Introduction This diary provides indicators from an unidentified RAT infection on Wednesday 2026-05-27 that was followed by a malicious NetSupport Manager RAT package. This originated from the SmartApeSG ClickFix campaign. I still don’t know the name of the initial RAT, but it has consistently been generating encoded (not HTTPS/SSL/TLS) traffic to a command and control…
Tag: Diary
AI, Europe, Global Security News, malware, Network Security
[Guest Diary] New Malware Libraries means New Signatures, (Fri, May 15th)
This is a Guest Diary by Gokul Prema Thangavel, an ISC intern as part of the SANS.edu Bachelor Degree Program. Introduction The SHA-256 a8460f446be540410004b1a8db4083773fa46f7fe76fa84219c93daa1669f8f2 is one of the most-observed Outlaw / Shellbot artifacts on the public internet. VirusTotal first ingested it on 5 July 2018 [2]. It is the SHA-256 of the authorized_keys file written…
AI, Cybersecurity, Global Security News, Network Security, privacy
[GUEST DIARY] Tearing apart website fraud to see how it works., (Wed, May 13th)
[This is a Guest Diary by Joshua Nikolson, an ISC Intern and part of the SANS.edu Bachelor’s degree in Applied Cybersecurity (BACS) program.] Introduction One day at work, a friend messaged me, “How do you check a website to see if it’s legit?” This friend recently received a phishing text message from a “bank”,…
Global Security News
Intel’s Apple-Polished Comeback
Plus, the hearing-walking correlation, Greg Brockman’s diary, Anthropic’s ‘Perfect Wingman’ and code-whispering.
AI, Apps, Cybersecurity, Exploits, Global Security News
An Adaptive Cyber Analytics UI for Web Honeypot Logs [Guest Diary], (Wed, May 6th)
[This is a Guest Diary by Eric Roldan, an ISC intern as part of the SANS.edu BACS program] Through the expansion of Large Language Models (LLMs), cybersecurity has exploded with a variety of tools for both offensive and defensive purposes. A majority of software and cyber tools are integrating Artificial Intelligence (AI) solutions into their…
AI, APAC, Exploits, Global Security News, malware, Network Security
Danger of Libredtail [Guest Diary], (Wed, Apr 29th)
[This is a Guest Diary by James Roberts, an ISC intern as part of the SANS.edu BACS program] Over the last few months, I have gained valuable experience working with the Internet Storm Center (ISC) operating a honeypot and analyzing its output via a SIEM environment. This work gave me hands on experience with system…
AI, Cybersecurity, Exploits, Global Security News, malware, Network Security, privacy, Risk Management
[Guest Diary] Beyond Cryptojacking: Telegram tdata as a Credential Harvesting Vector, Lessons from a Honeypot Incident, (Wed, Apr 22nd)
[This is a Guest Diary by L. Carty, an ISC intern as part of the SANS.edu Bachelor’s Degree in Applied Cybersecurity (BACS) program [1].] Introduction A few weeks ago, my honeypot logged an incident that changed how I think about modern attacks. A threat actor broke into my system using weak SSH credentials and immediately…
AI, Global Security News, malware
Lumma Stealer infection with Sectop RAT (ArechClient2), (Fri, Apr 17th)
Introduction This diary provides indicators from a Lumma Stealer infection that was followed by Sectop RAT (ArechClient2). I searched for cracked versions of popular copyright-protected software, and I downloaded the initial malware after following the results of one such search. This is a common distribution technique for various families of malware, and I often find…
AI, Cybersecurity, Global Security News, malware, Network Security
[Guest Diary] Compromised DVRs and Finding Them in the Wild, (Thu, Apr 16th)
[This is a Guest Diary by Alec Jaffe, an ISC intern as part of the SANS.edu Bachelor’s Degree in Applied Cybersecurity (BACS) program [1]. Security cameras are great at monitoring physical doors, but terrible at locking their own digital ones. Across the internet, thousands of unpatched DVRs sit publicly exposed, many guarded only by the…
AI, Global Security News
Number Usage in Passwords: Take Two, (Thu, Apr 9th)
In a previous diary [1], we looked to see how numbers were used within passwords submitted to honeypots. One of the items of interest was how dates, and more specifically years, were represented within the data and how that changed over time. It is often seen that years and seasons are used in passwords, especially…
AI, Global Security News, malware, Network Security
SmartApeSG campaign pushes Remcos RAT, NetSupport RAT, StealC, and Sectop RAT (ArechClient2), (Wed, Mar 25th)
Introduction This diary provides indicators from the SmartApeSG (ZPHP, HANEYMANEY) campaign I saw on Tuesday, 2026-03-24. SmartApeSG is one of many campaigns that use the ClickFix technique. This past week, I’ve seen NetSupport RAT as follow-up malware from Remcos RAT pushed by this campaign. But this time, I also saw indicators for StealC malware and…
AI, Apps, Global Security News, Network Security
IPv4 Mapped IPv6 Addresses, (Tue, Mar 17th)
Yesterday, in my diary about the scans for “/proxy/” URLs, I noted how attackers are using IPv4-mapped IPv6 addresses to possibly obfuscate their attack. These addresses are defined in RFC 4038. These addresses are one of the many transition mechanisms used to retain some backward compatibility as IPv6 is deployed. Many modern applications use IPv6-only networking…
AI, Endpoint, Global Security News, malware
SmartApeSG campaign uses ClickFix page to push Remcos RAT, (Sat, Mar 14th)
Introduction This diary describes a Remcos RAT infection that I generated in my lab on Thursday, 2026-03-11. This infection was from the SmartApeSG campaign that used a ClickFix-style fake CAPTCHA page. My previous in-depth diary about a SmartApeSG (ZPHP, HANEYMANEY) was in November 2025, when I saw NetSupport Manager RAT. Since then, I’ve fairly consistently seen…
AI, Cybersecurity, Data Breaches, Data Security, Exploits, Global Security News, Network Security, Risk Management
When your IoT Device Logs in as Admin, It?s too Late! [Guest Diary], (Wed, Mar 11th)
[This is a Guest Diary by Adam Thorman, an ISC intern as part of the SANS.edu BACS program] Introduction Have you ever installed a new device on your home or company router? Even when setup instructions are straightforward, end users often skip the step that matters most: changing default credentials. The excitement of deploying a…
AI, Apps, Cybersecurity, Exploits, Global Security News, Network Security
Differentiating Between a Targeted Intrusion and an Automated Opportunistic Scanning [Guest Diary], (Wed, Mar 4th)
[This is a Guest Diary by Joseph Gruen, an ISC intern as part of the SANS.edu BACS program] The internet is under constant, automated siege. Every publicly reachable IP address is probed continuously by bots and scanners hunting for anything that can be exploited or retrieved. It’s not because there is a specific target, but…
AI, Global Security News
Quick Howto: ZIP Files Inside RTF, (Mon, Mar 2nd)
In diary entry “Quick Howto: Extract URLs from RTF files” I mentioned ZIP files. There are OLE objects inside this RTF file: They can be analyzed with oledump.py like this: Options –storages and -E %CLSID% are used to show the abused CLSID. Stream CONTENTS contains the URL: We extracted this URL with the method…
AI, APAC, Cybersecurity, Exploits, Global Security News, malware, Network Security
Finding Signal in the Noise: Lessons Learned Running a Honeypot with AI Assistance [Guest Diary], (Tue, Feb 24th)
[This is a Guest Diary by Austin Bodolay, an ISC intern as part of the SANS.edu BACS program] Over the past several months, I have gained practical insight into the challenges of deploying and operating a honeypot, even within a relatively simple environment. This work highlighted how varying hardware, software, and network design—can significantly alter…
AI, APAC, Apps, Cybersecurity, Global Security News, Government & Policy, Network Security, Risk Management
The CLAIR Model: A Synthesized Conceptual Framework for Mapping Critical Infrastructure Interdependencies [Guest Diary], (Wed, Feb 25th)
[This is a guest diary contributed by Claire Perry (LinkedIn)] The structural integrity of modern society is predicated upon a dense and often opaque network of interconnected systems. For decades, the modeling of these systems remained siloed within specific domains: industrial processes were governed by the hierarchical constraints of the Purdue Model, while corporate…
AI, Global Security News, malware, Russia
Under the Hood of DynoWiper, (Thu, Feb 19th)
[This is a Guest Diary contributed by John Moutos] Overview In this post, I’m going over my analysis of DynoWiper, a wiper family that was discovered during attacks against Polish energy companies in late December of 2025. ESET Research [1] and CERT Polska [2] have linked the activity and supporting malware to infrastructure and tradecraft…
AI, Exploits, Global Security News, malware
Tracking Malware Campaigns With Reused Material, (Wed, Feb 18th)
A few days ago I wrote a diary called “Malicious Script Delivering More Maliciousness”[1]. In the malware infection chain, there was a JPEG picture that embedded the last payload delimited with “BaseStart-” and “-BaseEnd” tags. Today, I discovered anoher campaign that relies exactly on the same technique. It started with an attachment called “TELERADIO_IB_OBYEKTLRIN_BURAXILIS_FORMASI.xIs” (SHA256:1bf3ec53ddd7399cdc1faf1f0796c5228adc438b6b7fa2513399cdc0cb865962).…
AI, Global Security News, malware
2026 64-Bits Malware Trend, (Mon, Feb 16th)
In 2022 (time flies!), I wrote a diary about the 32-bits VS. 64-bits malware landscape[1]. It demonstrated that, despite the growing number of 64-bits computers, the “old-architecture” remained the standard. In the SANS malware reversing training (FOR610[2]), we quickly cover the main differences between the two architectures. One of the conclusions is that 32-bits code is…
AI, Exploits, Global Security News, malware, Network Security
Four Seconds to Botnet – Analyzing a Self Propagating SSH Worm with Cryptographically Signed C2 [Guest Diary], (Wed, Feb 11th)
[This is a Guest Diary by Johnathan Husch, an ISC intern as part of the SANS.edu BACS program] Weak SSH passwords remain one of the most consistently exploited attack surfaces on the Internet. Even today, botnet operators continue to deploy credential stuffing malware that is capable of performing a full compromise of Linux systems in…