Uptycs Blog

Network traffic encryption is increasing. This increase is driven by demand for privacy protection and the availability of great services for deploying certificates for free. According to Google’s Transparency Report, 88% of web traffic performed on Chrome for Windows is encrypted, and that number is higher for macOS, Android, and ChromeOS. The encryption trend is even clearer when you look at the percentage of HTTPS browsing time in the Transparency Report. At the same time, malware is also following this trend, as the increased security allows attackers to evade some detection mechanisms.

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. 

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.