The end of the year is always a nice time to take a look on the main developments and incidents that took place in the cyber security industry over the preceding 12 months. To review the impact these events had on organizations and individuals, and predict what they could mean for the overall evolution of the threat landscape, Kaspersky continues its series of annual Kaspersky Security Bulletin publications.
All the statistics used in the reports were obtained using Kaspersky Security Network (KSN), a distributed network that works with various anti-malware protection components. The anonymized data was collected from KSN users who agreed to provide it.
According to older public researches, Lyceum conducted operations against organizations in the energy and telecommunications sectors across the Middle East. In 2021, we have been able to identify a new cluster of the group’s activity, focused on two entities in Tunisia.
While investigating a recent rise of attacks against Exchange servers, we noticed a recurring cluster of activity that appeared in several distinct compromised networks. With a long-standing operation, high profile victims, advanced toolset and no affinity to a known threat actor, we decided to dub the cluster GhostEmperor.
We discovered a campaign delivering the Tomiris backdoor that shows a number of similarities with the Sunshuttle malware distributed by DarkHalo APT and target overlaps with Kazuar.
This is our latest summary of advanced persistent threat (APT) activity, focusing on significant events that we observed during Q2 2021: attacks against Microsoft Exchange servers, APT29 and APT31 activities, targeting campaigns, etc.