom downloader is to steal BTC from the victim’s account by performing web injections into targeted cryptocurrency websites. The malware attempts to do this by installing an extension for Chromium-based web browsers, which later communicates with its C2 server, whose address is stored in the BTC transaction data.

The malicious extension has various JS scripts to perform browser manipulations while the user is browsing the targeted websites, including enumeration and manipulation with cryptocurrency websites. It also has the ability to manipulate the appearance of some email services, such as Gmail, Hotmail and Yahoo, in order to hide its activity with the victim’s cryptocurrencies shown in the email notifications.

Satacom technical analysis

The initial infection begins with a ZIP archive file. It is downloaded from a website that appears to mimic a software portal that allows the user to download their desired (often cracked) software for free. The archive contains several legitimate DLLs and a malicious Setup.exe file that the user needs to execute manually to initiate the infection chain.

Various types of websites are used to spread the malware. Some of them are malicious websites with a hardcoded download link, while others have the “Download” button injected through a legitimate ad plugin. In this case, even legitimate websites may have a malicious “Download” link displayed on the webpage. At the time of writing, we saw the QUADS plugin being abused to deliver Satacom.

Websites with embedded QUADS ad plugin

The plugin is abused in the same way that other advertising networks are abused for malvertising purposes: the attackers promote ads that look like a “Download” button and redirect users to the attackers’ websites.

WP QUADS ad plugin within the website’s content

After the user clicks on the download button or link, there’s a chain of redirects that automatically takes them through various servers to reach a website masquerading as a file-sharing service to distribute the malware. In the screenshot below, we can see examples of websites that are the final destinations of the redirection chains.

Fake ‘file-sharing’ services

After the user downloads and extracts the ZIP archive, which is about 7MB in size, a few binaries, EXE and DLL files are revealed. The DLLs are legitimate libraries, but the ‘Setup.exe’ file is a malicious binary. It is about 450MB, but is inflated with null bytes to make it harder to analyze. The original size of the file without the added null bytes is about 5MB and it is an Inno Setup type file.

Null bytes added to the PE file

Inno Setup installers usually work as follows: at runtime the binary extracts a child installer to a temporary folder with the name ‘Setup.tmp’. Then it runs the child installer ‘Setup.tmp’ file that needs to communicate with the primary installer with arguments pointing to the location of the original ‘Setup.exe’ and its packages in order to retrieve the BIN data inside the ‘Setup.exe’ file for the next step of the installation.

In the case of the Satacom installer, the Setup.tmp file, once running, creates a new PE DLL file in the Temp directory. After the DLL is created, the child installer loads it into itself and runs a function from the DLL.

It then decrypts the payload of Satacom and creates a new sub-process of ‘explorer.exe’ in order to inject the malware into the ‘explorer.exe’ process.

Based on the behavior we observed, we can conclude that the malware performs a common process injection technique on the remote ‘explorer.exe’ process called process hollowing. This is a known technique used to evade detection by AV applications.

The malicious payload that’s injected into the ‘explorer.exe’ process uses the RC4 encryption implementation to decrypt its configuration data, communication strings and data for the other dropped binaries on the victim’s machine. The encrypted data is stored inside the malicious payload.

The malware uses different hardcoded keys to decrypt the data at each step. There are four different RC4 keys that the malware uses to perform its actions, first decrypting the HEX string data to use it for its initial communication purposes.

RC4 keys (left pane) and encrypted HEX strings (right pane)

In the screenshot above, the left pane shows the four RC4 hardcoded keys as HEX strings, and in the right pane we can see the HEX strings that are decrypted using the RC4 ‘config_strings’ key to get the strings for the first initialization of communication with the C2. If we decrypt the strings ourselves using the key, we get the result shown in the screenshot.

Once the HEX strings are decrypted, ‘explorer.exe’ initiates its first communication. To do so, it performs a DNS request to don-dns[.]com (a decrypted HEX string) through Google DNS (8.8.8.8, another decrypted string) and it queries for the TXT record.

DNS query for TXT record through Google to don-dns[.]com

Once the request is complete, the DNS TXT record is received as another base64-encoded RC4-encrypted string: “ft/gGGt4vm96E/jp”. Since we have all of the RC4 keys, we can try to decrypt the string with the ‘dns_RC4_key’ and get another URL as a result. This URL is where the payload is actually downloaded from.

Decrypted string of TXT record

The payload: malicious browser extension

The Satacom downloader downloads various binaries to the victim’s machine. In this campaign we observed a PowerShell script being downloaded that installs a malicious Chromium-based browser extension that targets Google Chrome, Brave and Opera.

The extension installation script is responsible for downloading the extension in a ZIP archive file from a third-party website server. The PowerShell script downloads the archived file to the computer’s Temp directory and then extracts it to a folder inside the Temp directory.

After that, the script searches for the possible locations of shortcuts for each of the targeted browsers in such places as Desktop, Quick Launch and Start Menu. It also configures the locations of the browsers’ installation files and the location of the extension on the computer.

Finally, the PS script recursively searches for any link (.LNK) file in the above locations and modifies the “Target” parameter for all existing browser shortcuts with the flag “–load-extension=[pathOfExtension]” so that the shortcut will load the browser with the malicious extension installed.

Chrome shortcut with the extension parameter

After performing this action, the script closes any browser processes that may be running on the machine, so that the next time the victim opens the browser, the extension will be loaded into the browser and run while the user is browsing the internet.

This extension installation technique allows the threat actors to add the addon to the victim’s browser without their knowledge and without uploading it to the official extension stores, such as the Chrome Store, which requires the addon to meet the store’s requirements.

Extension installation PowerShell script

Malicious extension analysis

After installation of the extension, we can analyze its functionality and features by checking specific files stored in the extension’s directory. If we take a look at the first lines of the ‘manifest.json’ file, we’ll see that the extension disguises itself by naming the addon “Google Drive,” so even when the user accesses the browser addons, the only thing they will see is an addon named “Google Drive”, which looks like just another standard Google extension installed inside the browser.

The manifest.json file settings

Another malicious extension file that always runs in the background when the user is browsing is ‘background.js’, which is responsible for initializing communication with the C2. If we take a closer look at the JavaScript code, we’ll find an interesting function call at the bottom of the script with a string variable that is the address of a bitcoin wallet.

Background.js script snippet

Looking at the script’s code, we can conclude that the extension is about to fetch another string from the hardcoded URL, into which the script inserts the bitcoin address. The JavaScript receives data in JSON format, which shows the wallet’s transaction activity, and then looks for a specific string within the latest transaction details.

JSON of the transaction details

There are two strings on the page that contain the C2 address. The “script” string is a HEX string that contains the C2 host of the malware, and the “addr” string is the Base58-encoded C2 address. The reason for using the last cryptocurrency transaction of a specific wallet to retrieve the C2 address is that the server address can be changed by the threat actors at any time. Moreover, this trick makes it harder to disable the malware’s communication with its C2 server, since disabling wallets is much more difficult than blocking or banning IPs or domains. If the C2 server is blocked or taken down, the threat actors can simply change the ‘script’ or ‘addr’ string to a different C2 server by performing a new transaction. And since the extension always checks these strings to retrieve the C2, it will always ask for the new one if it’s ever changed.

Decoded C2 address from the transaction details

The extension has several other scripts that are responsible for initializing the received commands and become functional after the C2 address is retrieved, because the scripts need to obtain some important information from the C2. For example, the C2 holds the BTC address that will be used when the BTC is transferred from the victim’s wallet to the threat actor’s wallet.

Threat actor’s BTC wallet address

To get hold of the victim’s cryptocurrency, the threat actors use web injects on the targeted websites. The web inject script is also provided by the C2 after the extension contacts it. In the following screenshot, we can see the ‘injections.js’ script from the extension, which fetches the web inject script from the C2 server.

The injections.js script

After the addon contacts the C2 server – extracted as mentioned above – the server responds with the web inject script that will be used on the targeted websites.

Webinject script from C2 server

If we take a closer look at the script, we can see that the threat actors are targeting various websites. In the version of the script shown above we can see that it targets Coinbase, Bybit, KuCoin, Huobi and Binance users.

Since the script within the C2 can be changed at any time, the threat actors can add or remove other web injection targets, as well as start targeting cryptocurrencies other than BTC, which makes this extension pretty dynamic and allows threat actors to control the malicious extension by changing the scripts.

If we look at the script, we can see that the extension performs various actions on the targeted websites. For example, it has the ability to retrieve the victims’ addresses, obtain account information, bypass 2FA, and much more. Moreover, it’s capable of transferring BTC currency from the victim’s wallet to the attackers’ wallet.

Functions from the web inject script

Looking at the full web inject script, we can conclude that the idea behind it is to steal BTC currencies from victims who have the malicious extension installed. The extension performs various actions on the account in order to remotely control it using the web inject scripts, and eventually the extension tries to withdraw the BTC currency to the threat actors’ wallet. To circumvent the 2FA settings for transactions, the web inject script uses 2FA bypass techniques.

Snippet of the BTC withdrawal function from the web inject script

Before stealing the cryptocurrency, the extension communicates with the C2 server to get the minimum BTC value. It then compares this value with the actual amount of money in the target wallet. If the wallet contains less cryptocurrency than the minimum amount received from the C2, it doesn’t withdraw any cryptocurrency from it.

Minimum amount threshold from C2

The script also performs several other checks before stealing the BTC currency. For example, it also checks the BTC to USD exchange rate.

When the amount of BTC in the target wallet meets the C2 checks, the script performs the withdrawal function to steal the BTC currency from the victim.

Performing balance check

In addition to stealing BTC, the malicious extension performs additional actions to hide its activity.

For example, the malicious extension contains scripts that target three different email services: Gmail, Hotmail and Yahoo. The idea behind the scripts is to hide the email confirmation of the transaction performed by the malicious extension.

Each script makes visual changes to the emails once the victim reaches the email service’s page. It searches for pre-defined email titles and content, and when it finds them, it simply hides them from the victim by injecting HTML code into the message body. As a result, the victim is unaware that a specific transaction transferring crypto currency to the threat actors’ wallet was made.

Extension JS targeting Gmail

In addition, the extension can manipulate email threads from the targeted websites, so if the victim opens a thread from, for example, Binance, it can change the content of the emails and display a fake email thread that looks exactly like the real one. It also contains a placeholder for desired strings that the extension can inject into the content of the message page.

Fake email thread template

The malicious extension has many other JavaScripts and it’s capable of performing additional actions. For example, it can extract information through the browser, such as the system information, cookies, browser history, screenshots of opened tabs, and even receive commands from the C2 server.

JavaScripts: requesting commands from the C2 (left pane) and taking screenshots (right pane)

The purpose of the extension is to steal BTC and manipulate targeted cryptocurrency websites and email services to make the malware as stealthy as possible, so the victim doesn’t notice any information about the fraudulent transactions. The extension can update its functionality due to the technique used to retrieve the C2 server via the last transaction of a specific BTC wallet, which can be modified at any time by making another transaction to this wallet. This allows the threat actors to change the domain URL to a different one in case it’s banned or blocked by antivirus vendors.

Victims

This campaign targets individual users around the world. According to our telemetry, in Q1 2023 users in the following countries were most frequently infected: Brazil, Algeria, Turkey, Vietnam, Indonesia, India, Egypt, Mexico.

Conclusions

Satacom is a downloader that is still running campaigns and being developed by the threat actor behind it. This threat actor continues to distribute malware families using various techniques, such as ad injection via ad plugins for WordPress websites.

The recently distributed malware, which is a side-loaded extension for Chromium-based browsers, performs actions in the browser to manipulate the content of the targeted cryptocurrency website. The main purpose of this malicious extension is to steal cryptocurrency from victims and transfer it to the threat actors’ wallet.

Moreover, since it is a browser extension, it can be installed in Chromium-based browsers on various platforms. Although the installation of the malicious extension and the infection chain described in this article are Windows-specific, if the threat actors want to target Linux and macOS users, they could easily do so, provided the victims use Chromium-based browsers.

Appendix I – Indicators of Compromise

Satacom files
0ac34b67e634e49b0f75cf2be388f244
1aa7ad7efb1b48a28c6ccf7b496c9cfd
199017082159b23decdf63b22e07a7a1

Satacom DNS
dns-beast[.]com
don-dns[.]com
die-dns[.]com

Satacom C2
hit-mee[.]com
noname-domain[.]com
don-die[.]com
old-big[.]com

Hosted PS scripts
tchk-1[.]com

Malicious extension ZIP
a7f17ed79777f28bf9c9cebaa01c8d70

Malicious extension CC
you-rabbit[.]com
web-lox[.]com

Hosted Satacom installer ZIP files
ht-specialize[.]xyz
ht-input[.]cfd
ht-queen[.]cfd
ht-dilemma[.]xyz
ht-input[.]cfd
io-strength[.]cfd
fbs-university[.]xyz
io-previous[.]xyz
io-band[.]cfd
io-strength[.]cfd
io-band[.]cfd
can-nothing[.]cfd
scope-chat[.]xyz
stroke-chat[.]click
icl-surprise[.]xyz
new-high[.]click
shrimp-clock[.]click
oo-knowledge[.]xyz
oo-station[.]xyz
oo-blue[.]click
oo-strategy[.]xyz
oo-clearly[.]click
economy-h[.]xyz
medical-h[.]click
hospital-h[.]xyz
church-h[.]click
close-h[.]xyz
thousand-h[.]click
risk-h[.]xyz
current-h[.]click
fire-h[.]xyz
future-h[.]click
moment-are[.]xyz
himself-are[.]click
air-are[.]xyz
teacher-are[.]click
force-are[.]xyz
enough-are[.]xyz
education-are[.]click
across-are[.]xyz
although-are[.]click
punishment-chat[.]click
rjjy-easily[.]xyz
guy-seventh[.]cfd

Redirectors to Satacom installer
back-may[.]com
post-make[.]com
filesend[.]live
soft-kind[.]com
ee-softs[.]com
big-loads[.]com
el-softs[.]com
softs-labs[.]com
soft-make[.]com
soft-end[.]com
soon-soft[.]com
tip-want[.]click
get-loads[.]com
new-loads[.]com
file-send[.]live
filetosend-upload[.]net
file-send[.]cc

Appendix II – MITRE ATT&CK Mapping

This table contains all the TTPs identified during analysis of the activity described in this report.

Introduction

Although ransomware is still a hot topic on which we will keep on publishing, we also investigate and publish about other threats. Recently we explored the topic of infection methods, including malvertising and malicious downloads. In this blog post, we provide excerpts from the recent reports that focus on uncommon infection methods and describe the associated malware.

For questions or more information on our crimeware reporting service, please contact crimewareintel@kaspersky.com.

RapperBot: “intelligent brute forcing”

RapperBot, based on Mirai (but with a different C2 command protocol), is a worm infecting IoT devices with the ultimate goal to launch DDoS attacks against non-HTTP targets. We observed the first sample in June 2022, when it was targeting SSH and not Telnet services. The latest version, however, removed the SSH functionality part and now focuses exclusively on Telnet—and with quite some success. In Q4 2022, we noticed 112k RapperBot infection attempts coming from over 2k unique IP addresses.

What sets RapperBot apart from other worms is its “intelligent” way of brute forcing: it checks the prompt and, based on the prompt, it selects the appropriate credentials. This method speeds up the brute forcing process significantly because it doesn’t have to go over a huge list of credentials.

RapperBot then determines the processor architecture and infects the device. The downloading of the actual malware is done via a variety of possible commands (for example, wget, curl, tftp and ftpget). If for some reason these methods don’t work, then a malware downloader is uploaded to the device via the shell “echo” commands.

Rhadamanthys: malvertising on websites and in search engines

Rhadamanthys is a new information stealer first presented on a Russian-speaking cyber criminal forum in September 2022 and offered as a MaaS platform. According to the author, the malware:

• Is written in C/C++, while the C2 is written in Golang.
• Is able to do a “stealthy” infection.
• Is able to steal/gather information on CPU type, screen resolution, supported wallets, and so on.
• Evades EDR/AV.
• Has encrypted communication with the C2.

Despite the malware being advertised already in September 2022, we started to detect the first samples at the beginning of 2023. Although Rhadamanthys was using phishing and spam initially as the infection vector, the most recent method is malvertising.

Online advertising platforms offer advertisers the possibility to bid in order to display brief ads in search engines, such as Google, but also websites, mobile apps and more. Both search engine and website-based ad platforms are leveraged by Rhadamanthys. The trick they pull is to display ads representing legitimate applications but in fact containing links to phishing websites. These phishing websites contain fake installers, luring users into downloading and installing the malware.

While analyzing Rhadamanthys, we noticed a strong connection with Hidden Bee miner. Both samples use images to hide the payload inside and both have similar shellcodes for bootstrapping. Additionally, both use “in-memory virtual file systems” and utilize Lua to load plugins and modules.

Comparison between Rhandamanthys’s “prepare.bin” and Hidden Bee’s “preload” modules

CUEMiner: distribution through BitTorrent and OneDrive

In August 2021, a project was started on GitHub called SilentCryptoMiner, hosting the miner consisting of a downloader and the payload, bot source and the compiled builder, as well as additional software, such as a system watcher. It has been constantly updated, with the latest update going back to October 31 2022. The repository is popular with cybercriminals, as illustrated by the huge number of samples we detected that featured many small changes and were combined with the different URLs and TTPs, making it clear that the malware is used by multiple groups in various ways concurrently.

During our investigation, we noticed two methods of spreading the malware. The first is via trojanized cracked software downloaded via BitTorrent. The other method is via trojanized cracked software that is downloaded from OneDrive sharing networks. How victims are lured into downloading these cracked packages is speculation, because we couldn’t find any direct links. Nevertheless, many crack sites these days do not immediately provide downloads. Instead, they point to Discord server channels for further discussion. This suggests some form of human interaction and social engineering.

The downloader is written in .NET and called CUEMiner. Despite being written in .NET, it is wrapped by a C++ based dropper and it connects to a set of URLs, which is varying from sample to sample, to download the miner and configuration settings. It also performs several checks in order to ensure it is running on bare metal systems, and not on a virtual machine. In case all checks are passed, the malware:

• Reconfigures Windows Defender to exclude the user profile path and the entire system drive from scanning.
• Fetches configuration details from a hardcoded URL and saves it at different places (for example, c:\logs.uce, %localappdata%\logs.uce).
• Creates empty files and subdirectories in %ProgramData%\HostData to make the directory look benign.
• Downloads the miner and watcher.
• Does a number of other things. The full list you can find in our private report.

The watcher, as the name suggests, monitors the system. If it doesn’t detect any processes that consume lots of system power (for example, games), the miner software is launched. When a heavy process, such as a game, is started, the miner is stopped and only started again when the aforementioned process stops. This is done in order to stay undetected on the system longer.

Conclusion

Open source malware is often used by less skilled cybercriminals. They often lack the required skills and contacts to conduct massive campaigns. Nevertheless, they can be still quite active and effective, as is shown by the huge number of CUEMiner samples we detected. If along their cybercriminal career they gain more skills, such as programming and understanding security better, they often reuse and improve crucial source code parts from open source malware.

Code reuse and rebranding is also used quite often by cybercriminals. There are many ransomware variants that change names over time while mostly containing the same code base. In other cases, cybercriminals re-use parts of the code in new campaigns. For example, Rhadamantys stealer features some code overlaps with the Hidden Bee malware. This suggests involvement of at least one individual in the Rhadamantys campaign who had also been involved in the development of Hidden Bee.

To protect yourself against these threats, intelligence reports can help. If you want to stay up to date on the latest TTPs used by criminals or have questions about our private reports, please contact crimewareintel@kaspersky.com.

Download the full version of the report (PDF)

Hundreds of deals are struck on the dark web every day: cybercriminals buy and sell data, provide illegal services to one another, hire other individuals to work as “employees” with their groups, and so on. Large sums of money are often on the table. To protect themselves from significant losses, cybercriminals use regulatory mechanisms, such as escrow services (aka middlemen, intermediaries, or guarantors), and arbitration. Escrow services control the fulfillment of agreements and reduce the risks of fraud in nearly every type of deal; arbiters act as a kind of court of law for cases where one of the parties of the deal tries to deceive the other(s). The administrators of the dark web sites, in turn, enforce arbiters’ decisions and apply penalties to punish cheaters. Most often, these measures consist in blocking, banning, or adding to “fraudster” lists available to any member of community.

Our research

We have studied publications on the dark web about deals involving escrow services for the period from January 2020 through December 2022. The sample includes messages from international forums and marketplaces on the dark web, as well as from publicly available Telegram channels used by cybercriminals. The total number of messages mentioning the use of an escrow agent in one way or another amounted to more than one million, of which almost 313,000 messages were published in 2022.

Dynamics of the number of messages on shadow sites mentioning escrow services in 2022. Source: Kaspersky Digital Footprint Intelligence (download)

We also found and analyzed the rules of operating escrow services on more than ten popular dark web sites. We found that the rules and procedures for conducting transactions protected by escrow on various shadow platforms were almost the same, and the typical transaction pattern that involved escrow services was as follows.

Besides the posts relating to escrow services, we analyzed those relating to arbitration and dispute settlement. We found that the format for arbitration appeals was also standardized. It usually included information about the parties, the value of the deal, a brief description of the situation, and the claimant’s expectations. In addition, parties sent their evidence privately to the appointed arbiter.

What we learned about dark web deal regulation

• About half of the messages that mention the use of an escrow agent in one way or another in 2022 were posted on a platform specializing in cashing out and associated services.
• Cybercriminals resort to escrow services—provided by escrow agents, intermediaries who are not interested in the outcome of the deal—not just for one-time deals, but also when looking for long-term partners or hiring “employees”.
• These days, dark web forums create automated escrow systems to speed up and simplify relatively typical deals between cybercriminals.
• Any party may sabotage the deal: the seller, the buyer, the escrow agent, and even third parties using fake accounts to impersonate official representatives of popular dark web sites or escrow agents.
• The main motivation for complying with an agreement and playing fair is the party’s reputation in the cybercriminal community.
• A deal may involve up to five parties: the seller, the buyer, the escrow agent, the arbiter, and the administrators of the dark web site. Moreover, further arbiters may be involved if a party is not satisfied with the appointed arbiter’s decision and tries to appeal to another.

The reasons to learn how business works on the dark web

Understanding how the dark web community operates, how cybercriminals interact with one another, what kinds of deals there are, how they are made, and what roles exist in them, is important when searching for information on the dark web and subsequently analyzing the data to identify possible threats to companies, government agencies, or certain groups of people. It helps information security experts find information faster and more efficiently without revealing themselves.

Today, regular monitoring of the dark web for various cyberthreats — both attacks in the planning stages and incidents that have already occurred, such as compromise of corporate networks or leakage of confidential documents, is essential for countering threats in time, and mitigating the consequences of fraudulent or malicious activities. As the saying goes, forewarned is forearmed.

Business on the dark web: deals and regulatory mechanisms — download the full version of the report (English, PDF)

In recent months, we observed an increase in the number of malicious campaigns that use Google Advertising as a means of distributing and delivering malware. At least two different stealers, Rhadamanthys and RedLine, were abusing the search engine promotion plan in order to deliver malicious payloads to victims’ machines. They seem to use the same technique of mimicking a website associated with well-known software like Notepad++ and Blender 3D.

The treat actors create copies of legit software websites while employing typosquatting (exploiting incorrectly spelled popular brands and company names as URLs) or combosquatting (using popular brands and company names combined with arbitrary words as URLs) to make the sites look like the real thing to the end user—the domain names allude to the original software or vendor. The design and the content of the fake web pages look the same as those of the original ones. Threat actors then pay to promote the website in the search engine in order to push it to the top search results. The technique is called “malvertising”.

Our observations

In the following snapshots, we can see Google ads promoting fake pages for AMD drivers and the Blender 3D software. If we take a closer look at the URLs, we will see that the domain names incorporate the software name but are in fact unrelated to the real AMD or Blender 3D vendors. In most cases, the top-level domains are different from those of the official sites as well. The use of less common TLDs enables the threat actors to register second-level domains that are similar to the real ones. These domains lure victims to click on the link and access the fake website more often than random domains registered in a more common domain zone, such as COM, because they may look more like a legitimate website.

Fake AMD and Blender 3D websites in search results

We visited some of the promoted sites and obtained the malicious payloads they were distributing. In this article, we will focus mainly on the “Blender 3D” fake websites.

Fake Blender 3D web pages

The size of the downloaded file (ZIP archive) is 269 MB, which is close to the original Blender installer size. The size of 257 MB stated on the fake web page matches that of the original Blender 3D installer, but it does not match the size of the fake download.

When the user clicks the “Download” button, the archive blender-3.4.1-windows-x64.zip (E0BDF36E4A7CF1B332DC42FD8914BA8B) is downloaded.

The size of the file (BBA8AA93FCDDA5AC7663E90C0EEFA2E7) extracted from the archive is 657 MB. When launched, it drops two files into the temp directory:

• The original Blender 3D MSI installer (marked green on the screenshot below), whose size is also 657 MB;
• A PE file that acts as a next-stage loader for a malicious PE file (marked red), which also has the same size as the original installer: 657 MB.

Dropped files: the original Blender 3D MSI installer and the malicious loader

The size of the dropped malicious loader is this big because it is inflated with junk bytes when the PE file is created. The deflated malicious loader size is about 330 KB, and the rest is junk.

Junk bytes inflating the loader

After the initial installer (extracted from the archive) drops these two files, it runs the malicious PE file using the CMD method (cmd.exe /c [Filename] command) to hide it from the user. Additionally, the initial installer also runs the original Blender 3D MSI to make the victim believe that the desired software is running.

Thus, the threat actors disguise their malicious payload through the installation of another software product by creating a “pre-installer” for the legitimate software, which will put both the malware and the desired genuine software on the victim’s machine.

Blender 3D installer launched by the “pre-installer”

The screenshot above shows the actual software installer running, but if we take a closer look at the processes, we will notice a short-lived sub-process (cmd.exe /c -> “SetupFileProgram”) run by the “pre-installer”. This short-lived process is the loader for the malware.

The loader

The loader is a .NET file protected by an unregistered version of .NET Reactor. It seems to use an anti-debugging technique in order to prevent a debugger from executing and dynamically analyzing the binary. In a nutshell, the loader runs a new powershell.exe process and manipulates it to execute numerous PowerShell commands, which instruct it to access a third-party URL in order to get the payload. The payload is a base64-encoded, AES-encrypted fileless binary. Further commands are related to decoding and decrypting that binary, then running it in memory, within a newly created aspnet_compiler.exe process, a legitimate Windows .NET framework compilation tool.

In this case, we observed two detection evasion tricks during the runtime:

• The fileless technique, which involves getting a payload from an online source and loading it directly into the memory of a process;
• LOLBAS (living-off-the-land binaries and scripts), which, in this case, is the use of a .NET compilation tool to run the malicious binary.

Below, we provide a more detailed analysis of the loader execution chain. After passing the loader anti-debugger, we can see that it starts a PowerShell process, so we will put a breakpoint at the CreateProcessW WinAPI call to observe the behavior.

Call of CreateProcessW to spawn a PowerShell process

Since we did not see any command passed to the PowerShell process when initializing it via the CreateProcessW call, we can conclude that it will be passed at some point later, so we can observe the passing of the PowerShell command(s) by putting a breakpoint at WinAPI WriteFile in order to see the command lines for the powershell.exe process.

So, after letting it run and reach the breakpoint, we will check the result in the return of the function call, and we can see in the stack that the first command pushed to the powershell.exe process was #Start-Sleep -seconds 30;.

Observing the pushed command(s)

We can try checking the memory section where the command is stored and searching for other commands that are being kept in the memory for later use by the loader.

Memory address of the pushed PowerShell commands

After taking all the data from this memory section, we will see all the commands passed to the powershell.exe process via the WriteFile WinAPI call.

PowerShell commands

If we read the commands, we will see exactly what the powershell.exe process is about to do. The commands instruct it to perform the following actions:

1. Download string data, which is part of the following URL, namely the name of the file: http[:]//45.93.201[.]114/docs/[RandomChars].txt. The downloaded data is a Base64-encoded string that is decoded into encrypted data.
2. Prepare the decryption method, AES-CBC, as can be seen in the screenshot above. We can also easily see and decode the Base64-encoded key and IV (initialization vector) used for decryption in the PowerShell command.
3. Decrypt the data into a Gzip-compressed binary.
4. Decompress the binary.
5. Invoke the binary to run it.

Decrypted binary

The extracted binary (RedLine stealer)

The binary that we obtained is the dropper of known malware, the RedLine stealer. The version of the stealer at hand uses an interesting technique to hide its malicious payload: it is encoded in the least significant bit of images stored in the resource section of the dropper, as well as the key and the IV bytes for its AES decryption.

Embedded images with a malicious payload

Payload decryption routine

After decrypting the payload, the dropper starts a legitimate process named “aspnet_compiler.exe”, which is part of the Microsoft .NET framework, and injects the payload into it.

Injecting a payload routine

Infrastructure

To deploy decoy pages, the malefactors register deceptive domain names, such as blender3d-software[.]net or blender3d-software[.]org. We have found more than fifty similar domains hosted at the same IP address: 91.229.23[.]200. These domain names mimic other software distribution sites as well, for example, afterburner-software[.]org, tradingviews-software[.]org, and unity-download[.]com.

The malicious payload could be stored on the same site (for example, hxxps[://]blahder3dsoft[.]store/Blender[.]rar) as the landing page or on a public service that can be used as the file hosting service (MediaFire or GitHub).

Conclusion

We are seeing an increase in the spread of malware families through Google Ads campaigns, specifically through search ads. Threat actors use fake websites to mimic legitimate software vendor websites to lure victims, and pay for ads to promote these. They use typosquatting and combosquatting for their malicious website domains, which have become common techniques in recent months. In some cases, such as the one described in this article, the threat actors also make sure to install the desired software alongside their malicious payload.

In recent campaigns, we observed mainly stealer-type malware, such as RedLine or the notorious Rhadamanthys, which is also known to use malvertising techniques to reach victims and steal data from their compromised machines.

This kind of distribution suggests that the threat actors are targeting victims, both individual and corporate, all around the world.

Indicators of Compromise

Year 2022 in numbers

Global threat statistics

In H2 2022, the percentage of ICS computers on which malicious objects were blocked increased by 3.5 percentage points compared to the previous six-month period, reaching 34.3%. This was higher than the percentages for 2021 and even 2020.

Percentage of ICS computers on which malicious objects were blocked, 2020 – 2022

In H2 2022 the percentage of ICS computers on which malicious objects were blocked increased in the automotive industry (+4.6 p.p.) and in the energy sector (+1 p.p.). In other industries tracked, the percentage decreased.

Percentage of ICS computers on which malicious objects were blocked in some industries, H2 2022

Geography

In different regions of the world, the percentage of ICS computers on which malicious activity was prevented ranged from 40.1% in Africa and Central Asia, which led the ranking, to 14.2% and 14.3%, respectively, in Western and Northern Europe, which were the most secure regions.

Regions of the world ranked by percentage of ICS computers on which malicious objects were blocked, H2 2022

African and Central Asian countries were prevalent among the 15 countries and territories with the highest percentage of ICS computers on which malicious objects were blocked in H2 2022.

15 countries and territories with the highest percentage of ICS computers on which malicious objects were blocked, H2 2022

In the Top 10 ranking of countries with the lowest percentage of ICS computers on which malicious objects were blocked, all countries, with the exception of Israel, were European.

10 countries and territories with the lowest percentage of ICS computers on which malicious objects were blocked, H2 2022

In H2 2022, the most significant increase among all countries in the percentage of ICS computers on which malicious objects were blocked was observed in Russia, where that percentage increased by 9 p.p.

Russia. Percentage of ICS computers on which malicious objects were blocked, 2020 – 2022

Variety of the malware detected

In H2 2022, Kaspersky security solutions blocked malware from 7,684 different families on industrial automation systems.

Percentage of ICS computers on which the activity of malicious objects from different categories was prevented, H2 2022

Main threat sources

The internet, removable devices and email clients remained the main sources of threats for computers in the operational technology infrastructure of organizations.

Percentage of ICS computers on which malicious objects from different sources were blocked, 2021 – 2022

In H2 2022, a very significant growth in the percentage of ICS computers on which internet threats were blocked – 12 p.p. and 7.8 p.p., respectively – was recorded in the regions of Russia and Central Asia.

Regions ranked by percentage of ICS computers on which internet threats were blocked, H2 2022

As per tradition, Africa topped the ranking of regions based on the percentage of ICS computers on which malware was blocked when removable devices were connected.

Regions ranked by percentage of ICS computers on which malware was blocked when removable devices were connected, H2 2022

Southern Europe topped the ranking of regions based on the percentage of ICS computers on which malicious email attachments and phishing links were blocked. Northern Europe was the only region in which the percentage increased (+0.3 p.p.) in H2 2022.

Regions ranked by percentage of ICS computers on which malicious email attachments and phishing links were blocked, H2 2022

The full report has been published on the Kaspersky ICS CERT website.

Figures of the year

In 2022:

• 48.63% of all emails around the world and 52.78% of all emails in the Russian segment of the internet were spam
• As much as 29.82% of all spam emails originated in Russia
• Kaspersky Mail Anti-Virus blocked 166,187,118 malicious email attachments
• Our Anti-Phishing system thwarted 507,851,735 attempts to follow phishing links
• 378,496 attempts to follow phishing links were associated with Telegram account hijacking

Phishing in 2022

Last year’s resonant global events

The year 2022 saw cybercrooks try to profit from new film releases and premieres just as they always have. The bait included the most awaited and talked-about releases: the new season of Stranger Things, the new Batman movie, and the Oscar nominees. Short-lived phishing sites often offered to see the premieres before the eagerly awaited movie or television show was scheduled to hit the screen. Those who just could not wait were in for a disappointment and a waste of cash. The promises of completely free access to the new content were never true. By clicking what appeared to be a link to the movie, the visitor got to view the official trailer or a film studio logo. Several seconds into the “preview”, the stream was interrupted by an offer to buy an inexpensive subscription right there on the website to continue watching. If the movie lover entered their bank card details on the fake site, they risked paying more than the displayed amount for content that did not exist and sharing their card details with the scammers.

Some websites that offered soccer fans free broadcasts of the FIFA World Cup in Qatar employed a similar scheme, but the variety of hoaxes aimed at soccer fans proved to be wider than that used by scammers who attacked film lovers. Thus, during the World Cup a brand-new scam appeared: it offered users to win a newly released iPhone 14 for predicting match outcomes. After answering every question, the victim was told that they were almost there, but there was a small commission to be paid before they could get their gadget. Of course, no prize ensued after the fee was paid.

Soccer fans chasing merchandise risked compromising their bank cards or just losing some money. Scammers created websites that offered souvenirs at low prices, including rare items that were out of stock in legitimate online stores. Those who chose to spend their money on a shady website risked never getting what they ordered.

Websites that offered tickets to the finals were another type of soccer-flavored bait. Scammers were betting on the finals typically being the most popular stage of the competition, tickets to which are often hard to get. Unlike legitimate ticket stores, the fake resellers were showing available seats in every sector even when the World Cup was almost closed. Vast selection of available seats should have alarmed visitors: real tickets would have been largely gone.

Fake donation sites started popping up after the Ukraine crisis broke out in 2022, pretending to accept money as aid to Ukraine. These sites referenced public figures and humanitarian groups, offering to accept cash in cryptocurrency, something that should have raised a red flag in itself.

The pandemic

The COVID-19 theme had lost relevance by late 2022 as the pandemic restrictions had been lifted in most countries. At the beginning of that year, we still observed phishing attacks that used the themes of infection and prevention as the bait. For example, one website offered users to obtain a COVID vaccination certificate by entering their British National Health Service (NHS) account credentials. Others offered the coveted Green Pass without vaccination.

Scammers abused legitimate survey services by creating polls in the name of various organization to profit from victims’ personal, including sensitive, data. In another COVID-themed scheme, the con artists introduced themselves as the Direct Relief charity, which helps to improve the quality of life and healthcare in poorer regions. Visitors were offered to fill out a form to be eligible for $750 per week in aid for twenty-six weeks. The survey page said the “charity” found the victim’s telephone number in a database of individuals affected by COVID-19. Those who wished to receive the “aid” were asked to state their full name, contact details, date of birth, social security and driver’s license numbers, gender, and current employer, attaching a scanned copy of their driver’s license. To lend an air of authenticity and to motivate the victim to enter valid information, the swindlers warned that the victim could be prosecuted for providing false information. The scheme likely aimed at identity theft: the illegal use of others’ personal details for deriving profit. The cybercrooks might also use the data to contact their victims later, staging a more convincing swindle.

Crypto phishing and crypto scams

The unabated popularity of cryptocurrency saw crypto scammers’ interest in wallet owners’ accounts growing, despite the fact that rates continued to drop throughout the year. Cybercriminals chased seed phrases, used for recovering access to virtual funds. By getting the user’s secret phrase, cybercriminals could get access to their cryptocurrency balance.

In a typical internet hoax manner, crypto scam sites offered visitors to get rich quick by paying a small fee. Unlike common easy-money scams, these websites asked for payments in cryptocurrency — which they promised to give away and which they were trying to steal. The “giveaways” were timed to coincide with events that were directly or indirectly associated with cryptocurrency. Thus, one of the fake sites promised prizes on the occasion of Nvidia thirty-year anniversary (the company is a major vendor of graphics processing units, which are sometimes used for crypto mining). Promotion of cryptocurrency use was another pretext for the “giveaways”. Users were offered to deposit up to 100 cryptocurrency units for a promise to refund two times that amount, purportedly to speed up digital currency adoption. In reality, the scheme worked the way any other internet hoax would: the self-professed altruists went off the radar once they received the deposit.

Compensation, bonus, and paid survey scams

Bonuses and compensations are hard to deny in times of crisis and instability, but it is worth keeping in mind that “financial assistance” is frequently promised by con artists to swindle you out of your money.

“Promotional campaigns by major banks” were a popular bait in 2022. Visitors to a fraudulent web page were offered to receive a one-time payment or to take a service quality survey for a fee. Unlike the prizes offered in the aforementioned crypto schemes, these fees were smaller: an equivalent of $30–40. The cybercriminals used an array of techniques to lull victims’ vigilance: company logos, assurances that the campaigns were legit, as well as detailed, lifelike descriptions of the offer. Similar “campaigns” were staged in the name of other types of organizations, for example, the Polish finance ministry.

Aid as distributed by various governmental and nongovernmental organizations remained a popular fraud theme in 2022. For example, in Muslim countries, scammers promised to send charity packages, purportedly under a “Ramadan Relief” program that aimed at helping low-income families during the Ramadan fast. The fasting period typically sees higher prices for food and household products, whereas observers buy more than they normally do and may be faced with a shortage of money. Legitimate charities, such as WF-AID, do operate Ramadan relief programs, and judging by the screenshot below, the fraudsters were pretending to represent that organization. An eye-catching picture of the organization’s logo and huge boxes was accompanied by a list of foodstuffs included in the aid package, with positive “recipient feedback” posted below the message. The victim was asked to make sure that their name was on the list of recipients, so they could get a package. This required providing personal data on the website and sending a link to the scam site to instant messaging contacts—nothing extraordinary for hoaxes like this. This way, the scammers both populate their databases and have victims spread links to their malicious resources for them. In addition to that, they might ask the victim to cover the “shipping costs”.

Growing utility rates and an increase in the price of natural resources have prompted several governments to start discussing compensations for the population. Payout notices could arrive by mail, email, or as a text message. Cybercriminals attempted to take advantage of the situation by creating web pages that mimicked government websites, promising cash for covering utility payments or compensation of utility expenses. Visitors were occasionally asked to provide personal details under the pretext of checking that they were eligible, or simply to fill out a questionnaire. In Britain, con artists posing as a government authority promised to compensate electricity costs. The description of the one-time payout was copied from the official website of the authority, which did provide the type of compensation. After completing the questionnaire, the victim was asked to specify the electric utility whose services they were using and enter the details of the bank card linked to their account with the utility. The promise of £400 was supposed to make the victim drop their guard and share their personal information.

In Singapore, scammers offered a refund of water supply costs, purportedly because of double billing. An energy or resource crisis was not used as a pretext in this particular case, but refunds were still offered in the name of the water supply authority.

Fake online stores and large vendor phishing

We see fake websites that imitate large online stores and marketplaces year after year, and 2022 was no exception. Phishing attacks targeted both the customers of globally known retailers and regional players. An attack often started with the victim receiving a link to a certain product supposedly offered at an attractive price, by email, in an instant messaging app, or on a social network. Those who fell for the trick could lose access to their accounts, have their bank card details stolen, or waste the money they wanted to spend on the dirt-cheap item.

“Insides” about “private sales” were also used as a lure. Thus, a web page that copied the appearance of a Russian marketplace promised discounts of up to 90% on all items listed on it. The page design did look credible, with the only potential red flags being really low prices and the URL in the address bar not matching the official one.

Many large vendors, notably in the home appliances segment, announced in early spring that they would be pulling out of Russia, which caused a spike in demand. This was reflected in the threat landscape, with fake online stores offering home appliances popping up all over the Russian segment of the internet (also called Runet). Large retailers being out of stock, combined with unbelievably low prices, made these offers especially appealing. The risk associated with making a purchase was to lose a substantial amount of money and never to receive what was ordered.

Hijacking of social media accounts

Users of social media have increasingly focused on privacy lately. That said, curiosity is hard to contain: people want to check out who has been following them, but do so without the other party knowing. Cybercriminals who were after their account credentials offered victims to have their cake and eat it by using some new social media capability. A fake Facebook Messenger page promised to install an update that could change the user’s appearance and voice during video calls, and track who has been viewing their profile, among other features. To get the “update”, the victim was asked to enter their account credentials, which the scammers immediately took over.

Many Instagram users dream about the Blue Badge, which stands for verified account and is typically reserved for large companies or media personalities. Cybercriminals decided to take advantage of that exclusivity, creating phishing pages that assured visitors their verified status had been approved and all they needed to do was to enter their account logins and passwords.

Russia blocked access to both Facebook and Instagram in March 2022, which led to the popularity of Russian social networks and Telegram skyrocketing. This increased usage meant the users’ risk of losing personal data was now higher, too. “Well-wishers” who operated scam sites offered to check if Russian social media contained any embarrassing materials on the victim. The scam operators told the users it was possible to find damaging information about every third user of a social network by running a search. If the user agreed to a search to be done for them, they were told that a certain amount of dirty linen indeed had been found. In reality, there was no search — the scammers simply stole the credentials they requested for the check.

One of the added risks of social media phishing is scammers getting access to both the social media account itself and any linked services.

The Telegram Premium status provides a range of benefits, from an ad-free experience to an ability to block incoming voice messages, but the subscription costs money. Scammers offered to “test” a Premium subscription free of charge or simply promised to give one for free if the victim entered their Telegram user name and password or a verification code sent by the service, which was exactly what the cybercrooks were after.

One more phishing campaign targeting Telegram users was arranged to coincide with the New Year’s celebration. Scammers created a page on the telegra.ph blogging platform that posted a gallery of children’s drawings, encouraging users to vote for their favorites. Scammers sent a link to that page from hacked accounts, asking users to vote for their friends’ kids’ works. Those who took the bait were directed to a fake page with a login form on it. The cybercriminals were betting on the users to go straight to voting, without checking the authenticity of the drawings, which had been copied from various past years’ competition pages, as requests to vote for one’s friends’ kids are common before public holidays.

The Telegram auction platform named Fragment went live in the October of 2022: it was selling unique usernames. You can become a user by linking your Telegram account or TON wallet. Scammers who were after those account details sent out links to fake Fragment pages. A visitor who tried to buy a username from the fake website was requested to log in. If the victim entered their credentials, the scam operators immediately grabbed those.

Spam in 2022

The pandemic

Unlike phishing, COVID-themed spam is still a thing. Most of that is “Nigerian-type” scams: millionaires dying from COVID bequeathing their money to treatment and prevention efforts, and to improve the lives of those who have recovered, or Mark Zuckerberg running a special COVID lottery where one can win a million euros even if they are not a Facebook user. Recipients are told that they could claim some IMF money left unallocated because of the pandemic. Others are offered hefty amounts under an anti-recession assistance program.

The amount of spam exploiting the coronavirus theme in some way dropped noticeably during 2022: at the beginning of the year, we were blocking a million of these emails per month, but the figure had shrunk by three times by yearend.

Contact form spam

The year 2022 saw cybercriminals abuse contact forms for spam more frequently. In a typical scheme of this kind, scammers find websites that offer registration, contact, or support request forms that do not require the user to be logged in to submit, and do not check the data entered. In some cases, they insert a scam message with a hyperlink in the login or name fields, and in others, add a longer text with images to the message field. Then the attackers add victims’ email addresses to the contact fields and submit. When getting a message via a registration or contact form, most websites reply to the user’s email address that their request was received and is being processed, their account has been created, and so on. As a result, the person gets an automated reply from an official address of a legitimate organization, containing unsolicited advertisements or a scam link.

Most scam messages offer a compensation or prize to the recipient. For example, a spam email targeting Russian users promised an equivalent of $190–4200 in VAT refunds. To get the money, the victim was offered to open the link in the message. This scheme is a classic: a linked web page requests that the user pay a commission of under a dozen dollars, which is insignificant in comparison to the promised refund. We observed many varieties of contact form money scam: from fuel cards to offers to make money on some online platform.

Scammers took advantage of forms on legitimate sites all around the world. Where spam email in Russian typically played on “prizes” or “earning money”, messages in other languages, in addition to offering “prizes”, encouraged users to visit “dating sites” — in fact, populated by bots — where the victims would no doubt be asked to pay for a premium account.

We blocked upward of a million scam emails sent via legitimate forms in 2022.

Blackmail in the name of law enforcement agencies

Extortion spam is nothing new. In such emails, attackers usually claim that the recipient has broken the law and demand money. In 2022, these mailings not only continued, but also evolved. For example, there was virtually no text in the messages: the user was either asked to open an attached PDF file to find out more, or they received threats in the form of an image with text. In addition, the geography of mailings widened in 2022.

The essence of the message, as in similar emails sent earlier, was that a criminal case was going to be opened against the recipient due to allegedly visiting sites containing child pornography.

To avoid serious consequences, the attackers urged the victim to respond as soon as possible to the sender and “settle the matter”. Most likely, the scammers would ask for a certain amount of money to be paid in further correspondence for the victim’s name to be removed from the “criminal case”. In 2022, we blocked over 100,000 blackmail emails in various countries and languages, including French, Spanish, English, German, Russian and Serbian.

Exploiting the news

Spammers constantly use major world events in their fraudulent schemes. The 2022 geopolitical crisis was no exception. Throughout the year, we saw mailings aimed at English-speaking users proposing transferring money, usually to a Bitcoin wallet, to help the victims of the conflict in Ukraine. Scammers often demand the transfer of money to Bitcoin wallets, as it is more difficult to trace the recipient through cryptocurrency transactions than through the bank ones. Blackmail demanding payment in cryptocurrency used to prevail in spam. Now, attackers have started collecting Bitcoin for charity.

The news agenda was also used in other scam mailings. For example, in early July, our solutions blocked 300,000 emails where fraudsters were requesting help on behalf of a Russian millionaire, who allegedly wanted to invest money and avoid sanctions. Another mailing said that the European Commission had decided to give away a fund created by Russian oligarchs, and the email recipient might be lucky to get a piece of this pie.

More and more “business offers” are appearing among spam mailings, and they exploit the current information agenda. Due to economic sanctions in 2022, enterprising businessmen offered replacements for goods and services from suppliers who left the Russian market. For example, spammers actively advertised services of a company transporting people to Russia. The email text emphasized the fact that many transport companies refused to provide such services.

There were also spam mailings where various companies offered to replace popular international software with Russian equivalents or solutions developed in third countries. In addition, there were spam propositions for intermediary services to open a company or bank account in neighboring countries, such as Armenia, as well as offers of assistance in accepting payments from foreign partners.

The shortage of printer paper in Russia in March and April 2022 spawned a wave of related ads offering paper at discount prices.

Spammers in 2022 also actively marketed their promotional mailing services as alternative advertising to unavailable promotion via platforms such as Instagram. For example, in April we blocked around a million of such mailings.

Against the backdrop of sanctions and the accompanying disruption of supply chains, there has been an increase in spam offering goods and services from Chinese suppliers. In 2022, our filter blocked more than 3.5 million emails containing such offers, and the number of them was growing, from around 700,000 in the first quarter to more than a million in the fourth.

Spam with malicious attachments

Employees shifting to remote work during the pandemic and the associated growth of online communications spurred the active development of various areas of phishing, both mass and targeted. Attackers have become more active in imitating business correspondence, not only targeting HR-specialists and accountants, as before the pandemic, but also employees in other departments. In 2022, we saw an evolution of malicious emails masquerading as business correspondence. Attackers actively used social engineering techniques in their emails, adding signatures with logos and information from specific organizations, creating a context appropriate to the company’s profile, and applying business language. They also actively exploited off the current news agenda and mentioned real employees from the company supposedly sending the emails. Spammers faked their messages as internal company correspondence, business correspondence between different organizations, and even as notifications from government agencies.

Masking malicious emails as business correspondence has become a major trend in malicious spam in 2022. Attackers tried to convince the recipient that it was a legitimate email, such as a commercial offer, a request for the supply of equipment, or an invoice for the payment of goods. For example, throughout the year, we encountered the following scheme. Attackers gained access to real business correspondence (most likely by stealing correspondence from previously infected computers) and sent malicious files or links to all of its participants in response to the previous email. This trick makes it harder to keep track of malicious emails, and the victim is more likely to fall for it.

In most cases, either the Qbot Trojan or Emotet was loaded when the malicious document was opened. Both can be used to steal user data, collect information about the corporate network, and spread additional malware, such as ransomware. Qbot also allows you to gain access to emails and steal them for further attacks.

Mailings imitating notifications from various ministries and other government organizations have become more frequent in the Runet. Emails were often designed to take into account the specific activities of the organizations they were pretending to be. The sender’s addresses copied the logic of email addresses in the relevant agencies, and the malicious attachment was disguised as some kind of specialized document, such as “key points of the meeting”. For example, malicious code was found in one of these mailings that exploited a vulnerability in the Equation Editor module, the formula editor in Microsoft Office.

The perpetrators did not ignore the news agenda. In particular, the malware was distributed under the guise of call-up “as part of partial mobilization” or as a “new solution” to safeguard against possible threats on the internet “caused by hostile organizations”.

In the second case, the program installed on victim’s computer was in fact a crypto-ransomware Trojan.

Two-stage spear phishing using a known phish kit

In 2022, we saw an increase in spear (or targeted) phishing attacks targeting businesses around the world. In addition to typical campaigns consisting of one stage, there were attacks in several stages. In the first email, scammers in the name of a potential client asked the victim to specify information about its products and services. After the victim responds to this email, the attackers start a phishing attack.

Key facts:

• Attackers use fake Dropbox pages created using a well-known phishing kit
• The campaign targets the sales departments of manufacturers and suppliers of goods and services
• Attackers use SMTP IP addresses and From domains provided by Microsoft Corporation and Google LLC (Gmail)

Statistics

The campaign began in April 2022, with malicious activity peaking in May, and ended by June.

Number of emails related to a two-step targeted campaign detected by Kaspersky solutions (download)

How a phishing campaign unfolds

Attackers send an email in the name of a real trade organization requesting more information about the victim company’s products. The email text looks plausible and has no suspicious elements, such as phishing links or attachments. A sender’s email address from a free domain, like gmail.com, may raise doubts. The email on the screenshot below is sent from an address in this domain, and the company name in the From field is different to its name in the signature.

Example of the first email

It is worth noting that the use of free domains is not typical for spear phishing in the name of organizations, because such domains are rarely used in business. Most often in targeted attacks, attackers either use spoofing of the legitimate domain of the organization they are pretending to be, or register domains similar to the original one. In addition, Google and Microsoft are pretty quick in blocking email addresses spotted sending spam. This is the most likely reason why attackers used different addresses in the From header (where the email came from) and Reply-to header (where the reply will go when clicking “Reply” in your email client). This means the victim responds to another address, which may be located in another free domain, such as outlook.com. The address in the Reply-to header is not used for spam, and correspondence with it is initiated by the victim, so it is less likely to be blocked quickly.

After victims respond to a first email, attackers send a new message, asking them to go to a file-sharing site and view a PDF file with a completed order, which can be found via the link.

An email with a phishing link

By clicking the link, the user is taken to a fake site generated by a well-known phishing kit. It is a fairly simple tool that generates phishing pages to steal credentials from specific resources. Our solutions blocked fake WeTransfer and Dropbox pages created with this kit.

A fake WeTransfer page created using the same phish kit as the target campaign sites

In the phishing campaign described above, the phishing site mimics a Dropbox page with static file images and a download button. After clicking any element of the interface, the user is taken to a fake Dropbox login page that requests valid corporate credentials.

A fake Dropbox page

Login page with a phishing form

When victims attempt to log in, their usernames and passwords are sent to https://pbkvklqksxtdrfqkbkhszgkfjntdrf[.]herokuapp[.]com/send-mail.

<form name="loginform">
          <div class="form-group">
            <label for="">Email Address</label>
            <input type="email" id="email" class="form-control" name="email" placeholder="email Address">
            <div class="email-error"></div>
          </div>
          <div class="form-group">
            <label for="">Password</label>
            <input type="password" id="password" class="form-control" name="password" placeholder="Password">
            <div class="password-error"></div>
          </div>
          <div class="form-group btn-area">
            <button class="download-btn" id="db" type="submit">Download</button>
          </div>
        </form>
      </div>
      <script src="https://firebasestorage.googleapis.com/v0/b/linktopage-c7fd6.appspot.com/o/obfuscated.js?alt=media&amp;token=1bb73d28-53c8-4a1e-9b82-1e7d62f3826b"></script>

HTML representation of a phishing form

Victims

We have identified targets for this campaign around the world, including the following countries: Russia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Singapore, USA, Germany, Egypt, Thailand, Turkey, Serbia, Netherlands, Jordan, Iran, Kazakhstan, Portugal, and Malaysia.

Statistics: spam

Share of spam in mail traffic

In 2022, an average of 48.63% of emails worldwide were spam, representing a 3.07 p.p. increase on 2021. Over the course of the year, however, the share of spam in global email traffic has gradually declined, from 51.02% in the first quarter to 46.16% in the fourth.

Share of spam in global email traffic, 2022 (download)

The most active month in terms of spam was February 2022, with junk traffic accounting for 52.78% of all email correspondence. June was in second place (51.66%). December was the calmest, only 45.20% of emails in this month were spam.

On Runet, the proportion of spam in email traffic is generally higher than worldwide. In 2022, an average of 52.44% of emails were junk mailings. At the same time, the trend for a gradual shift in ratio in favor of legitimate correspondence can also be seen. We saw the largest share of spam in Runet in the first quarter, with 54.72% of all emails, and by the fourth quarter it had dropped to 49.20%.

Proportion of spam in Runet email traffic, 2022 (download)

Even though the second quarter (53.96%) was quieter in terms of spam than the first, the most active month in the Russian segment of the internet was June (60.16%). Most likely, the share of spam in June, both in Russia and globally, was influenced by the surge in mailings with offers from Chinese factories that we observed in that month. And the quietest month in Runet was December (47.18%), the same as globally.

Countries and territories — sources of spam

In 2022, the share of spam from Russia continued to grow, from 24.77% to 29.82%. Germany (5.19%) swapped places with mainland China (14.00%), whose share increased by 5.27 percentage points. Third place is still held by the United States (10.71%).

TOP 20 countries and territories — sources of spam, 2022 (download)

The Netherlands remained in fifth place (3.70%), its share decreased compared to 2021. Sixth and seventh places went to Japan (3.25%) and Brazil (3.18%), whose shares rose by 0.89 and 3.77 p.p., respectively. Next come the UK (2.44%), France (2.27%) and India (1.82%).

Malicious mail attachments

In 2022, our Mail Anti-Virus detected 166,187,118 malicious email attachments. That’s an increase of 18 million from the previous year. This component caused most triggers in March, May, and June 2022.

Number of Mail Anti-Virus hits, January — December 2022 (download)

The most common malicious email attachments in 2022, as in 2021, were Agensla Trojan stealers (7.14%), whose share decreased slightly. Noon spyware (4.89%) moved up to second place, and Badun Trojans (4.61%) spreading as archived electronic documents moved down to third place. The fourth most common malware were vulnerability exploits CVE-2018-0802 (4.33%) in Microsoft Equation Editor. In 2022, attackers used them significantly more often than CVE-2017-11882 exploits in the same component (1.80%). This vulnerability was more widespread in 2021 and has now dropped to tenth place.

TOP 10 malware families spread by email attachments in 2022 (download)

ISO Trojans (3.27%), sent in the form of disk images, moved up to number five, and the sixth most common was the Guloader downloader family (2.65%), which delivers remotely controlled malware to victims’ devices. They are closely followed by the Badur family (2.60%), PDF files containing links to web resources with questionable content, and in eighth place is the infamous Emotet botnet (2.52%). Law enforcement shut this down in early 2021, but by fall, attackers had restored the infrastructure and were actively distributing it in 2022. More recently, Emotet has been used to deliver other malware to victims’ devices, particularly ransomware. The ninth most popular family was Taskun (2.10%), which creates malicious tasks in the task scheduler.

TOP 10 types of malware spread by email attachments in 2022 (download)

The list of the most common malware sent via email usually corresponds to the list of families. As in 2021, attackers mostly distributed the same instances from the TOP 10 families.

Countries and territories targeted by malicious mailings

Spain remains the leader in terms of blocked malicious attachments in 2022 (8.78%), which is a slight decrease compared to 2021 (9.32%). The share of Russia (7.29%), on the other hand, increased slightly. Third place went to Mexico (6.73%), and fourth place to Brazil (4.81%), whose share was virtually unchanged from the previous reporting period.

TOP 20 countries and territories targeted by malicious mailings, 2022 (download)

In Italy, 4.76% of all detected malicious attachments were blocked in 2022. The country is followed by Vietnam (4.43%) and Turkey (4.31%). The percentage of Mail Anti-Virus detections on computers of users from Germany (3.85%) continued to decrease. The share in the United Arab Emirates (3.41%) also decreased slightly, dropping to ninth place, while Malaysia (2.98%) remained in tenth place.

Statistics: phishing

In 2022, the number of phishing attacks increased markedly. Our Anti-Phishing system prevented 507,851,735 attempts to follow a phishing link, roughly double the number in 2021.

Map of phishing attacks

In 2022, the geography of phishing attacks changed dramatically. Attempts to click phishing links were most often blocked on devices from Vietnam (17.03%). In 2021, this country was not among the TOP 10 most attacked countries and territories. Macau is in second place (13.88%), also absent from last year’s ranking. Madagascar is in third place (12.04%), which was seventh in 2021. In addition to Vietnam and Macau, Algeria (11.05%), Malawi (10.91%) and Morocco (10.43%) appeared at the top of the list of most attacked countries and territories. Ecuador (11.05%) moved up to fifth place, while Brunei (10.59%) dropped one place to seventh. Brazil (10.57%) and Portugal (10.33%) moved from first and third places to eighth and tenth, respectively, and France, which was second in 2021, left the TOP 10.

TOP 10 countries and territories by share of attacked users:

* Share of users encountering phishing out of the total number of Kaspersky users in that country/territory, 2022

Top-level domains

As in previous years, the majority of phishing pages were hosted in the COM domain zone, but its share almost halved, from 31.55% to 17.69%. Zone XYZ remained in second place (8.79%), whose share also decreased. The third most popular domain among attackers was FUN (7.85%), which had not previously received their attention. The domain is associated with entertainment content, which is perhaps what attracted fraudsters to it.

Most frequent top-level domains for phishing pages in 2022 (download)

Domains ORG (3.89%) and TOP (1.80%) swapped places relative to 2021 but remained in fourth and fifth places. In addition to this, the top ten domain zones in most demand among cybercriminals included: RU (1.52%), COM.BR (1.13), DE (0.98%), CO.UK (0.98%) and SE (0.92%).

Organizations under phishing attacks

The rating of organizations targeted by phishers is based on the triggering of the deterministic component in the Anti-Phishing system on user computers. The component detects all pages with phishing content that the user has tried to open by following a link in an email message or on the web, as long as links to these pages are present in the Kaspersky database.

In 2022, pages impersonating delivery services had the highest percentage of clicks on phishing links blocked by our solutions (27.38%). Online stores (15.56%), which were popular with attackers during the pandemic, occupied second place. Payment systems (10.39%) and banks (10.39%) ranked third and fourth, respectively.

Distribution of organizations targeted by phishers, by category, 2022 (download)

The share of global internet portals (8.97%) almost halved, with almost as many phishing resources targeting users of smaller web services (8.24%). Social networks (6.83%), online games (2.84%), messengers (2.02%) and financial services (1.94%) round complete the TOP 10 categories of sites of interest to criminals.

Hijacking Telegram accounts

In 2022, our solutions stopped 378,496 phishing links aimed at hijacking Telegram accounts. Apart from a spike in phishing activity throughout June, when the number of blocked links exceeded 37,000, the first three quarters were relatively quiet. However, by the end of the year, the number of phishing attacks on the messenger’s users increased dramatically to 44,700 in October, 83,100 in November and 125,000 in December. This increase is most likely due to several large-scale Telegram account hijacking campaigns that we observed in late 2022 (article in Russian).

Number of clicks on phishing links aimed at hijacking a Telegram account worldwide, and in Russia specifically, January — December 2022 (download)

It is of note that the majority of phishing attacks were aimed at users from Russia. While in the first months of 2022 their share was approximately half of the total number of attacks worldwide, since March 70–90% of all attempts to follow phishing links by Telegram users were made by Russian users.

Phishing in messengers

Statistics on messenger-based phishing are based on anonymized data from the Safe Messaging component of Kaspersky Internet Security for Android, voluntarily provided by users of this solution. Safe Messaging scans incoming messages and blocks attempts to follow any phishing or otherwise malicious links in them.

In 2022, our mobile solution blocked 360,185 attempts to click on phishing links from messengers. Of these, 82.71% came from WhatsApp, 14.12% from Telegram and another 3.17% from Viber.

Distribution of links blocked by the Safe Messaging component, by messenger, 2022 (download)

Phishing activity on WhatsApp is down slightly since 2021. On average, the Safe Messaging component blocked 816 clicks on fraudulent links per day. The first half of the year was the most turbulent, and by the third quarter, phishing activity in the messenger had dropped sharply.

Dynamics of phishing activity on WhatsApp in 2022 (weekly number of detected links shown)

The largest number of phishing attempts on WhatsApp, approximately 76,000, was recorded in Brazil. Russia is in second place, where over the year, the Chat Protection component prevented 69,000 attempts to go to fraudulent resources from the messenger.

TOP 7 countries and territories where users most often clicked phishing links in WhatsApp (download)

Unlike WhatsApp, the number of phishing attacks on Telegram almost tripled in 2022 compared to the previous reporting period. On average, our solutions blocked 140 attempts to follow phishing links in this messenger per day. The peak of activity came at the end of June and beginning of July, when the number of blocked clicks could have exceeded 1,500 per week. Phishing activity on Telegram also increased sharply at the end of the year.

Dynamics of phishing activity on Telegram in 2022 (weekly number of detected links shown)

In Russia, we recorded the largest number (21,000) of attempts to click a link to fraudulent resources from Telegram. Second place went to Brazil, where 3,800 clicks were blocked.

TOP 7 countries and territories where users most frequently clicked phishing links from Telegram (download)

Conclusion

Times of crisis create the preconditions for crime to flourish, including online. Scams promising compensation and payouts from government agencies, large corporations and banks are likely to remain popular among cybercriminals next year. The unpredictability of the currency market and departure of individual companies from specific countries’ markets will likely affect the number of scams associated with online shopping. At the same time, the COVID-19 topic, popular with cybercriminals in 2020 and 2021, but already beginning to wane in 2022, will finally cease to be relevant and will be replaced by more pressing global issues.

Recently, we’ve seen an increase in targeted phishing attacks where scammers don’t immediately move on to the phishing attack itself, but only after several introductory emails where there is active correspondence with the victim. This trend is likely to continue. New tricks are also likely to emerge in the corporate sector in 2023, with attacks generating significant profits for attackers.

There is a vast number of trackers, which gather information about users’ activities online. For all intents and purposes, we have grown accustomed to online service providers, marketing agencies, and analytical companies tracking our every mouse click, our social posts, browser and streaming services history. The collected data can be used for improving their user interfaces or the overall user experience, or to personalize ads.

There exist various types of trackers meant for collecting different types of information: advertising (AdAgency) trackers, analytics (WebAnalytics) trackers, and so on. Most of these are largely used on websites and inside applications. There are more versatile trackers too, used on websites, inside applications, and even in e-mail. This article describes one of these tracker types: web beacons. We demonstrate what tracking systems’ and companies’ web beacons our security products (anti-tracking browser extensions and antispam technology) detect most often.

What web beacons are

Web beacons, or web bugs, also known as tracker pixels or spy pixels, among other names, are tracking elements used on web pages, inside applications and in e-mail for checking that the user has accessed certain content (opened an e-mail or visited a web page). Their main purpose is to collect statistics and build analytical reports on the user’s activities.

Web beacons on websites track visitors. Analytical marketing agencies or website owners themselves can use these to measure how well certain content or promotional campaigns performed, or how their audiences responded. Some websites use tracker pixels as watermarks for their content, for example, to track down illegal copies.

The main purpose of web beacons in e-mail, just as those on websites, is to count users who interact with the content. For example, tracker pixels can be used to make a report on e-mail open rates. These help companies to find out which e-mail campaigns their users find interesting and which they do not. For example, if an e-mail campaign sees declining open rates, the company may choose to either replace the subject with something more eye-catching or clickbaity, or on the contrary, make it more matter-of-fact and informative.

How web beacons work

A beacon on a web page is typically an image that loads from an external source. The size is usually one or even zero pixels, so invisible to the human eye. Hence the name: “spy pixel”. Additionally, the CSS display property can be set to “none” (do not display) to hide the image. Less common are JavaScript beacon implementations, such as Beacon API: an interface that allows sending requests to a server without expecting a response.

Example of web beacon location in the HTML code of a website

E-mail web beacons are implemented in a similar way: invisible images are placed within the e-mail body, or JavaScript code is added in an HTML attachment.

Example of web beacon location in the HTML part of an e-mail

When the web page or e-mail is opened, a request is sent to the web beacon server. If the web beacon is an image the request is to upload this image. Otherwise it is a request specified in the JavaScript code, usually one that doesn’t require a response. The following information is typically communicated to the server:

• Date and time of opening the web page or e-mail
• Operating system version
• Browser or e-mail client type and version
• Screen resolution
• IP address

Example of user data transmission

The most common website and e-mail beacons

We have analyzed the web beacons detected by our systems in December 2022, and ranked twenty companies whose beacons interacted with our users while browsing websites or opening e-mail messages most often.

Twenty most common beacons on websites

This section uses anonymous statistics collected from December 1 through 31, 2022 by the Do Not Track (DNT) component, which blocks loading of website trackers. DNT, which is disabled by default, is part of Kaspersky Internet Security, Kaspersky Total Security, and Kaspersky Security Cloud. The statistics consist of anonymized data shared by users with their consent. We have compiled a list of twenty companies whose content DNT detected around the world the most frequently. One hundred percent represents the total number of DNT detections triggered by these twenty systems.

Most of the twenty companies according to DNT have at least some connection to digital advertising and marketing. For example, Aniview, in sixth place with 2.68%, specializes in video advertising. OpenX (2.19%), Taboola (1.63%), Smart AdServer (1.55%), and many others are advertising or marketing agencies.

Even tech giants, such as Google (32.53%), Microsoft (21.81%), Amazon (13.15%) and Oracle (2.86%), who lead in our rankings, operate marketing and advertising subsidiaries, and product enhancement is by far not the only reason why they use web beacons.

Twenty most common website beacons in December 2022 (download)

Twenty most common beacons in e-mail

This section presents anonymized Anti-Spam detection data from Kaspersky users’ devices. The Anti-Spam component is part of Kaspersky Security for Linux Mail Server, Kaspersky Security for Microsoft Exchange Server, Kaspersky Secure Mail Gateway, and Kaspersky Security for Microsoft Office 365.

Unlike the website beacons rankings, the list of the most common e-mail beacons is not dominated by the big tech: Adobe Analytics (4.49%) is eighth, and Google (3.86%) and Microsoft (3.18%) have even humbler shares. The fact that there is a fairly large number of companies specializing in e-mail marketing could explain that. These companies can be broken down into two categories:

• Email service providers (ESP): companies that manage and maintain e-mail campaigns for their clients.
• Customer relationship management (CRM): companies that specialize in building platforms for managing every type of customer communications at various stages in the sales process.

The tech giants own major advertising networks that are used by most websites, and hence their trackers dominate these websites, whereas ESP and CRM companies manage most e-mail campaigns, and so their trackers dominate e-mail. ESP and CRM beacons collect user data to track their responses to e-mail campaigns: the percentage of users who open the messages, how the open rate changes from region to region, and so on. Most of the beacons we detected in e-mail traffic were by Mailchimp (21.74%) and SendGrid (19.88%), two major American e-mail marketing players.

Besides ESP and CRM, our e-mail beacon rankings included the large Japanese online retailer Rakuten (5.97%), the business networking website LinkedIn (4.77%), the ride-hailing platform Uber (1.49%), and Booking.com (0.56%), a major accommodation booking service. These companies share their reasons for using web beacons with the ESP and CRM players: to evaluate e-mail campaign impact and collect aggregate user statistics.

Twenty most common web beacons in e-mail, December 2022 (download)

Conclusion

Companies strive to collect as much data on their users as they can, to add as much detail to each user profile as possible, so that they can personalize their offerings, and sell their goods and services more efficiently. Various tracking systems enable companies to track users on websites, inside applications, and in e-mail.

Rather than outsourcing these services, many large companies are able to set up advertising subsidiaries of their own, selling the same services as advertising specialists do. They often merge their information about users obtained from diverse sources to enrich and extend each user profile that they already have. Meanwhile, others use the services of the Internet giants, marketing agencies, ESP and CRM companies, helping these to amass even more data.

The user would find it sufficiently difficult, if at all possible, to track down where their data ends up. Even more, you sometimes may not even notice that data is being collected. Beacons on websites and in e-mail are invisible to the user, and companies that put them there give no warning, as opposed to cookies. The beacons, meanwhile, allow the companies to find out how many times the users visited the website, where they came from, and who opened the e-mail, when and where. By gathering all that information on a regular basis, one can get an idea of not just the user’s reaction to specific e-mail messages or landing pages, but also the user’s habits, such as when they typically get online.

If cybercriminals were to obtain that information, for example, as result of a leak, they could use it for their own purposes. In particular, they could try hacking your online accounts or send fake e-mail in your name if they found out your usual offline hours. Moreover, attackers use the web beacon technology too. It is worth adopting at least minimal anti-tracking measures to protect yourself from unwanted attention by companies, let alone cybercrooks. You can install a special browser extension that prevents loading of trackers on web pages and configure your browser for increased privacy. Many VPN services offer tracker blocking as an added feature. When it comes to e-mail, you can prevent images from loading automatically. Even if you do open an e-mail that contains a spy pixel, it will not be functional, as any images — a web beacon is an image too — will not load unless you explicitly permit it. As for more advanced JavaScript beacons, these are located in the attachment and only load once you open that.

Kaspersky detects an average of 400,000 malicious files every day. These add up to 144 million annually. The threat landscape is constantly updated through new malware and spyware, advanced phishing methods, and new social engineering techniques. The media routinely report incidents and leaks of data that end up publicly accessible on the dark web. Hacker attacks constantly hurt individuals, corporations, and entire countries, and not just financially. In certain cases, cyberattacks may threaten human lives, for example if they target critical infrastructure.

Last year, the cybersecurity of corporations and government agencies was more significant than ever before, and will become even more so in 2023. As part of the Kaspersky Security Bulletin, the DFI (Digital Footprint Intelligence) and DFIR (Digital Forensics and Incident Response) teams have come up with an overview of threats that will be relevant to the segment in question.

More personal data leaks; corporate email at risk

The trend for personal data leaks grew rapidly in 2022 and will continue into 2023. Last year saw, a number of high-profile cases, such as Medibank, Uber, and WhatsApp. The leaks affected various organizations and amounts of data. For example, last September, an attacker offered for sale a database containing 105 million records with information about Indonesian citizens. The compromised data included full name, place and date of birth, gender, as well as national identification number. The perpetrator valued the data, seemingly taken from the General Elections Commission of Indonesia, at US$5,000 and put it up for sale on the dark web.

A post on the dark web that offers Indonesian data for sale and was found with the help of Digital Footprint Intelligence

We often see people use work email addresses to register with third-party sites and services, which can be hacked and exposed to a data leak, putting the security of the company that owns the email at risk. The attack surface in its infrastructure increases with the number of potentially vulnerable objects. When sensitive data becomes publicly accessible, it may invoke the interest of cybercriminals and trigger discussions of potential attacks on the organization on dark web sites (forums, instant messaging channels, onion resources, etc.). In addition, the likelihood of the data being used for phishing and social engineering increases. 

Media blackmail: businesses to learn they were hacked from hackers’ public posts with a countdown to publication

Ransomware operators set up blogs where they post about new successful hacks of businesses and publish the data they stole. The number of posts in those blogs grew in 2022, both in open sources and on the dark web. Whereas we were seeing 200 to 300 posts in each of the first ten months of 2021, the number peaked at more than 500 monthly at the end of 2021 and the first half of 2022^[1].

Changes in the number of ransomware blog posts in 2021–2022, worldwide (download)

Extortionists used to try to settle matters with victim businesses in private, without attracting the attention of the broader public. Cybercriminals used to strive to keep a low profile until they got what they wanted, while the hack victims preferred to avoid reputational damage or any other consequences of the attack. These days, hackers post about the security breach in their blogs instead of contacting the victim, set a countdown timer to the publication of the leaked data, and wait for the victim’s reaction. This pattern helps cybercriminals win regardless of whether the victim pays up or not. Data is often auctioned, with the closing bid sometimes exceeding the demanded ransom.

Example: a post about the hack of the Australian company Medibank, found with the help of Digital Footprint Intelligence

We expect that in 2023, cybercriminals will try to reach out to victim businesses ever less often, while the number of blog posts and mentions of victims’ names in the news will increase.

Example of a countdown to the publication of leaked data as seen in the LockBit ransomware blog

Enjoying the fun part: cybercriminals to post fake hack reports more often

These days, hardly a day goes by without a new leak being reported. The number of fake reports grows along with that. We believe that in 2023, cybercriminals will more frequently allege, that they have hacked a company, as an ego trip and a rep boost. A leak report that appears in public sources can be used as a media manipulation tool and hurt the target business regardless of whether the hack happened or not. It is key to identify these messages in a timely manner and initiate a response process similar to that for information security incidents. This includes monitoring of dark and deep web sites for leak or compromise reports.

Cloud technology and compromised data sourced on the dark web to become popular attack vectors

The major attack vectors, such as vulnerabilities in publicly used applications, compromised credentials, and emailed malicious links and attachments, will be joined by activities and tools relating to cloud and virtualization technology. Businesses increasingly transfer their information infrastructures to the cloud, often using partner services for that. They place little focus on information security when migrating to the cloud: this is not even a task they assign to the virtualization service provider. An incident catches the company with insufficient data for investigation, as the cloud provider neither gathers nor logs system events. This essentially makes investigating the incident a difficult task.

Cybercriminals will tap dark web sites more often in 2023 to purchase access to previously compromised organizations. Our investigations have revealed a clear trend: the number of attacks utilizing pre-compromised accounts posted on dark web sites is on the rise. What is dangerous about that trend is that the preliminary phase of the attack, that is the account being compromised, can go unnoticed. The victim company will not learn about the attack until it is faced with major damage, such as their services suffering interruptions or ransomware encrypting their data.

Digitalization brings increased cybersecurity risks with it. If a corporation is to secure the loyalty of its customers and partners, it must ensure business continuity and robust protection of its critical assets, corporate data and the entire IT infrastructure to counter growing threats. Large businesses and government organizations often employ multilevel security, but even that is not a guarantee against compromise. Therefore, timely, adequate incident response and investigation are essential to both remedying the consequences and fixing the root cause, as well as to preventing similar incidents from happening again.

Malware-as-a-service: a greater number of cookie-cutter attacks, more complex tools

The malware-as-a-service model will continue to gain popularity in 2023, with blackmailer teams among others. Cybercriminals try to optimize their work efforts by scaling their operations and outsourcing certain activities just as a legitimate business would. For instance, LockBit — you can read about its evolution here — has been expanding its services like a software development company. The cybercriminals recently went so far as to announce a bug bounty program. Malware-as-a-service (MaaS) is lowering the entry threshold for wannabe cybercriminals: anyone can launch a ransomware attack by renting a fitting malware tool.

Meanwhile, the number of popular and well-known ransomware tools will decline, and attacks will grow in similarity. Companies might view this as a positive: a great number of ransomware tools will utilize similar MaaS techniques and tactics, so a smaller number of these will need to be considered for SOC response. That said, attackers’ tools will grow in complexity, rendering automated systems insufficient as a means of complete security.

The year 2023 will be a complicated one from an information security perspective, because the threat landscape is evolving rapidly. This sets a pace for businesses, which are forced to adapt. On the brighter side, researchers have the advanced tools to curb the growing threats.

These were our predictions for the year 2023. A year from now, we shall see which ones materialized and which ones did not.

^[1] The statistics contain data on sites that are covered by the Digital Footprint Intelligence monitoring system

All statistics in this report are from the global cloud service Kaspersky Security Network (KSN), which receives information from components in our security solutions. The data was obtained from users who had given their consent to it being sent to KSN. Millions of Kaspersky users around the globe assist us in collecting information about malicious activity. The statistics in this report cover the period from November 2021 to October 2022, inclusive.

Figures of the year

• During the year, 15.37% of internet user computers worldwide experienced at least one Malware-class attack.
• Kaspersky solutions blocked 505,879,385 attacks launched from online resources across the globe.
• 101,612,333 unique malicious URLs triggered Web Anti-Virus components.
• Our Web Anti-Virus blocked 109,183,489 unique malicious objects.
• Ransomware attacks were defeated on the computers of 271,215 unique users.
• During the reporting period, miners attacked 1,392,398 unique users.
• Attempted infections by malware designed to steal money via online access to bank accounts were logged on the devices of 376,742 users.

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