White Papers

Over the past year, ESET researchers have been publishing an ongoing series of articles about Latin American banking trojan malware families. In this white paper, which was also presented at the Virus Bulletin conference, they look at these families from a higher-level perspective – rather than examining details of each family and highlighting their unique characteristics, they focus on what the malware families have in common.

In this white paper, ESET researchers describe their findings gleaned during an investigation of attacks that the InvisiMole group conducted against several high-profile organizations in the military sector and diplomatic missions in Eastern Europe in late 2019. The research uncovered an extensive, sophisticated toolset used for the delivery, lateral movement and execution of InvisiMole’s backdoors - the missing pieces of the puzzle in our previous research. It also revealed previously unknown cooperation between InvisiMole and Gamaredon, a highly active threat group that mainly targets Ukrainian institutions.

ESET researchers uncover targeted attacks against several high-profile aerospace and military companies in Europe and the Middle East. While there is no compelling evidence connecting the attacks to a known threat actor, they discovered several hints suggesting a possible link to the Lazarus group, including similarities in targeting, development environment, and anti-analysis techniques used.

ESET researchers have uncovered a new version of ComRAT, a backdoor that the Turla APT group has been using since at least 2007. This white paper analyzes this latest addition to the toolkit of a cyberespionage group that is known to have breached major public and private targets on multiple continents.

ESET researchers discovered a previously unknown vulnerability in Wi-Fi chips and named it KrØØk. This serious flaw, assigned CVE-2019-15126, affects devices with Wi-Fi chips by Broadcom and Cypress that haven’t been patched yet. These are the most common Wi-Fi chips used in contemporary Wi-Fi-capable devices such as smartphones, tablets, laptops, and IoT gadgets. In a successful attack, this vulnerability allows an adversary to decrypt some wireless network packets transmitted by a vulnerable device.

As devices are undeniably getting smarter all the time, the question arises: Are we “smart” enough to derive maximum benefit from these devices without suffering repercussions? With 2019 ending, ESET experts offer their insights into how new innovations will impact our privacy, security and lives in the not so distant future.

ESET researchers have discovered a previously unreported cyberespionage platform used in targeted attacks since at least 2013. Focusing on diplomatic missions and governmental institutions, Attor is designed specifically to attack privacy-concerned targets. Its most interesting features are a complex modular architecture, elaborate network communications, and a unique plugin to fingerprint GSM devices.

This white paper provides a technical analysis of recent malware used by the Winnti Group. The group is well known for its supply-chain attacks and for compromising multiple high-profile targets – while staying under the radar for many months before they were found and disrupted. This analysis further refines our understanding of the group's techniques and allows us to infer relationships between the different supply-chain incidents.

Building on their earlier work on UEFI threats, ESET experts describe how they trained a machine-learning model to recognize a handful of unwanted UEFI components within a flood of millions of harmless samples. Besides showing strong capabilities in identifying suspicious UEFI executables, this system offers real-time monitoring of the UEFI landscape and was found to reduce the workload of ESET analysts by up to 90 percent.