Feike Hacquebord

Cyber Considerations for Organizations During Times of Conflict This article provides a comprehensive overview of the necessary adjustments and strategies CISOs need to implement to safeguard their organizations’ assets, maintain business continuity, and uphold pu...

We published this article on "Cyber Considerations for Organizations During Times of Conflict" in 2024. It is worth a read again - www.trendmicro.com/vinfo/us/sec...

Spammers abused Atlassian Jira’s notifications to bypass email security filters and target government and corporate entities with spam. In one of the campaigns highly skilled Russians working abroad were targeted, even though the motivation looks to be financial - www.trendmicro.com/en_us/resear...

Navalny was poisoned with exotic frog toxin, five Western nations confirm Five European countries have confirmed that Navalny was poisoned with epibatidine — a high-potency neurotoxin derived from South American poison dart frogs. Traces of the toxin were found in tissue sa...

Navalny was poisoned with exotic frog toxin, five Western nations confirm

Multiple labs have independently analyzed biological samples taken from Alexei Navalny’s body and found epibatidine, a highly toxic alkaloid sourced from a South American poisonous frog.

Threat Attribution Framework: How TrendAI™ Applies Structure Over Speculation TrendAI™ brings structure and discipline to threat attribution, helping security leaders and teams make informed decisions about cyber risk, incident response, and overall defensive posture.

TrendAI formalizes threat attribution as a structured, repeatable discipline by combining standardized evidence scoring, relationship mapping, and bias testing, with a temporary stage that separates clustering from final naming. Article on how we attribute: www.trendmicro.com/vinfo/us/sec...

#BREAKING #ESETresearch identified the wiper #DynoWiper used in an attempted disruptive cyberattack against the Polish energy sector on Dec 29, 2025. At this point, no successful disruption is known, but the malware’s design clearly indicates destructive intent. 1/5

Trend Micro tracks SHADOW-VOID-042 spear-phishing (Nov 2025) using Trend Micro-themed lures and a decoy site mimicking Trend’s corporate style, targeting defence, energy, chemicals, cybersecurity and ICT sectors. www.trendmicro.com/en_us/resear...

spear phishing email using Trend Micro updates as a lure

targeted industries

comparison between this intrusion set and Void Rabisu

Website mimicking Trend Micro graphical design

We investigated an #APT with links to Void Rabisu (Romcom) that used Trend Micro updates as a lure in a recent campaign involving vulnerability exploitation. There were at least 4 stages before the final payload, some of them being tailored to the targeted machine www.trendmicro.com/en_us/resear...

SHADOW-VOID-042 Targets Multiple Industries with Void Rabisu-like Tactics

Recently various industries, including Trend Micro, were targeted by a Trend Micro-themed campaign. Trend Vision One™ stopped it early in the kill chain. The campaign somewhat aligns with Void Rabisu (ROMCOM). For now we track this temporarily under SHADOW-VOID-042 www.trendmicro.com/en_us/resear...

The Rise of Collaborative Tactics Among China-aligned Cyber Espionage Campaigns

Cyberespionage campaigns are becoming increasingly complex due to the close collaboration between distinct APT groups. Learn how China-aligned Earth Estries provides initial access to compromised assets for Earth Naga (Flax Typhoon) to continue exploitation: www.trendmicro.com/en_us/resear....

One of the botnets that is using a modular approach that will likely be able to circumvent network-based access controls against residential proxies is known as BadBox 2.0. The FBI issued an advisory yesterday: www.ic3.gov/PSA/2025/PSA...

This modular model is already employed by residential proxy providers in the Far East who obtain millions of residential proxies by exploiting vulnerabilities in the supply chain of inexpensive IoT devices and by shipping pre-infected Android Open Source Project-supported devices (AOSP).

We anticipate that residential proxy providers will seek to bypass connection and session-based access controls, by uploading separate software modules to residential endpoints. These modules can independently carry out specific tasks like advertisement fraud without relying on proxied connections.

The Rise of Residential Proxies as a Cybercrime Enabler This research discusses how residential proxies help cybercriminals bypass antifraud and IT security systems, and how vulnerabilities in the IoT supply chain are exploited where Android-based devices ...

Residential proxies are a key enabler of cybercrime today. This creates a growing need for connection and session-based access control. We used Ja4T fingerprinting that successfully tagged incoming connections from residential proxies to 1,500 IDS systems. www.trendmicro.com/vinfo/us/sec...

One of my favorite pieces of evidence we were able to obtain was 7 videos with English text, which painstakingly explain how to set up a Beavertail C&C. The screen recording, lasting more than 1 hour, was created by someone logged in with a BlockNovas account from an IP address probably in Russia.

Russian Infrastructure Plays Crucial Role in North Korean Cybercrime Operations

DPRK cybercrime uses Russian infrastructure in Khasan and Khabarovsk, masked by VPNs, proxies, and RDPs. One fictitious DPRK company to lure IT professionals with interviews was BlockNovas. FBI seized BlockNovas' site and a related C&C on April 23, 2025. Read more: www.trendmicro.com/en_us/resear...

“Let’s hire an ISIS suicide bomber to blow him up in the street!”: Europe’s most wanted man plotted my murder — and that of my colleague A jury at the Old Bailey, London’s Central Criminal Court, has just found six of my compatriots — citizens of Bulgaria — guilty of conspiring with the Kremlin to kidnap and possibly murder me and my c...

Roman Dobrokhotov and Christo Grozev have extensively reported on FSB and GRU. Read this to learn about their ordeal when a team, led by Marsalek, was hunting them down. The story has fun elements and close calls. It highlights the dangers journalists face as they inform us: theins.ru/en/inv/279034

Updated Shadowpad Malware Leads to Ransomware Deployment

Updated Shadowpad malware used in recent attacks against the manufacturing industry led to ransomware in some incidents. Research by @thehellu.bsky.social : www.trendmicro.com/en_us/resear...

Earth Koshchei Coopts Red Team Tools in Complex RDP Attacks

Yet another suspected case of publicly disclosed red team tools being used by an intelligence agency — allegedly the SVR — to conduct a sweeping surveillance operation.

(ht @feikeh.bsky.social)

www.trendmicro.com/en_us/resear...

Earth Koshchei Coopts Red Team Tools in Complex RDP Attacks

Earth Koshchei (APT29): A cyberespionage group targeting critical sectors with stealthy techniques. Here’s what you need to know: www.trendmicro.com/en_us/resear... #Cybersecurity #ThreatIntel with @feikeh.bsky.social

Earth Koshchei Coopts Red Team Tools in Complex RDP Attacks

Since Aug 2024 Earth Koshchei (APT29, Midnight Blizzard) used 193 RDP relays and 34 rogue backends against military, MFAs and others. The campaign peak was likely preceded by barely audible campaigns that ended with a bang in Oct 2024. Details and indicators here: www.trendmicro.com/en_us/resear...

Attack chain showing attacker generating link on Moonshine, then sending it through targeted application to the victim, which after clicking the links gets compromised and delivered the DarkNimbus backdoor

Validation flow that fingerprints the target by looking at user agent and delivering the proper exploit

multiple Chrome vulnerabilities exploited in the third-party applications

List of Android applications being targeted Most are very popular in South East Asia

Our latest report presents Earth Minotaur, a threat actor targeting Tibetans and Uyghurs using Moonshine, an exploitation framework for Android apps described in 2019 by
@citizenlab.ca
leveraging vulnerabilities in applications embedding old versions of Chromium trendmicro.com/en_us/resear...

Nsocks provides an alternative explanation: "Competitors have hired an organization that has blocked our back-connect servers and continues DDOS attacks." Nsocks now also mandates authentication for their SOCKS5 entrance nodes (which was not the case previously - security by obscurity)

One week ago Lumen/Shadowserver sinkholed Water Barghest C&Cs. Nsocks (alleged seller of Ngioweb bots) apparently suffers from this: US proxies down to 4494 (was 14037), EU proxies down to 2038 (was 9092). I expected a faster recovery. Still expect Water Barghest will make their botnet more robust.

Inside Water Barghest’s Rapid Exploit-to-Market Strategy for IoT Devices

Water Barghest automated each step between finding vulnerable IoT devices to offering them for rent on a commercial residential proxy provider. Water Barghest's infrastructure was used to exploit Cisco IOS XE devices with a 0-day in October 2023. Read more here: www.trendmicro.com/en_us/resear...