ESET Research Podcast: Sextortion, digital usury and SQL brute-force

ESET Research

Closing intrusion vectors unit cybercriminals to revisit aged onslaught avenues, but besides to look for caller ways to onslaught their victims

12 Sep 2023

Sextortion emails and different text-based threats person been connected a monolithic summation successful H1 2023 and the question remains why. Are criminals conscionable lazy? Are they trying to gain casual wealth during their days off? Or is this a portion of thing bigger, perchance involving generative AI?

And that’s conscionable scratching the aboveground of the trends observed successful the latest ESET Threat Report, the absorption of this episode. Another intrusion vector that has seen accrued attraction from cybercriminals was MS SQL servers that had to withstand a renewed summation successful brute unit attacks.

Oh, and let’s not hide the transgression signifier of usury, appearing successful the signifier of malicious Android apps. Hunting for victims successful the countries astir the equator and successful the confederate hemisphere, cybercriminals effort to unit and endanger victims into paying exorbitant involvement rates connected short-term loans – which sometimes, they don’t adjacent provide.

Yet, it wasn’t each atrocious successful H1 2023. One portion of bully quality was that notorious Emotet botnet showed small activity, moving lone a fewer insignificant and amazingly ineffective spam campaigns successful March. After those were over, it went silent. What caught the attraction of researchers was a caller functionality resembling a debugging output. This feeds into the rumors that Emotet has been – astatine slightest partially – sold to different menace radical that is unsure of however things work.

Another affirmative communicative came regarding Redline stealer. This notorious malware-as-a-service (MaaS) utilized by criminals to bargain victim’s accusation and present different malware has been disrupted by ESET researchers and their friends astatine Flare systems. The disruption took down a concatenation of GitHub repositories indispensable to tally RedLine power panels for the affiliates. As determination was nary backup channel, operators down the MaaS volition person to find a antithetic way to tally their “service”.

For each those topics and much from ESET Threat Report, perceive to the latest occurrence of ESET Research podcast, hosted by Aryeh Goretsky. This time, helium directed his questions to 1 of the authors of the report, Security Awareness Specialist Ondrej Kubovič.

For the afloat study from H1 2023, including different topics specified arsenic changes successful cryptocurrency threats, malicious OneNote files, the archetypal treble supply-chain onslaught – courtesy of Lazarus radical – oregon the latest developments successful the ransomware scene, click here.

Discussed:

• Sextortion and text-based threats 1:46
• Brute unit attacks connected MS SQL servers 7:10
• Usury connected Android apps 9:20
• Emotet enactment 13:25
• RedLine Stealer disruption 16:45