White Papers

ESET researchers have discovered and analyzed advanced malware, previously undocumented, that has been used in targeted attacks against critical infrastructure organizations in Central and Eastern Europe. The malware, named GreyEnergy by ESET researchers, exhibits many conceptual similarities with BlackEnergy, the malware used in attacks against the Ukrainian energy industry in December 2015

ESET researchers have discovered the first in-the-wild UEFI rootkit. Dubbed LoJax, the research team has shown that the Sednit operators used different components of the LoJax malware to target a few government organizations in the Balkans as well as in Central and Eastern Europe. The Sednit group is a resourceful APT group targeting people and organizations around the world. It has been in operation since at least 2004, using a wide range of malware families.

Turla, also known as Snake, is an espionage group notorious for having breached some heavily-protected networks. They have been busy attacking diplomats and military targets around the world. Among the notable victims were the Finnish Foreign Ministry in 2013 , the Swiss military firm RUAG between 2014 and 2016 and more recently, the German government at the end of 2017/beginning of 2018.

Artificial intelligence (AI) is almost an omnipresent topic these days. It is the centerpiece of sales pitches, it “powers” various online services and is mentioned in regard to almost any new product seeking investors.

Using remote access tools Quasar, Sobaken and Vermin, cybercriminals have been systematically spying on Ukrainian government institutions and exfiltrating data from their systems. The threat actors, first mentioned in a report from January 2018 and tracked by ESET since mid-2017, continue to develop new versions of their stealthy malware.

Microsoft Windows XP is perhaps Microsoft’s most-storied operating system.  Released in 2001, just a year after the release of Microsoft Windows 2000, it was meant to fix Microsoft’s cycle of releasing separate operating systems for consumers—based on Windows 95— and operating systems for enterprises—based on Windows NT—with a single unified operating system for use by everyone. Combining the reliability of the Windows NT kernel with the multimedia subsystem of Windows 9x, it would be equally usable whether at work or at play. So, how well did Microsoft execute on this vision from so long ago? In April 2014, Windows XP was installed on about 30% of our customers’ desktop computers. As of March 2018, Windows XP accounts is installed on about 5,5% of those systems. While this may seem like a small percentage, it is 10 times the number of computers running Windows XP's successor, Windows Vista, which today accounts for a mere sub-1% of usage.

OceanLotus continues its activity particularly targeting company and government networks in East-Asian countries. A few months ago, we discovered and analyzed one of their latest backdoors. Several tricks are being used to convince the user to execute the backdoor, to slow down its analysis and to avoid detection. These techniques will be discussed in detail in this white paper.

In 2017, cryptocurrencies became a booming industry, attracting the attention of not only new users, but also cybercriminals. As the fraudsters came rushing to the newly crowded cryptocurrency space, users, businesses, and exchanges have found themselves the target of various fraud schemes – from phishing scams, through hacks, to surreptitious crypto-mining on compromised devices and, as of late 2017, via browsers. Cybercrime targeting cryptocurrency has recently become so rampant that regulators have issued multiple warnings on cryptocurrency scams; Facebook banned all cryptocurrency ads on its platform; and insurers have started to offer protection against cryptocurrency theft.

Malware writers have also begun to use more sophisticated methods to spread their infected apps  To avoid the unwanted attention, attackers have started to encrypt malicious payloads, burying them deeper in the application – often moving them to the assets folder, typically used for pictures or other necessary contents