Tag Archives: malware

Another sensationalist media story was released today stating among other things that Kaspersky Lab helps a certain intelligence agency in getting their hands on sensitive data from another intelligence agency through the home computer of a contractor. Another accusation in the article is that we are very ‘aggressive’ in our methods of hunting for new malware.

The first statement sounds like the script of a C movie, and again – disclosed by anonymous sources (what a surprise). I can hardly comment on it besides the official statement.

However, I couldn’t agree more with the second claim about being aggressive in our hunt for malware. We absolutely and aggressively detect and clean malware infections no matter the source, and have been proudly doing so for 20 years. This is the reason why we consistently get top ratings in independent, third-party malware detection tests. We make no apologies for being aggressive in the battle against malware and cybercriminals – you shouldn’t accept any less. Period.

While protecting our customers, we do – as any other cybersecurity vendors – check the health of a computer. It works like an X-ray: the security solution can see almost everything in order to identify problems, but it cannot attribute what it sees to a particular user. Let me elaborate a bit more on what we do and what we don’t when protecting our users from cyberattacks:

What we do

Every day, we develop new heuristics and advanced detection mechanisms that flag suspected malware and send it to machine-learning-powered back-end for automatic analysis. These heuristics are designed in a way so that they focus only on a particular type of data – one that has characteristics potentially dangerous to computer health. And the data’s risk is the only feature the heuristics care about.

We focus on high-profile cyberthreats that have the potential to impact many users. Such threats are usually very sophisticated and may consist of multiple components – not necessary malicious at first glance. Please read our recent ShadowPad story as an example.

We hunt for and analyze all kinds of threats. We ignore none. We also invest a lot of resources into systems that protect our users from malware, make their computers more secure, and allow them to enjoy their user experience as opposed to worrying about it.

In the wake of this latest article I want to emphasize the following: if our technologies detect anything suspicious and this object is identified as malware, in a matter of minutes all our customers – no matter who or where they are – receive protection from the threat. In the most serious cases – such as global malware outbreaks like WannaCry or sophisticated cyber-espionage platforms like Equation – our researchers analyze the threat deeply and publish the research with indicators of compromise openly, so not only our customers, but all other users and our colleagues in the cybersecurity industry can learn how to protect against the new threat. Customers’ security is our mission, and we’re committed to protect against all kinds of cyberthreats regardless their origin or purpose. This approach is the foundation of our business and is what our users pay for.

This is the one and only way of how we deal with cyberthreats. The new allegations look to me like this: someone just took this process of how we deal with a threat, added some fictional details, and here we go – the new C-movie script is ready.

What we don’t do

With big power comes big responsibility. We never betray the trust that our users place in our hands. If we were ever to do so just once, it would immediately be spotted by the industry and it would be the end of our business – and rightly so.

To understand why something like this would be impossible for Kaspersky Lab or any other reputable security company, one needs to understand how the cybersecurity industry works. In our industry there are mainly two types of folks: first, those who do offensive things: breaking software, creating espionage tools, exploits, and – to the extreme – helping governments with their spy efforts. And second, folks who fight for users, take their side, protect them from attacks, create software that defends computers, and cause all manner of headaches for spy agencies.

This is a fundamental separation, which expresses itself in many ways – from what is considered ethical by one category or the other, to reputation and separating right from wrong.

For 20 years, KL has been fighting for users. It’s pioneered many technologies, including machine learning and cloud security, created one of the world’s best security products, and strived to ONLY hire people who abide to the highest ethical standards.

Any of our experts would consider it unethical to abuse user trust in order to facilitate spying by any government. Even if, let’s say, one or two such people would somehow infiltrate the company, there are dozens of internal technological and organizational strategies to mitigate the risk. There are also 3000+ people working at Kaspersky Lab and some of them would notice something like that. It’s impossible to hide it from everybody.

Now to the complicated part

Even though we have an internal security team and run bug bounty programs, we can’t give a 100% guarantee that there are no security issues in our products; name another security software vendor that can! Software is made by people and people make mistakes – no getting round that.

Now, if we assume that what is reported is true: that Russian hackers exploited a weakness in our products installed on the PC of one of our users, and the government agencies charged with protecting national security knew about that, why didn’t they report it to us? We patch the most severe bugs in a matter of hours; so why not make the world a bit more secure by reporting the vulnerability to us? I can’t imagine an ethical justification for not doing so.

In the end, I can’t shake off a disturbing thought: no matter how great security technologies and measures are, the security of millions can be easily compromised by the oldest threat actor there is – a $5 USB stick and a misguided employee.

Dissecting the recent WSJ cybersecurity story: truth, lies and disturbing details by @e_kaspersky himselfTweet

Good day boys and girls!

I’ve been a bit quiet of late – but I’ve a good excuse – I had a real tough week: the schedule was tight and intercontinental, plus alarmingly… combative…

It all started in Moscow. Now, normally come the month of May, the last vestiges of the long cold winter – snow and ice – have long disappeared, at least by a month. Not this year. It snowed the other week! The weather was so bad – cold, windy, wet – that even the May 9 Victory Day parade was partially called off (the airborne part). Ye gods! And I was soooo looking forward to it.

Bad weather causing things to be called off – hardly anything new there, right? Well, actually…

You see, in Russia, the authorities have a habit of… making sure the weather’s good on special occasions. In Russian they call it ‘shooing away the clouds’. I don’t know the details, but they somehow shoo away clouds by… doing something to the atmosphere to make sure clouds don’t come close. Playing God? Maybe. Whatever, it normally works. My question: WHAT WENT WRONG THIS TIME?! I mean, the budget for seeing off clouds for the weekend must be huge. Hmmm, I wonder…

Early doors it looked like the budget was well-spent: the sky was clear and the sun was shining:

Read on: a sudden global malware outbreak…

Such is the way Homo Sapiens are: we’re constantly – even recklessly – looking to the future to try and work out what it might hold for us. Many say we should all live in the present – after all, the future never comes – but, well, that doesn’t work for everyone, and most of us do need to make at least some plans for our futures.

But there are different approaches to looking ahead.

There’s belief in fate, pure guessing, flipping a coin, and so on. There’s also not thinking about the future at all. But there’s a far superior, science-based approach too. This is doing the eastern spirituality thing a bit – not quite being in the present but carefully analyzing the present instead – to be able to predict the future as accurately as possible. And this is exactly what is done to predict the cyber-future; in particular – the security of the cyber-future. And that’s what we do – little by little every day, but also broadly and deeply and especially – and merrily – every year, when we bring together the world’s cybersecurity elite for a week-long pow-wow in a tropical seaside resort, which pow-wow we call the Security Analyst Summit (SAS):

Oops – wrong vid. Here u go…:

Dough! Nope. This one:

I don’t know quite how it’s done but every single year SAS just gets better. I mean, it’s always been GReAT, but the GReATness just keeps going up and up: more experts, better quality content, better and more original ideas, slicker, cooler, and more and more world scoops and exclusive material.

And it’s exclusive material that I’ll be writing about in this here post. Specifically, my Top-5 favorite presentations from SAS-2017. I’m not saying the others were no good or just so-so, it’s just I wasn’t physically able to see them all as they were running simultaneously in different halls. Also – everyone has their own taste; well here’s a guide to mine!…

Off we go!…

Read on: A Maze for a Penguin Under the Moonlight…

If you’re a regular reader of this here blog of mine, you’ll know about our GReAT (Global Research and Analysis Team) – 40+ top-notch cybersecurity experts dotted all around the globe specializing in protecting our customers from the most sophisticated cyberthreats out there. GReATers like to compare their work to paleontology: exploring the deep web for the ‘bones’ of ‘cyber monsters’. Some may consider this an old-fashioned approach: what’s so special about analyzing the ‘bones’ of ‘creatures’ from the distant past when it’s protecting your networks from monsters that are alive now that’s key? Well, here’s a fresh story that proves that sometimes you won’t find today’s living monsters without looking at old ones…

Some of you will be aware of so-called wipers – a type of malware which, once installed on an attacked PC, completely wipes all data from it – leaving the owner of the computer with a completely clean, hardly operating piece of hardware. The most famous (and infamous) wiper is Shamoon – malware which in 2012 made a lot of noise in the Middle East by destroying data on 30,000+ endpoints at the world’s largest oil company – Saudi Aramco, and also hitting another energy  giant – Rasgas. Just imagine: 30,000+ pieces of inoperable hardware in the world’s largest  oil company…

Curiously, since it’s devastating campaign against the Saudi company in 2012, little has been heard of Shamoon, until it returned in 2016 as Shamoon 2.0, with several new waves of attacks – again in the Middle East.

Since the new waves of Shamoon attacks began, we’ve been tuning our sensors to search for as many versions of this malware as possible (because, let’s face it, we don’t want ANY of our customers to EVER be struck by malware like Shamoon). And we managed to find several versions – hurray! But together with our haul of Shamooners, our nets unexpectedly caught a completely new type of wiper malware, which we’ve named StoneDrill.

The code base of StoneDrill is different to that of Shamoon, and that’s why we think it’s a completely new malware family; it also utilizes some advanced detection avoidance techniques, which Shamoon doesn’t. So it’s a new player, for sure. And one of the most unusual – and worrying – things we’ve learned about this malware is that, unlike Shamoon, StoneDrill doesn’t limit the scope of its targets to Saudi Arabia or other neighboring countries. We’ve found only two targets of this malware so far, and one of them is based in Europe.

Why is this worrying? Because this finding indicates that certain malicious actors armed with devastating cyber-tools are testing the water in regions in which previously actors of this type were rarely interested.

Read on: more wipers!…

Hi folks!

Herewith, the next installment in my ‘Uh-oh Cyber-News’ column – the one in which I keep you up to date with all that’s scarily fragile and frailly scary in the digital world.

Since the last ‘Uh-oh’ a lot has piled up that really needs bringing to your attention. Yep, the flow of ‘Uh-ohs’ has indeed turned from mere mountain-stream trickle to full-on Niagara levels. And that flow just keeps on getting faster and faster…

As a veteran of cyber-defense, I can tell you that in times past cataclysms of a planetary scale were discussed for maybe half a year. While now the stream of messages is like salmon in spawning season: overload! So many they’re hardly worth mentioning as they’re already yesterday’s news before you can say ‘digital over-DDoSe’. “I heard how they hacked Mega-Corporation X the other day and stole everything; even the boss’s hamster was whisked away by a drone!”…

Anyway, since the stream of consciousness cyber-scandals is rapidly on the up and up, accordingly, the number of such scandals I’ll be writing about has also gone up. In the past there were three of four per blogpost. Today: seven!

Popcorn/coffee/beer at the ready? Off we go…

1) Infect a Friend and Get Your Own Files Unlocked for Free.

Read on: Effective Hacker Headhunting…

And so it’s come to pass: the abbreviation ‘DDoS‘ has entered the lexicon to such an extent that it often doesn’t get written out in full these days in the general interest newspapers. Well, some actually may still not know what it stands for, but everyone and their dog does know that a DDoS is very bad thing for a certain large target, with something very important suddenly not working, with employees twiddling their thumbs as the network’s down, and with their tech-support’s telephones requiring an ice bath as they’re so hot from ringing – and disgruntled clients swearing down them all the time. What’s more, everyone and their cat also knows that normally a DDoS attack gets carried out by unknown, mysterious – and just plain bad – cyber-enemies.

DDoS attacks have evolved very quickly, as you’ll find out reading this blogpost. They’ve grown much nastier and become a lot more technically advanced; from time to time the adopt utterly unusual attack methods; they go after fresh new targets; and break new world records in being the biggest and baddest DDoS’s ever. But, then, the world in which DDoS find themselves in has evolved very quickly too. Everything and the kitchen sink is online: the number of assorted ‘smart’ [sic] devices connected to the net now far outstrips the number of good old desktop and laptop computers.

The result of these two evolutions running in parallel – of DDoS’s themselves plus the digital landscape in which they dwell – has brought us equally evolved headlines: botnets made up of IP cameras and home Wi-Fi routers breaking DDoS records on size (Mirai), and massive DDoS attacks on Russian banks.

If, earlier, botnets were made up of zombie PCs, soon they’ll be made up of zombie refrigerators, vacuum cleaners, tumble dryers and coffee machines.

Read on: So what’s next?…

In the early 2000s I’d get up on stage and prophesize about the cyber-landscape of the future, much as I still do today. Back then I warned that, one day, your fridge will send spam to your microwave, and together they’d DDoS the coffeemaker. No, really.

The audience would raise eyebrows, chuckle, clap, and sometimes follow up with an article on such ‘mad professor’-type utterances. But overall my ‘Cassandra-ism’ was taken as little more than a joke, since the more pressing cyberthreats of the times were deemed worth worrying about more. So much for the ‘mad professor’…

…Just open today’s papers.

Any house these days – no matter how old – can have plenty of ‘smart’ devices in it. Some have just a few (phones, TVs…), others have loads – including IP-cameras, refrigerators, microwave ovens, coffee makers, thermostats, irons, washing machines, tumble dryers, fitness bracelets, and more. Some houses are even being designed these days with smart devices already included in the specs. And all these smart devices connect to the house’s Wi-Fi to help make up the gigantic, autonomous – and very vulnerable – Internet of Things, whose size already outweighs the Traditional Internet which we’ve known so well since the early 90s.

Connecting everything and the kitchen sink to the Internet is done for a reason, of course. Being able to control all your electronic household kit remotely via your smartphone can be convenient (to some folks:). It’s also rather trendy. However, just how this Internet of Things has developed has meant my Cassandra-ism has become a reality.

Source

Read on: The phantom ransomware menace…

It’s just the way it is: the human being is a lazy creature. If it’s possible not to do something, we don’t do it. However, paradoxically this is a good thing, because laziness is… the engine of progress! What? How so? Well, if a job’s considered too hard or long-winded or complex for humans to do, certain lazy (but conscientious) humans (Homo Laziens?: ) give the job to a machine! In cybersecurity we call it optimization.

Analysis of millions of malicious files and websites every day, developing ‘inoculations’ against future threats, forever improving proactive protection, and solving dozens of other critical tasks – all of that is simply impossible without the use of automation. And machine learning is one of the main concepts used in automation.

Automation has existed in cybersecurity right from the beginning (of cybersecurity itself). I remember, for example, how back in the early 2000s I wrote the code for a robot to analyze incoming malware samples: the robot put the detected files into the corresponding folder of our growing malware collection based on its (the robot’s) verdict regarding its (the file’s!) characteristics. It was hard to imagine – even back then – that I used to do all that manually!

These days however, simply giving robots precise instructions for tasks you want them to do isn’t enough. Instead, instructions for tasks need to be given imprecisely. Yes, really!

For example, ‘Find the human faces on this photograph’. For this you don’t describe how human faces are picked out and how human faces differ from those of dogs. Instead what you do is show the robot several photographs and add: ‘These things here are humans, this is a human face, and these here are dogs; now work the rest out yourself’! And that, in a nutshell, is the ‘freedom of creativity’ that calls itself machine learning.

Image source

Read on: ML + CS = Love…

I think the recent article in the New York Times about the boom in ‘artificial intelligence’ in Silicon Valley made many people think hard about the future of cybersecurity – both the near and distant future.

I reckon questions like these will have been pondered on:

• Where’s the maniacal preoccupation with ‘AI’, which now only exists in the fantasies of futurologists going to lead to?
• How many more billions will investors put into ventures which, at best, will ‘invent’ what was invented decades ago, at worst – will turn out to be nothing more than inflated marketing… dummies?
• What are the real opportunities for the development of machine learning cybersecurity technologies?
• And what will be the role of humans experts in this brave new world?

Sometimes when I hang around with A.I. enthusiasts here in the valley, I feel like an atheist at a convention of evangelicals.

Jerry Kaplan, computer scientist, author, futurist and serial entrepreneur (inc. co-founder of Symantec)

What’s going on now in the field of ‘AI’ resembles a soap bubble. And we all know what happens to soap bubbles eventually if they keep getting blown up by the circus clowns (no pun intended!): they burst.

Now, of course, without bold steps and risky investments a fantastical future will never become a reality. But the problem today is that along with this wave of widespread enthusiasm for ‘AI’ (remember, AI today doesn’t exist; thus the inverted commas), startup-shell-companies have started to appear.

A few start-ups? What’s the big deal, you might ask.

The big deal is that these shell-startups are attracting not millions but billions of dollars in investment – by riding the new wave of euphoria surrounding ‘AI’ machine learning. Thing is, machine learning has been around for decades: it was first defined in 1959, got going in the 70s, flourished in the 90s, and is still flourishing! Fast forward to today and this ‘new’ technology is re-termed ‘artificial intelligence’; it adopts an aura of cutting-edge science; it gets to have the glossiest brochures; it gets to have the most glamorously sophisticated marketing campaigns. And all of that is aimed at the ever-present human weakness for belief in miracles – and in conspiracy theories about so-called ‘traditional’ technologies. And sadly, the cybersecurity field hasn’t escaped this new ‘AI’ bubble…

Read on: Too much AI will kill you…

Hi all!

On a bit of a roll here on the survival-of-the-fittest-in-IT theme. Wasn’t planning a trilogy… it just kinda happened. Sort of…

…Sort of, as, well, the specific problem of parasites in the IT Security world I’ll be writing about today has been at the back of my mind for a long time already. This Darwinism talk seemed the perfect opportunity to finally let rip. You’ll see what I mean…

Today folks: parasites. But not those we’re fighting against (the ‘very’ bad guys); those who claim are also fighting the very bad guys (philosophical question: who’s worse?).

The IT industry today is developing at a galloping pace. Just 10-15 years ago its main themes were desktop antiviruses, firewalls and backups; today there’s a mass of new different security solutions, approaches and ideas. Sometimes we manage to stay ahead of the curve; sometimes we have some catch-up to do. And there are other times we fall into a stupor from astonishment – not from new technologies, innovations or fresh ideas, but from the barefaced brazenness and utter unscrupulousness of our colleagues in the security industry.

But first, let me explain how events have been developing.

There’s a very useful service called the VirusTotal multiscanner. It aggregates around 60 antivirus engines, which it uses to scan files and URLs folks send it for malware checking, and then it returns the verdict.

Example: Joe Bloggs finds a suspicious application or office document on a hard drive/USB stick/the Internet. Joe’s own antivirus software doesn’t flag it as containing a malware, but Joe is the paranoid type; he wants to make really sure it’s not infected. So he heads over to the VirusTotal site, which doesn’t have just one antivirus solution like he does, but ~60. It’s free too, so it’s a no brainer. So Joe uploads the file to VirusTotal and gets instant info on what all the different AVs think about it.

First of all, to clarify: both the folks at VirusTotal and those at VirusTotal’s owners Google are firmly on the ‘good guys’ side. They have no connection with parasites whatsoever. VirusTotal is run by a very professional team, which has for years been fulfilling the task at hand extremely effectively. (Still need convincing? How about VirusTotal winning the MVP award last year at the Security Analyst Summit (SAS)?) Today VirusTotal is one of the most important sources of new malware samples and malicious URLs; and also a very cool archeological tool for researching targeted attacks.

Recognizing VirusTotal for enduring contribution to security research #SaveTheWorldMVP #TheSAS2015 pic.twitter.com/lZTjN30Xwg

— J. A. Guerrero-Saade (@juanandres_gs) February 16, 2015

The problem lies with a handful of shady users of the multiscanner who, alas, are becoming more and more unblushingly unabashed in how they conduct themselves.

Read on: Things getting interesting… for wrong reasons