Category: Malware Analysis

2020-10-19
10/21/2020: The classification of the malware in this Threat Spotlight has been corrected from “Ave_Maria” to “Warzone RAT”. The source of the distinctive “Ave_Maria” substring can be attributed to the open-source TinyNuke malware, which was reused in some Warzone RAT samples. In TinyNuke the string “AVE_MARIA” is transmitted in the
2020-10-06
Kernel-mode malware is among the most difficult to detect and remove. In this post—condensed from a SANS webcast featuring SANS analyst Jake Williams and VMRay Sr. Threat Researcher Tamas Boczan present an introduction into kernel-mode rootkits, explaining why attackers use them, how they bypass mitigations built into Windows and break
2020-10-01
A Fresh Look at an Old Problem Formbook is a well-known malware family of data stealers and form grabbers. Sold as “malware-as-a-service” on hacking forums since early 2016, anyone so inclined can purchase a subscription and use the Formbook tool. It is usually distributed using malspam containing malicious attachments and
2020-09-15
The Re-Emergence of Qbot After more than a decade in operation, the Qbot Trojan is back in the news. A modified version of the malware which now extracts email threads from Outlook to use in phishing attacks was used in a prominent campaign that ran from March to the end
2020-08-20
Targeted ransomware is a common occurrence nowadays. Recently Garmin confirmed to have been the target of a ransomware attack on July 23, 2020, which led to the interruption of many of their online services. According to Bleeping Computer, the ransomware has been confirmed to be WastedLocker. The article goes on
2020-08-17
If you are of a certain age, you might remember Mad Magazine’s satirical Spy v. Spy comic strip in which two agents – one dressed completely in white and the other in black – would try and outwit and annihilate each other on a weekly basis. Malware authors and the
2020-08-11
In this Malware Analysis Spotlight, the VMRay Labs Team will examine MassLogger, a Spyware/Stealer that was first publicly observed in-the-wild at the end of April. During our analysis, we monitored a significant amount of behavioral matches for techniques that MassLogger uses to discover the host machine and to steal sensitive
2020-07-22
After a long time of being inactive, the infamous malware delivery framework Emotet is back – the three Emotet botnets started pushing malicious spam on Friday, July 17. In this Malware Analysis Spotlight, we will take a look at one of the Microsoft Word documents used in the campaign (Figure
Editor’s Note: This blog post was updated on August 10, 2020. Over the last couple of months, we observed a new downloader called GuLoader (also known as CloudEyE) that has been actively distributed in 2020. In contrast to prototypical downloaders, GuLoader is known to use popular cloud services such as
2020-07-01
A Primer on Spyware-as-a-Service The rise in spyware-as-a-service allows cyber-criminals to choose a specialty, whether improving spyware, infecting users, or maximizing the profit derived from stolen information. The business model for spyware-as-a-service starts with an individual or team to developing the initial spyware and standing up any necessary infrastructure that

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