April 20, 2020 By David Bisson 3 min read

Last week in security news, researchers revealed that a new malware family called Mozi is in the process of building an internet of things (IoT) botnet. Mozi wasn’t the only digital threat that made its first appearance in news headlines that week. Speculoos backdoor also gained some attention for a new attack campaign perpetrated by the APT41 threat actor.

Top Story of the Week: Mozi’s IoT Bots

In December 2019, Black Lotus Labs at CenturyLink noticed that the security firm’s reputation systems had registered an increase in activity involving the otherwise static IoT Reaper malware family. The research team decided to investigate further. This effort revealed that IoT Reaper had nothing to do with the attack and that the activity actually involved a new malware family whose compromised hosts contained references to files with “Mozi” in their names.

Black Lotus Labs ultimately learned that CenturyLink’s reputation systems had mislabeled the activity because Mozi had evolved from the source code of IoT Reaper, Gafgyt and Mirai. It used this code to begin building a P2P botnet of its own by targeting routers, DVRs and other IoT devices that were either unpatched or unprotected by strong credentials.

Source: iStock

Also in Security News

  • TA505 Targeted Networks With SDBbot RAT: IBM X-Force revealed that it spotted a campaign in which the threat actor Hive0065, otherwise known as TA505, leveraged spear phishing emails impersonating Onehub to target enterprise employees in Europe. Those emails sought to steal users’ credentials and infect their machines with the SDBbot remote-access Trojan (RAT).
  • New York State Confirmed Intrusion Against Government Network: As reported by The Wall Street Journal, New York’s Office of Information Technology Services discovered a breach in late January in which attackers had constructed tunnels into servers used for relaying sensitive data. The state responded by hiring outside security services and working with the FBI to investigate the incident.
  • Speculoos Backdoor Distributed by Campaign Exploiting CVE-2019-19781: In an attack spotted by Palo Alto Networks’ Unit 42, malicious actors targeted various organizations in North America, South America and Europe with a campaign that exploited CVE-2019-19781. This flaw granted attackers the capability of executing remote code for the purpose of installing Speculoos.
  • AZORult, NanoCore RAT Delivered by FreeDom Loader: Zscaler observed that the attack campaign began with malspam messages carrying PowerPoint files. These attachments relied on macros to download an encoded VBScript from Pastebin, a script that then used PowerShell to spawn FreeDom loader for the purpose of installing AZORult or NanoCore RAT.
  • WebEx Users Targeted With Spoofed IT Security Alerts: Per Cofense, this attack campaign sought to target WebEx users by sending out messages from an address designed to look like “meetings[@]webex[.]com.” Those messages attempted to trick recipients into visiting a phishing landing page designed to steal their WebEx credentials.
  • Nemty Ransomware’s Operators Announced End of RaaS Program: ZDNet learned that the operators of Nemty ransomware had announced on the dark web that they would be shutting down their creation’s ransomware-as-a-service (RaaS) platform. Shortly after that announcement, these malicious actors also closed the portal used by Nemty to leak its victims’ data.

Security Tip of the Week: Secure Your IoT Devices

Security professionals can help defend their organizations against malware such as Mozi by improving the authentication measures on their IoT devices. Specifically, they should enable two-factor authentication where it’s available and implement strong passwords on all of their corporate assets. Infosec personnel also need to invest in their ability to passively discover all of their IoT devices so that they can locate and remediate vulnerabilities and other security risks on a timely basis.

More from

FYSA – Adobe Cold Fusion Path Traversal Vulnerability

2 min read - Summary Adobe has released a security bulletin (APSB24-107) addressing an arbitrary file system read vulnerability in ColdFusion, a web application server. The vulnerability, identified as CVE-2024-53961, can be exploited to read arbitrary files on the system, potentially leading to unauthorized access and data exposure. Threat Topography Threat Type: Arbitrary File System Read Industries Impacted: Technology, Software, and Web Development Geolocation: Global Environment Impact: Web servers running ColdFusion 2021 and 2023 are vulnerable Overview X-Force Incident Command is monitoring the disclosure…

What does resilience in the cyber world look like in 2025 and beyond?

6 min read -  Back in 2021, we ran a series called “A Journey in Organizational Resilience.” These issues of this series remain applicable today and, in many cases, are more important than ever, given the rapid changes of the last few years. But the term "resilience" can be difficult to define, and when we define it, we may limit its scope, missing the big picture.In the age of generative artificial intelligence (gen AI), the prevalence of breach data from infostealers and the near-constant…

Airplane cybersecurity: Past, present, future

4 min read - With most aviation processes now digitized, airlines and the aviation industry as a whole must prioritize cybersecurity. If a cyber criminal launches an attack that affects a system involved in aviation — either an airline’s system or a third-party vendor — the entire process, from safety to passenger comfort, may be impacted.To improve security in the aviation industry, the FAA recently proposed new rules to tighten cybersecurity on airplanes. These rules would “protect the equipment, systems and networks of transport…

Topic updates

Get email updates and stay ahead of the latest threats to the security landscape, thought leadership and research.
Subscribe today