Still, in the intrusions they analyzed that were outside of the Middle East, most of the malicious emails were written in English, according to the report. They found that other languages were used in different regions outside of the Middle East attack they examined. They shared a screen capture, shown below, that’s representative of the malicious email replies that showed up in all of the user inboxes of one affected network, all sent as legitimate replies to existing threads, all written in English. Trend Micro’s Incident Response team had decided to look into what researchers believe are SquirrelWaffle-related intrusions in the Middle East, to figure out whether the attacks involved the notorious Exchange server vulnerabilities. Additionally, no malware was executed on the Exchange servers that will trigger any alerts before the malicious email is spread across the environment.” Middle East Campaign Thus, they left no tracks, as “no suspicious network activities will be detected. The attacker also didn’t drop, or use, tools for lateral movement after gaining access to the vulnerable Exchange servers, Trend Micro said.
“Delivering the malicious spam using this technique to reach all the internal domain users will decrease the possibility of detecting or stopping the attack, as the mail will not be able to filter or quarantine any of these internal emails,” they wrote. In a report posted on Friday, Trend Micro researchers Mohamed Fahmy, Sherif Magdy and Abdelrhman Sharshar said that hijacking email replies for malspam is a good way to slip past both people’s spam suspicions and to avoid getting flagged or quarantined by email gateways. Those rigged links are tucked into an email reply, similar to how the virulent Emotet malware – typically spread via malicious emails or text messages – has been known to work. SquirrelWaffle campaigns are known for using stolen email threads to increase the chances that a victim will click on malicious links.
The Office documents infected systems with SquirrelWaffle in the initial stage of the infection chain. What’s still under discussion: whether the offensive is delivering SquirrelWaffle, the new email loader that showed up in September, or whether SquirrelWaffle is just one piece of malware among several that the campaigns are dropping.Ĭisco Talos researchers first got wind of the SquirrelWaffle malspam campaigns beginning in mid-September, when they saw boobytrapped Microsoft Office documents delivering Qakbot malware and the penetration-testing tool Cobalt Strike – two of the most common threats regularly observed targeting organizations around the world. While due care has been taken in its preparation, the ARC cannot guarantee and assumes no legal liability or responsibility for the accuracy, currency, completeness or interpretation of the information.Attackers are gnawing on the ProxyLogon and ProxyShell vulnerabilities in Microsoft Exchange Server to hijack email chains, by malspamming replies to ongoing email threads, researchers say. For this reason, figures may not match with results found in Grants Search. The information in these datasets is limited to what was current at the time project applications were approved and announced for funding by the Minister, and accordingly excludes any post-award variations that may subsequently have been approved. Participating Organisations – this dataset lists organisations named on grant applications awarded funding by the Minister.Success Rates – this dataset lists the number of applications received, projects funded and the success rate by scheme and Primary Field of Research Group (FoR 4D) from 2011 (inclusive).
EXCEL TRENDLINE IN THE BACL CODE
Yearly Funding Allocation – this dataset lists ARC funding by calendar year of funding allocation for all projects.NCGP Projects – this dataset lists ARC funding for all projects by funding commencement year including university group, Administering Organisation, state/territory, program, scheme, STEM/HASS allocation, Primary Field of Research Division (FoR 2D) and Primary Field of Research Group (FoR 4D).This may require further manipulation using excel or other analytics applications where the datasets can be combined and linked. The data is provided at the project level to enable flexibility in exploring the data.
EXCEL TRENDLINE IN THE BACL DOWNLOAD
ARC research data for projects funded since 2002 is available to view and download in Microsoft Excel format.