ESET Research

As regular readers will know, every year we publish our predictions on cybercrime attacks for the year ahead. Well, our South American research team has spent the last few weeks putting together our predictions for 2015.

Today, we are publishing research on ransomware that emerged in 2014. We have posted blog articles about this threat before, to raise awareness when we realized the criminals were targeting the United Kingdom and Spain.

ESET conference papers from the 2014 Virus Bulletin and AVAR conferences are now available.

Microsoft released a patch last week for a critical vulnerability allowing remote code execution in Internet Explorer. This vulnerability is significant because it exploits an old bug present in Internet Explorer versions 3 through 11.

APT actors trying to use big events as a lure to compromise their targets is nothing new. Tibetan NGOs being targeted by APT actors is also nothing new. Thus, surrounding the upcoming G20 2014 summit that is held in Brisbane, Australia, we were expecting to see G20 themed threats targeted at Tibetan NGOs. A Win32/Farfli (alias Gh0st RAT) sample ultimately confirmed our suspicions.

After taking a look at recent Korplug (PlugX) detections, we identified two larger scale campaigns employing this well-known Remote Access Trojan. This blog gives an overview of the first one

Two Flash vulnerabilities that were fixed by Adobe 2 weeks ago are now being used in exploit kits. This is in addition to a third vulnerability, CVE-2014-0556, that was patched in September and that has also been added to Nuclear EK last week.

Last month, we presented “The Evolution of Webinject” in Seattle at the 24th Virus Bulletin conference. This blog post will go over its key findings and provide links to the various material that has been released in the last few weeks.

Following the recognition at Virus Bulletin 2014 of ESET’s research on Operation Windigo, I took the opportunity to ask Marc-Etienne Léveillé – who worked directly on the Operation Windigo report a few questions. Marc-Etienne is a malware researcher at ESET.