Research Blog

Authored by Joshua Kamp Executive summary The authors behind Android banking malware Vultur have been spotted adding new technical features, which allow the malware operator to further remotely interact with the victim’s mobile device. Vultur has also started masquerading more of its malicious activity by encrypting its C2 communication, using multiple encrypted payloads that are […]

Author: Axel Boesenach and Erik Schamper In this blog post we will go into a user-friendly memory scanning Python library that was created out of the necessity of having more control during memory scanning. We will give an overview of how this library works, share the thought process and the why’s. This blog post will […]

At Fox-IT (part of NCC Group) identifying servers that host nefarious activities is a critical aspect of our threat intelligence. One approach involves looking for anomalies in responses of HTTP servers. Sometimes cybercriminals that host malicious servers employ tactics that involve mimicking the responses of legitimate software to evade detection. However, a common pitfall of […]

Mathew Vermeer is a doctoral candidate at the Organisation Governance department of the faculty of Technology, Policy and Management of Delft University of Technology. At the same university, he has received both a BSc degree in Computer Science and Engineering, as well as a MSc degree in Computer Science with a specialization in cyber security. […]

Fox-IT (part of NCC Group) has uncovered a large-scale exploitation campaign of Citrix NetScalers in a joint effort with the Dutch Institute of Vulnerability Disclosure (DIVD). An adversary appears to have exploited CVE-2023-3519 in an automated fashion, placing webshells on vulnerable NetScalers to gain persistent access. The adversary can execute arbitrary commands with this webshell, […]

Max Groot Ruud van Luijk TL;DR A recently uncovered malware sample dubbed ‘Saitama’ was uncovered by security firm Malwarebytes in a weaponized document, possibly targeted towards the Jordan government. This Saitama implant uses DNS as its sole Command and Control channel and utilizes long sleep times and (sub)domain randomization to evade detection. As no server-side […]

Since we published about identifying Cobalt Strike Team Servers in the wild just over three years ago, we’ve collected over 128,000 beacons from over 24,000 active Team Servers. Today, RIFT is making this extensive beacon dataset publicly available in combination with the open-source release of dissect.cobaltstrike, our Python library for studying and parsing Cobalt Strike […]

tl;dr An approach to detecting suspicious TLS certificates using an incremental anomaly detection model is discussed. This model utilizes the Half-Space-Trees algorithm and provides our security operations teams (SOC) with the opportunity to detect suspicious behavior, in real-time, even when network traffic is encrypted.  The prevalence of encrypted traffic As a company that provides Managed Network […]

Over the past few months NCC Group has observed an increasing number of data breach extortion cases, where the attacker steals data and threatens to publish said data online if the victim decides not to pay. Given the current threat landscape, most notable is the absence of ransomware or any technical attempt at disrupting the […]

tl:dr Incremental Learning is an extremely useful machine learning paradigm for deriving insight into cyber security datasets. This post provides a simple example involving JA3 hashes showing how some of the foundational algorithms that enable incremental learning techniques can be applied to novelty detection (the first time something has happened) and outlier detection (rare events) […]