Hornetsecurity Blog

Since 2021-01-20 Hornetsecurity observes a new malspam campaign using a fake flower shop in an elaborate social engineering lure to spread the BazarLoader malware. The campaign sends invoices from a fake flower shop in hopes that potential victims will manually find the fake flower shop website and download the BazarLoader malware.

On 2021-01-27 it was announced by Europol that an international worldwide coordinated law enforcement and judicial action has disrupted the Emotet botnet and investigators have taken control of Emotet’s infrastructure. If successful this could mean the end of Emotet, its botnet, malspam, and malware loader operation. While the situation is still developing, we can confirm that the Emotet botnet infrastructure is disrupted. Victims will be notified by responsible country CERTs and should take appropriate actions to clean their Emotet malware and secondary malware infections to prevent still active malware that was downloaded by Emotet to deploy ransomware.

On 2020-12-13 FireEye disclosed a backdoor in updates of the SolarWinds Orion Platform. Affected organizations should update to the fixed version immediately. The backdoor is part of a global espionage operation and used to access government and high profile private company networks. Hornetsecurity assessed its own situation and is not affected.

QakBot has been updated with more evasion techniques. QakBot’s configuration is now stored in a registry key instead of a file. The run key for persistence is not permanently present in the registry but only written right before shutdown or reboot, and deleted immediately after QakBot is executed again. QakBot’s executable is also not stored permanently on the file system anymore, but similarly to the run key registry entry, dropped onto the file system before reboots and deleted afterwards. This way security software can only detect QakBot artifacts on disk, right before system shutdown, and shortly after system boot. However, at that time security software itself is shutting down and booting up, hence may not detect QakBot’s new persistence method.