Director, Global Research & Analysis Team
Costin specializes in analyzing advanced persistent threats and high-level malware attacks. He is leading the Global Research & Analysis Team (GReAT) at Kaspersky that researched the inner workings of Stuxnet, Duqu, Carbanak and more recently, Lazarus, BlueNoroff, Moonlight Maze and the Equation group. Costin’s work includes analyzing malicious websites, exploits and online banking malware. Costin has over 24 years of experience in anti-virus technologies and security research. He is a member of the Virus Bulletin Technical Advisory Board, a member of the Computer AntiVirus Researchers’ Organization (CARO) and a reporter for the Wildlist Organization International. Before joining Kaspersky, Costin worked for GeCad as Chief Researcher and as a Data Security Expert with the RAV antivirus developers group. Costin joined Kaspersky Lab in 2000 and became the Director of the Global Research & Analysis Team in 2010. Some of his hobbies include chess, photography and the Science Fiction literature.While monitoring the traffic of our own corporate Wi-Fi network, we noticed suspicious activity that originated from several iOS-based phones. We created offline backups of the devices, inspected them and discovered traces of compromise.
GoldenJackal is an APT group, active since 2019, that usually targets government and diplomatic entities in the Middle East and South Asia. The main feature of this group is a specific toolset of .NET malware, JackalControl, JackalWorm, JackalSteal, JackalPerInfo and JackalScreenWatcher.
Kaspersky analysis of the CloudWizard APT framework used in a campaign in the region of the Russo-Ukrainian conflict.
For more than five years, the Global Research and Analysis Team (GReAT) at Kaspersky has been publishing quarterly summaries of advanced persistent threat (APT) activity. These summaries are based on our threat intelligence research; and they provide a representative snapshot of what we have published and discussed in greater detail in our private APT reports.