Costin Raiu

Director, Global Research & Analysis Team

Costin specializes in analyzing advanced persistent threats and high-level malware attacks. He is leading the Global Research & Analysis Team (GReAT) at Kaspersky that researched the inner workings of Stuxnet, Duqu, Carbanak and more recently, Lazarus, BlueNoroff, Moonlight Maze and the Equation group. Costin’s work includes analyzing malicious websites, exploits and online banking malware. Costin has over 24 years of experience in anti-virus technologies and security research. He is a member of the Virus Bulletin Technical Advisory Board, a member of the Computer AntiVirus Researchers’ Organization (CARO) and a reporter for the Wildlist Organization International. Before joining Kaspersky, Costin worked for GeCad as Chief Researcher and as a Data Security Expert with the RAV antivirus developers group. Costin joined Kaspersky Lab in 2000 and became the Director of the Global Research & Analysis Team in 2010. Some of his hobbies include chess, photography and the Science Fiction literature.

@craiu

Reports

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.

Costin Raiu

Looking at Big Threats Using Code Similarity. Part 1

PuzzleMaker attacks with Chrome zero-day exploit chain

Hunting APTs with YARA

An analysis of Regin’s Hopscotch and Legspin

Penquin’s Moonlit Maze

Publications

MysterySnail attacks with Windows zero-day

Applied YARA training Q&A

PuzzleMaker attacks with Chrome zero-day exploit chain

Zero-day vulnerability in Desktop Window Manager (CVE-2021-28310) used in the wild

Sunburst backdoor – code overlaps with Kazuar

Sunburst: connecting the dots in the DNS requests

Looking at Big Threats Using Code Similarity. Part 1

YARA webinar follow up

Hunting APTs with YARA

APT review of the year

Kaspersky Security Bulletin: Threat Predictions for 2018

The Festive Complexities of SIGINT-Capable Threat Actors

Reports

Lyceum group reborn

GhostEmperor: From ProxyLogon to kernel mode

DarkHalo after SolarWinds: the Tomiris connection

APT trends report Q2 2021

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