CVE-2012-1723

In early October, a story was published by the Wall Street Journal alleging Kaspersky Lab software was used to siphon classified data from an NSA employee’s home computer system. Given that Kaspersky Lab has been at the forefront of fighting cyberespionage and cybercriminal activities on the Internet for over 20 years now, these allegations were treated very seriously. To assist any independent investigators and all the people who have been asking us questions whether those allegations were tr...

PDF version In July we published our in-depth analysis into a targeted attack campaign that we dubbed ‘Crouching Yeti’. This campaign is also known as ‘Energetic Bear’. This campaign, which has been active since late 2010, has so far targeted the following sectors:  industrial/machinery, manufacturing, pharmaceutical, construction, education and information technology.  So far there have been more than 2,800 victims worldwide, and we have been able to identify 101 different organisatio...

Technical Appendix with IOCs Over the last 10 months, Kaspersky Lab researchers have analyzed a massive cyber-espionage operation which we call “Epic Turla”. The attackers behind Epic Turla have infected several hundred computers in more than 45 countries, including government institutions, embassies, military, education, research and pharmaceutical companies. The attacks are known to have used at least two zero-day exploits: We also observed exploits against older (patched) vulnerabilities,...

One of the biggest problems facing the IT security industry is the use of vulnerabilities in legitimate software to launch malware attacks. Malicious programs can use these vulnerabilities to infect a computer without attracting the attention of the user – and, in some cases, without triggering an alert from security software. That’s why cyber criminals prefer these attacks, known as exploits, over other infection methods. Unlike social engineering, which can be hit or miss, the use of vulne...

Here are answers to the most frequently asked questions related to Icefog, an APT operation targeting entities in Japan and South Korea. Icefog refers to a cyber-espionage campaign that has been active at least since 2011. It targets governmental institutions, military contractors, maritime and ship-building groups, telecom operators, satellite operators, industrial and high technology companies and mass media, mainly in South Korea and Japan. It is likely that the crew targets organizations in ...

During Q3 2012, over 9,000 new malicious .dex files were added to our malware collection. This is 5,000 files fewer than last quarter but 3,500 more than in Q1 2012. This is due to the fact that in Q2 files that had been detected heuristically for some time were added to our malware collection. (Note that one heuristic is used to detect a large number of different programs.) In Q3, the situation was standard and the number of new files added to our collection was in line with the trend we have s...