We proudly announce that the open-source version of MWDB Core has been released!
If you want to try it – check out mwdb-core project on GitHub.
MWDB Core is a malware repository for automated malware collection and analysis systems, developed by CERT Polska. You can set it up as a part of a malware analysis lab or use it for collaborative malware analysis in your organization.
24th edition of iconic and the oldest cybersecurity conference in Poland.
Do you love being on stage (or at least you don’t faint) and have something interesting to say? Apply!
Emotet is one of the most widespread and havoc-wreaking malware families currently out there. Due to its modular structure, it’s able to easily evolve over time and gain new features without having to modify the core.
Its first version dates back to 2014. Back then it was primarily a banking trojan. These days Emotet is known mostly for its spamming capabilities and as a delivery mechanism of other malware strains.
We are happy to announce that we are releasing a free decryption tool for the Mapo (a GarrantyDecrypt/Outsider variant) ransomware today. Read more
Yo dawg, I heard you like droppers so I put a dropper in your dropper
On 2019-11-18 we received a report that some of Polish users have began receiving malspam imitating DHL:
In this short article, we’ll take a look at the xls document that has been used as a (1st stage) dropper distributing another well-known (2nd stage) dropper – brushaloader.
Call for Speakers for SECURE 2019 is now open. If you have an interesting topic and would like to share your ideas with a crowd of Polish and international IT security specialists, please consider submitting your proposal. You will find all applicable information below.
SECURE 2019 will be held on October 22-23, 2019 in Warsaw, Poland. This annual conference is dedicated entirely to IT security and addressed to administrators, security team members and practitioners in this field. SECURE’s unique feature is the organisers’ commitment to providing participants with reliable information about everything that is current and meaningful in IT security. A high professional level of the talks is ensured by CERT Polska during the paper selection process. Particular emphasis is on practical solutions, analysis of the current threats, latest trends in countering threats as well as important legal issues. Participants have an opportunity to gain the latest knowledge, improve their qualifications and exchange experience with experts.
Impersonating online payment service providers was the most popular attack scenario used for targeting e-banking users over the last year. The evolution of malware (increasingly affecting mobile devices and Internet of Things) still remains a challenge for IT security professionals. Another observed trend is usage of previously unknown 0-day vulnerabilities by APT groups. The VPNFilter case shows that advanced attacks can also affect an ordinary user. The question arises, how to take care of privacy and security in the face of above? We will try to find the answer to these and many more questions during SECURE 2019.
If you want to share your experience in these topics, or if you are an expert in one of the areas below, this Call for Speakers is for you.
SECURE 2019 will be held on October 22-23, 2019 in Warsaw, Poland. The conference topics will be roughly grouped in the following tracks:
Presentation topics
We are looking for speakers willing to deliver a talk covering one or more of the following subjects:
Important facts
Important dates
Lightning talks
We encourage participants of SECURE to share their thoughts. One of the conference blocks will include lightning talks, allowing everyone to talk briefly about their projects, works, ideas or problems. Everything goes, as long as it touches IT security.
Important facts about lightning talks
Publication of our annual report is coming soon. Editing is moving forward at full speed, but in the meantime we’d like to share some statistics concerning 2018. This statistics provide a big bicture of an IT security landscape in Poland and as well conclusions about major trends in this area. For many years already CERT Polska has incorporated eCSIRT.net incident classification (now, the sixth version marked as mkVI)1, which defines pretty well different incident categories.
In 2018 operators of CERT Polska received 19439 incident reports. We carefully analyzed and categorized all of them. Among these reports, 5675 were the reason to register incident. Our team created 3739 security incidents, what gives on the average over 10 incidents created daily. The remaining a dozen or so reports not assigned to any incident were irrelevant or can be considered as automatic alerts sent from several alerting systems. In case of the latter our activities were connected with supplying our n6 platform2 and other analytic tools as well.
Often, one incident can be connected with many incident reports, e.g. three different entities report the same phishing site.
In the table below we present incidents handled by our team, divided into categories according to eCSIRT.net classification.
| Category | Incidents | % |
|---|---|---|
| Abusive Content | 431 | 11,53 |
| Spam | 419 | 11,21 |
| Harmful Speech | 5 | 0,13 |
| Child/Sexual/Violence/… | 0 | 0 |
| Unclassified | 7 | 0,19 |
| Malicious Code | 862 | 23,05 |
| Virus | 4 | 0,11 |
| Worm | 0 | 0 |
| Trojan | 117 | 3,13 |
| Spyware | 0 | 0 |
| Dialer | 1 | 0,03 |
| Rootkit | 1 | 0,03 |
| Unclassified | 739 | 19,76 |
| Information Gathering | 101 | 2,7 |
| Scanning | 80 | 2,14 |
| Sniffing | 1 | 0,03 |
| Social Engineering | 7 | 0,19 |
| Unclassified | 13 | 0,35 |
| Intrusion Attempts | 153 | 4,09 |
| Exploiting of known Vulnerabilities | 30 | 0,8 |
| Login attempts | 37 | 0,99 |
| New attack signature | 0 | 0 |
| Unclassified | 86 | 2,3 |
| Intrusions | 125 | 3,34 |
| Privileged Account Compromise | 11 | 0,29 |
| Unprivileged Account Compromise | 21 | 0,56 |
| Application Compromise | 35 | 0,94 |
| Bot | 4 | 0,11 |
| Unclassified | 54 | 1,44 |
| Availability | 49 | 1,31 |
| DoS | 7 | 0,19 |
| DDoS | 35 | 0,94 |
| Sabotage | 0 | 0 |
| Outage (no malice) | 1 | 0,03 |
| Unclassified | 6 | 0,16 |
| Information Content Security | 46 | 1,23 |
| Unauthorised access to information | 21 | 0,56 |
| Unauthorised modification of information | 13 | 0,35 |
| Unclassified | 12 | 0,32 |
| Fraud | 1878 | 50,23 |
| Unauthorized use of resources | 1 | 0,03 |
| Copyright | 8 | 0,21 |
| Masquerade | 43 | 1,15 |
| Phishing | 1655 | 44,26 |
| Unclassified | 171 | 4,57 |
| Vulnerable | 69 | 1,85 |
| Open for abuse | 14 | 0,37 |
| Unclassified | 55 | 1,47 |
| Other | 25 | 0,67 |
Table 1. Incidents handled by CERT Polska, divided into eCSIRT.net categories
In 2018 CERT Polska created 17,5% more incidents comparing to 2017. Most of them were categorized as phishing, malware or spam. According to the data from 2017 we observed slight change on the podium in that infamous ranking, because then the first three places went as follows: phishing, malware, intrusions. Proportion of phishing incidents remained on similar level comparing to 2017 and reached 44%, which was firmly dominant result above remaining categories. Most popular scenarios were connected with phishings on foreign servers targeting Polish financial institutions (mostly banks). Another popular scenarios were related to phishings targeting services like Netflix or PayPal served from compromised Polish servers. Leading theme behind those attacks was premium users’ credentials theft or simply stealing money from internet bank account. Many scenarios concerned also selling goods on advertisement websites at the attractive prices. Main objective of these operations was to persuade users to enter sensitive data on fake websites, impersonating online payment platforms like Dotpay or PayU.
Website impersonating online payment platform
In 2018 we also observed fake online shops business, which has been visibly developed by some actors. In last year number of incidents related to fake online shops tripled, comparing to 2017. At this point, we’d like to thank all users aware of this kind of threat, who report about such activities more often and more eagerly every year. Attackers tried to find as many victims as possible, e.g. by advertising their shops in social media and popular search engines, where they were optimizing their shops’ position on the list of search results.
An example of a fake shop “offering” electronics at the attractive prices
The second most popular category of incidents was malware. It’s a broad category with many subcategories, but usually we marked incidents related to malware as “unclassified”. Firstly, because in many scenarios more than one malware family was used, incorporating variety of methods and attack techniques. Secondly, we registered significant number of incidents concerning ransomware, which unfortunately don’t have its own category in eCSIRT.net classification. In that aspect the classification isn’t perfect yet, but we hope that in the next revision it will be updated.
A vast number of malware incident reports was related to attacks on Polish users. Popular scenarios concerning emails with fake invoice, delivery details or claim for payment (or additional payment) continued spreading in different versions. These emails usually contained malicious attachment as a script, document with macros or link leading to some website distributing malware (e.g. banker or mobile banker app, depending on User-Agent HTTP header).
Email with malicious attachment pretending to be an invoice
This year for the first time we publish classification of incidents divided into Polish economy sectors. You can find detailed information in the table below. At a glance significant number of incidents is marked as Other (3 out of 4 incidents were classified to this category). These were mostly incidents concerning individuals or private entities. Next places in the classification belong to banking sector and public administration. Total number of the latter was little, comparing to the Other category. We are aware that presented classification is far from ideal. However, we had created this classification before CERT Polska has been designated as one of the three national-level CSIRTs under National Cybersecurity System law. Now, when the law is in force, we’ll be able to specify categories of this classification to reflect security of different economy sectors in a better way.
| Sector | Incidents | % |
|---|---|---|
| IT infrastructure | 29 | 0,78 |
| Public health care | 13 | 0,35 |
| Banking | 643 | 17,2 |
| Other financial institutions | 62 | 1,66 |
| Energy industry | 20 | 0,53 |
| Transport | 51 | 1,36 |
| Public administration | 85 | 2,27 |
| Water supply | 2 | 0,05 |
| Other | 2834 | 75,8 |
| Total | 3739 | 100 |
Table 2. Incidents handled by CERT Polska divided into Polish economy sectors
More conclusions you’ll find in our annual report (coming soon). You’re warmly welcomed to follow CERT Polska’s blog and our profiles in social media to be up-to-date with latest news concerning publication of our report.
During last year we have collaborated with Hatching.io on improving the open source Cuckoo Sandbox. The main works were focused on porting advanced mechanisms for memory analysis which were developed internally by our team in the previous years. The public release of the onemon marks the last stage of this collaboration. We are proud that results of this work are now available to the security community.
Read more
But in this article we will not focus on the core itself but rather the loader whose job is to decrypt the payload and execute it.
Read more
CERT Polska has observed an interesting phishing technique used in attack against users of a popular Polish content aggregator. We have also noticed the emergence of a new tool called “Modlishka” whose purpose is to simplify and automate phishing attacks. In this article, we describe the way these highly-automated attacks work and present our recommendations for creators of websites for defending about them.Read more
