Media Coverage

A new white paper, published by the NCSC and the National Crime Agency, examines how the tactics of organised criminal groups (OGCs) have evolved as ransomware and extortion attacks have grown in popularity. It’s particularly aimed at security professionals and resilience sector leads who need to be aware of changes in cyber criminal activity to better protect their systems and inform security policy.

We’d like to thank our industry partners that contributed to the paper, specifically Mandiant, SecureWorks, ShadowServer and PWC.

In a new threat briefing report, Forescout Vedere Labs looks back at the most relevant cybersecurity events and data between January 1 and July 31, 2023 (2023H1) to emphasize the evolution of the threat landscape. The activities and data we saw during this period confirm trends we have been observing in our recent reports, including threats to unmanaged devices that are less often studied. Overall, 2023H1 continued the trend of threat actors exploiting an increasingly diverse attack surface.

There were at least 25 CISA vulnerability advisories in the period related to devices used in building automation functions such as access control and power management. Looking into Shadowserver statistics, we see 13 vulnerabilities on building automation devices from nine vendors that are being exploited, while none of them is yet present on CISA’s Known Exploited Vulnerabilities (KEV) catalog.

Africa’s Cybercrime landscape is a cause for great concern. In Interpol’s latest African Cyberthreat Assessment Report it clearly indicates the rising threat of cybercrime for governments. The rapid advancement and interconnectivity of technology is a breeding ground for complex attacks and criminals are exploiting new methods of infiltration in order to access confidential data and sensitive information. Ransomware attacks on public sector entities have crippled major operations and systems incurring exorbitant losses. According to Interpol’s report, the impact of malicious programs should not be underestimated.

The proliferation of ransomware has resulted in a rise in financially motivated cybercrime activities across Africa. This increasingly severe threat will be addressed at the upcoming Public Sector Cybersecurity Summit on 3 October 2023 (#PubliSec2023) in Johannesburg South Africa.

Shadowserver also reported that South Africa is the nation most targeted by ransomware attacks, accounting for 42% of all detected attacks. Morocco is next with 8%, Botswana and Egypt at 6%, Tanzania and Kenya each account for 4% of detected ransomware attacks.

This week, it was reported that Juniper patched a vulnerability in mid-August. Recently, there have been targeted attacks. In terms of important attack activities and incidents, many information security companies revealed that many incidents were targeted at the Taiwan government and enterprises. 

In this week’s vulnerability news, the information security research team Shadowserver pointed out on the X community platform that Juniper patched the J-Web interface vulnerability CVE-2023-36844 in Junos OS on the 17th, and discovered an attack on the 25th, and on the same day, a proof-of-concept (PoC) attack program was released.

A multinational action called Operation “Duck Hunt” — led by the FBI, the Department of Justice, the National Cybersecurity Alliance, Europol, and crime officials in France, Germany, the Netherlands, Romania, Latvia and the U.K. — was able to gain access to the Qakbot network and shut down the malicious botnet, which has affected 700,000 computers worldwide.

Over the course of its more than 15-year campaign, Qakbot (aka Qbot and Pinkslipbot) has launched some 40 worldwide ransomware attacks focused on companies, governments and healthcare operations. The DOJ noted that over just the past year and a half, Qakbot has caused nearly $58 million in damages. As part of the action against Qakbot, the DOJ seized approximately $8.6 million in cryptocurrency in illicit profits.

The DOJ said it received technical assistance from Zscaler and that the FBI partnered with the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, Shadowserver, Microsoft Digital Crimes Unit, the National Cyber-Forensics and Training Alliance, and Have I Been Pwned to aid in victim notification and remediation.

The Qakbot botnet has been disrupted by an international law enforcement operation that culminated last weekend, when infected computers started getting untethered from it by specially crafted FBI software. 

The FBI used a computer they control to instruct Tier 1 servers to download and install an FBI-created module that contains a new encryption key, to sever the communication between the Qakbot administrators and the Tier 1 servers and establish communication to an FBI-controlled server. From that server, an additional program is downloaded that uninstalls the Qakbot malware and gathers the computer’s IP address and associated routing information so that the FBI can get in touch with Qakbot victims. 

The list of IPs has been shared with organizations such as The Spamhaus Project, which will notify email service providers and hosting companies responsible for compromised accounts so they can reset the passwords on those accounts, and the Shadowserver Foundation, which will send a report to national computer security incident response team (CSIRTs) and network owners, to help them notify any remaining victims and help them deal with the other malware delivered by Qakbot.

Citrix NetScaler ADC and NetScaler Gateway are at heightened risk of opportunistic attacks by a ransomware group likely linked to the financially motivated FIN8 threat actor. NetScaler products are popular attacker targets because of the highly privileged access they provide to targeted networks. Many organizations have deployed gateway technologies like these to enable secure access to enterprise applications and data for remote workers.

The critical code injection vulnerability is being tracked as CVE-2023-3519 and affects multiple versions of Citrix’ application delivery, load balancing, and remote access technologies.

On Aug. 7, the nonprofit Shadowserver Foundation, which tracks and monitors malicious Internet activity, said it had identified at least three separate campaigns targeting CVE-2023-3519. Two of the campaigns involved the threat actor dropping a PHP Web shell on a vulnerable host, while the third involved the attacker executing malicious commands at the root level via a Web shell. The Foundation said its telemetry showed at least 7,000 NetScaler hosts worldwide as being vulnerable to exploit at the time.

US investigators say they’ve dealt a serious blow to the ransomware scourge by taking down a notorious botnet known as Qakbot.  On Tuesday, the Justice Department and FBI announced they had dismantled Qakbot by securing a search warrant to essentially hijack the servers that controlled the botnet. Federal agents then forced the botnet to circulate an uninstaller to thousands of computers infected with Qakbot, removing the malicious program.

During their investigation, federal agents noticed Qakbot controlling 700,000 infected computers, about 200,000 of which were based in the US.

Qakbot, also known as Qbot, first began as a Windows-based Trojan designed to steal access to users’ bank account information when it was first spotted around 2008. It can typically spread through malicious attachments in phishing emails.

Another 6.5 million stolen login credentials from victims was also uncovered. “The FBI has partnered with the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, Shadowserver, Microsoft Digital Crimes Unit, the National Cyber Forensics and Training Alliance, and Have I Been Pwned to aid in victim notification and remediation,” the agency added.

Exploitation of the recently disclosed Ivanti Endpoint Manager Mobile (EPMM) vulnerability has started to pick up, just as the vendor announced the discovery of a new flaw. The EPMM zero-day tracked as CVE-2023-35078, which allows an unauthenticated attacker to obtain sensitive information and make changes to the targeted system, was exploited in attacks aimed at the Norwegian government since at least April 2023. While initially the flaw was only exploited in targeted attacks, threat intelligence firm GreyNoise started seeing exploitation attempts from dozens of unique IP addresses on July 31. The company has seen attacks coming from a total of 75 IPs. The ShadowServer Foundation reports that there are still roughly 700 internet-exposed instances of the mobile management software that are vulnerable to attacks. In the attacks exploiting CVE-2023-35078, threat actors also leveraged a different EPMM security hole, CVE-2023-35081, to upload webshells on the device and run commands.

Hundreds of Citrix Netscaler ADC and Gateway servers have already been compromised and backdoored in a series of attacks targeting a critical Remote Code Execution (RCE) vulnerability identified as CVE-2023-3519. The vulnerability was previously exploited as a zero-day to breach the network of a US critical infrastructure agency.

Security researchers from the Shadowserver Foundation, a non-profit organization dedicated to strengthening internet security, have now revealed that the attackers deployed web shells on at least 640 Citrix servers in these attacks.