Uptycs Blog

macOS Bundlore is one of the most popular macOS adware installers. It either comes bundled with pirated applications, or from the web, prompting users to install or update Flash. Though the majority of browsers now have limited support for Flash, it is still a favorite mechanism for infecting systems. 

In recent times we are seeing an increased number of Docker container malware. Attackers scan the internet to identify the misconfigured Docker engine API installations to install the malicious images or run commands to install the malware. Access to the Docker engine API can provide an attacker fine control over the Docker installation enabling him/her to create, delete, dump and run commands in the containers, although the majority of the malware seen to-date are either using system resources for crypto mining or denial of service attacks. In general, the container is an encapsulated environment to run the application so it can be used for any activity from proxies to botnet services and can easily become part of attacker infrastructure to distribute malware.

Uptycs' threat intelligence team collects over a million indicators every week to provide the latest threat data. All of this data is downloaded from more than 40 publicly available sources which we then put into eight categories including:

The Uptycs Threat Intelligence team is responsible for providing a high quality, curated, and current Threat Intelligence feed to the Uptycs product. In order to deliver the threat feed, the team evaluates every single alert that is seen by our customers, and investigates the alert as feedback into the threat feed curation process. Recently we observed a malicious domain alert from a customer. The out-of-the-box alert description indicated that it belonged to the OSX/Shlayer malware family. We were quickly able to query Uptycs threat intelligence to find that the domain first appeared on February, 2019 and was reported by multiple threat intel sources. Once the threat was validated, we dove into deeper investigation to understand the threat surface and risk. This post walks through the steps and techniques we performed to analyze data that had been collected via osquery, and aggregated in Uptycs.

Threats to cyber security have been around for decades, but the sophistication and motivations of attackers have evolved. In the early days, they carried out relatively simple, insignificant attacks in an attempt to show off their programming abilities; now, sophisticated cybercriminals (sometimes sponsored by governments and companies) launch serious attacks to steal products and ideas, or other data, from digital infrastructure.

Detecting security threats is difficult work, now more so than ever. Our threat intelligence tools are playing catch-up with increasingly sophisticated attack vectors, including polymorphic malware, quick-turn domains and other turn-on-a-dime attack tactics.