Senior Security Researcher at Kaspersky`s GReAT
As a computer-sciences engineer, Pierre walked his first miles on the cybersecurity road pentesting industrial systems and designing security architectures, applications and operating systems for critical infrastructures. He then worked for eight years within French government (ANSSI, MoD), where he notably designed national cybersecurity crisis plans, conducted large-scale incident-response operations on critical infrastructures, managed a threat-intelligence team, and drove international partnerships. Pierre also worked as CISO for a multinational corporation. Pierre is an organized and creative thinker, who likes tuning all the knobs to get actionable results – from embedded microcontrollers development to policies. He joined Kaspersky GReAT in 2020 to get his hands back on threat-intelligence operations.This is our latest summary of advanced persistent threat (APT) activity, focusing on events that we observed during Q1 2022.
We recently discovered a Trojanized DeFi application that was compiled in November 2021. This application contains a legitimate program called DeFi Wallet that saves and manages a cryptocurrency wallet, but also implants a full-featured backdoor.
At the end of 2021, we inspected UEFI firmware that was tampered with to embed a malicious code we dub MoonBounce. In this report we describe how the MoonBounce implant works and how it is connected to APT41.
It appears that BlueNoroff shifted focus from hitting banks and SWIFT-connected servers to solely cryptocurrency businesses as the main source of the group’s illegal income.