The Turkish government has been actively pursuing the prosecution of the participants of the Gülen movement in what it calls “the Fetullahist Terrorist Organization/Parallel State Structure (FETÖ/PDY)”. To this end, the Turkey’s National Intelligence Organization (Millî İstihbarat Teşkilatı or MİT in Turkish) has investigated the relation of a publicly available smart phone messaging application called … Continue reading Fox-IT debunks report on ByLock app that landed 75,000 people in jail in Turkey →

Revision history: Update 2 (current): 28th of June, 2017 22:45 (UTC +2) - Added Snort rule for detection purposes Update 1: 27th of June, 2017 18:04 (UTC +2) - Initial post A new variant of the Petya ransomware started to spread havoc within various companies around the world the 27th of June 2017 . The … Continue reading Liveblog: Huge Petya ransomware wave →

Last updated: May 16th 2017 A ransomware variant known as WanaCry/WanaCrypt0r has spread on a massive scale around the world since the 12th of May 2017. For more information about the context with regards to this WanaCry variant, see also our earlier blog. The section below outlines the frequently asked questions and corresponding answers. Q: … Continue reading FAQ on the WanaCry ransomware outbreak →

Today, May 12th 2017, a ransomware variant known as WanaCry is being spread on a massive scale around the world. Once a computer is infected it will attempt to infect other machines on the same network using a recently patched vulnerability in the Windows SMB protocol. Update: We have published an FAQ to answer additional … Continue reading Massive outbreak of ransomware variant infects large amounts of computers around the world →

Insecurities in NTLM Authentication have been known about for over 15 years. The protocol can be abused to hijack a victim’s session through a process called “relaying”, which abuses a victim’s credentials by forwarding them to a different service than intended. NTLM authentication is still supported and enabled by default in many cases, even though it has been replaced as default authentication method by the more secure Kerberos. In this blog we will demonstrate relaying credentials to LDAP, IMAP and MSSQL with Ntlmrelayx, a Fox-IT extension to the well-known smbrelayx tool.

Summary Snake, also known as Turla, Uroburos and Agent.BTZ, is a relatively complex malware framework used for targeted attacks1. Over the past year Fox-IT has been involved in multiple incident response cases where the Snake framework was used to steal sensitive information. Targets include government institutions, military and large corporates. Researchers who have previously analyzed … Continue reading Snake: Coming soon in Mac OS X flavour →

With the daily growth of the different kinds of ransomware and distribution techniques, Fox-IT's Security Operations Center was investigating a new ransomware called Mole. This ransomware is currently being spread by a social engineering exploit kit to trick the user in downloading a malicious executable. The ransomware author of Mole made a small mistake, which … Continue reading A Mole exposing itself to sunlight →

As a result of increased political tensions between The Netherlands and Turkey, a surge in activity from several Turkish hacker groups has been observed by Fox-IT. Most activities observed thus far appear to be aimed at defacement and disruption of online Dutch infrastructure. Most of the methods and techniques used to achieve this goal are … Continue reading Turkish hacktivists targeting the Netherlands: high noise, low impact →

On Thursday February 9th the vulnerability named ’Ticketbleed’ was made public. The name of this vulnerability does not just sound similar to Heartbleed, but also shares the same implication: remote reading of uninitialized memory. At the time we published Snort IDS detection rules for the Heartbleed vulnerability in OpenSSL, and have now decided to do … Continue reading Detecting Ticketbleed (CVE-2016-9244) →