In this Malware Analysis Spotlight, we analyze the Berserker variant of Hentai Oniichan Ransomware. We’ve observed at least two different variants of Hentai Oniichan Ransomware in-the-wild, King Engine, and Berserker. What we found interesting in our analysis of the Berserker variant is its attempts to make recovery difficult by deleting
Earlier this year, in one of our blog posts we covered GuLoader, a downloader outfitted with advanced anti-analysis techniques that has delivered FormBook, NanoCore, LokiBot, and Remcos among others. Recently, we’ve observed GuLoader delivering AZORult. Active for many years, AZORult is an information stealer that has seen many iterations and
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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