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How does cyberthreat attribution help in practice?
Not every cybersecurity practitioner thinks it’s worth the effort to figure out exactly who’s pulling the strings behind the malware hitting their company. The typical incident investigation algorithm goes something like this: analyst finds a suspicious file → if the antivirus didn’t catch it, puts it into a sandbox to test → confirms some malicious activity → adds the hash to the blocklist → goes for coffee break. These are the go-to steps for many cybersecurity professionals — especially when they’re swamped with alerts, or don’t quite have the forensic skills to unravel a complex attack thread by thread. However, when dealing with a targeted attack, this approach is a one-way ticket to disaster — and here’s why.
If an attacker is playing for keeps, they rarely stick to a single attack vector. There’s a good chance the malicious file has already played its part in a multi-stage attack and is now all but useless to the attacker. Meanwhile, the adversary has already dug deep into corporate infrastructure and is busy operating with an entirely different set of tools. To clear the threat for good, the security team has to uncover and neutralize the entire attack chain.
But how can this be done quickly and effectively before the attackers manage to do some real damage? One way is to dive deep into the context. By analyzing a single file, an expert can identify exactly who’s attacking his company, quickly find out which other tools and tactics that specific group employs, and then sweep infrastructure for any related threats. There are plenty of threat intelligence tools out there for this, but I’ll show you how it works using our Kaspersky Threat Intelligence Portal.
A practical example of why attribution matters
Let’s say we upload a piece of malware we’ve discovered to a threat intelligence portal, and learn that it’s usually being used by, say, the MysterySnail group. What does that actually tell us? Let’s look at the available intel:
First off, these attackers target government institutions in both Russia and Mongolia. They’re a Chinese-speaking group that typically focuses on espionage. According to their profile, they establish a foothold in infrastructure and lay low until they find something worth stealing. We also know that they typically exploit the vulnerability CVE-2021-40449. What kind of vulnerability is that?
As we can see, it’s a privilege escalation vulnerability — meaning it’s used after hackers have already infiltrated the infrastructure. This vulnerability has a high severity rating and is heavily exploited in the wild. So what software is actually vulnerable?
Got it: Microsoft Windows. Time to double-check if the patch that fixes this hole has actually been installed. Alright, besides the vulnerability, what else do we know about the hackers? It turns out they have a peculiar way of checking network configurations — they connect to the public site 2ip.ru:
So it makes sense to add a correlation rule to SIEM to flag that kind of behavior.
Now’s the time to read up on this group in more detail and gather additional indicators of compromise (IoCs) for SIEM monitoring, as well as ready-to-use YARA rules (structured text descriptions used to identify malware). This will help us track down all the tentacles of this kraken that might have already crept into corporate infrastructure, and ensure we can intercept them quickly if they try to break in again.
Kaspersky Threat Intelligence Portal provides a ton of additional reports on MysterySnail attacks, each complete with a list of IoCs and YARA rules. These YARA rules can be used to scan all endpoints, and those IoCs can be added into SIEM for constant monitoring. While we’re at it, let’s check the reports to see how these attackers handle data exfiltration, and what kind of data they’re usually hunting for. Now we can actually take steps to head off the attack.
And just like that, MysterySnail, the infrastructure is now tuned to find you and respond immediately. No more spying for you!
Malware attribution methods
Before diving into specific methods, we need to make one thing clear: for attribution to actually work, the threat intelligence provided needs a massive knowledge base of the tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs) used by threat actors. The scope and quality of these databases can vary wildly among vendors. In our case, before even building our tool, we spent years tracking known groups across various campaigns and logging their TTPs, and we continue to actively update that database today.
With a TTP database in place, the following attribution methods can be implemented:
- Dynamic attribution: identifying TTPs through the dynamic analysis of specific files, then cross-referencing that set of TTPs against those of known hacking groups
- Technical attribution: finding code overlaps between specific files and code fragments known to be used by specific hacking groups in their malware
Dynamic attribution
Identifying TTPs during dynamic analysis is relatively straightforward to implement; in fact, this functionality has been a staple of every modern sandbox for a long time. Naturally, all of our sandboxes also identify TTPs during the dynamic analysis of a malware sample:
The core of this method lies in categorizing malware activity using the MITRE ATT&CK framework. A sandbox report typically contains a list of detected TTPs. While this is highly useful data, it’s not enough for full-blown attribution to a specific group. Trying to identify the perpetrators of an attack using just this method is a lot like the ancient Indian parable of the blind men and the elephant: blindfolded folks touch different parts of an elephant and try to deduce what’s in front of them from just that. The one touching the trunk thinks it’s a python; the one touching the side is sure it’s a wall, and so on.
Technical attribution
The second attribution method is handled via static code analysis (though keep in mind that this type of attribution is always problematic). The core idea here is to cluster even slightly overlapping malware files based on specific unique characteristics. Before analysis can begin, the malware sample must be disassembled. The problem is that alongside the informative and useful bits, the recovered code contains a lot of noise. If the attribution algorithm takes this non-informative junk into account, any malware sample will end up looking similar to a great number of legitimate files, making quality attribution impossible. On the flip side, trying to only attribute malware based on the useful fragments but using a mathematically primitive method will only cause the false positive rate to go through the roof. Furthermore, any attribution result must be cross-checked for similarities with legitimate files — and the quality of that check usually depends heavily on the vendor’s technical capabilities.
Kaspersky’s approach to attribution
Our products leverage a unique database of malware associated with specific hacking groups, built over more than 25 years. On top of that, we use a patented attribution algorithm based on static analysis of disassembled code. This allows us to determine — with high precision, and even a specific probability percentage — how similar an analyzed file is to known samples from a particular group. This way, we can form a well-grounded verdict attributing the malware to a specific threat actor. The results are then cross-referenced against a database of billions of legitimate files to filter out false positives; if a match is found with any of them, the attribution verdict is adjusted accordingly. This approach is the backbone of the Kaspersky Threat Attribution Engine, which powers the threat attribution service on the Kaspersky Threat Intelligence Portal.
Kaspersky official blog – Read More
Please Don’t Feed the Scattered Lapsus ShinyHunters
A prolific data ransom gang that calls itself Scattered Lapsus ShinyHunters (SLSH) has a distinctive playbook when it seeks to extort payment from victim firms: Harassing, threatening and even swatting executives and their families, all while notifying journalists and regulators about the extent of the intrusion. Some victims reportedly are paying — perhaps as much to contain the stolen data as to stop the escalating personal attacks. But a top SLSH expert warns that engaging at all beyond a “We’re not paying” response only encourages further harassment, noting that the group’s fractious and unreliable history means the only winning move is not to pay.
Image: Shutterstock.com, @Mungujakisa
Unlike traditional, highly regimented Russia-based ransomware affiliate groups, SLSH is an unruly and somewhat fluid English-language extortion gang that appears uninterested in building a reputation of consistent behavior whereby victims might have some measure of confidence that the criminals will keep their word if paid.
That’s according to Allison Nixon, director of research at the New York City based security consultancy Unit 221. Nixon has been closely tracking the criminal group and individual members as they bounce between various Telegram channels used to extort and harass victims, and she said SLSH differs from traditional data ransom groups in other important ways that argue against trusting them to do anything they say they’ll do — such as destroying stolen data.
Like SLSH, many traditional Russian ransomware groups have employed high-pressure tactics to force payment in exchange for a decryption key and/or a promise to delete stolen data, such as publishing a dark web shaming blog with samples of stolen data next to a countdown clock, or notifying journalists and board members of the victim company. But Nixon said the extortion from SLSH quickly escalates way beyond that — to threats of physical violence against executives and their families, DDoS attacks on the victim’s website, and repeated email-flooding campaigns.
SLSH is known for breaking into companies by phishing employees over the phone, and using the purloined access to steal sensitive internal data. In a January 30 blog post, Google’s security forensics firm Mandiant said SLSH’s most recent extortion attacks stem from incidents spanning early to mid-January 2026, when SLSH members pretended to be IT staff and called employees at targeted victim organizations claiming that the company was updating MFA settings.
“The threat actor directed the employees to victim-branded credential harvesting sites to capture their SSO credentials and MFA codes, and then registered their own device for MFA,” the blog post explained.
Victims often first learn of the breach when their brand name is uttered on whatever ephemeral new public Telegram group chat SLSH is using to threaten, extort and harass their prey. According to Nixon, the coordinated harassment on the SLSH Telegram channels is part of a well-orchestrated strategy to overwhelm the victim organization by manufacturing humiliation that pushes them over the threshold to pay.
Nixon said multiple executives at targeted organizations have been subject to “swatting” attacks, wherein SLSH communicated a phony bomb threat or hostage situation at the target’s address in the hopes of eliciting a heavily armed police response at their home or place of work.
“A big part of what they’re doing to victims is the psychological aspect of it, like harassing executives’ kids and threatening the board of the company,” Nixon told KrebsOnSecurity. “And while these victims are getting extortion demands, they’re simultaneously getting outreach from media outlets saying, ‘Hey, do you have any comments on the bad things we’re going to write about you.”
Nixon argues that no one should negotiate with SLSH because the group has demonstrated a willingness to extort victims based on promises that it has no intention to keep. Nixon points out that all of SLSH’s known members hail from The Com, shorthand for a constellation of cybercrime-focused Discord and Telegram communities which serve as a kind of distributed social network that facilitates instant collaboration.
Nixon said Com-based extortion groups tend to instigate feuds and drama between group members, leading to lying, betrayals, credibility destroying behavior, backstabbing, and sabotaging each other.
“With this type of ongoing dysfunction, often compounding by substance abuse, these threat actors often aren’t able to act with the core goal in mind of completing a successful, strategic ransom operation,” Nixon said. “They continually lose control with outbursts that put their strategy and operational security at risk, which severely limits their ability to build a professional, scalable, and sophisticated criminal organization network for continued successful ransoms – unlike other, more tenured and professional criminal organizations focused on ransomware alone.”
Intrusions from established ransomware groups typically center around encryption/decryption malware that mostly stays on the affected machine. In contrast, Nixon said, ransom from a Com group is often structured the same as violent sextortion schemes against minors, wherein members of The Com will steal damaging information, threaten to release it, and “promise” to delete it if the victim complies without any guarantee or technical proof point that they will keep their word. She writes:
The SLSH group steals a significant amount of corporate data, and on the day of issuing the ransom notification, they line up a number of harassment attacks to be delivered simultaneously with the ransom. This can include swatting, DDOS, email/SMS/call floods, negative PR, complaints sent to authority figures in and above the company, and so on. Then, during the negotiation process, they lay on the pressure with more harassment- never allowing too much time to pass before a new harassment attack.
What they negotiate for is the promise to not leak the data if you pay the ransom. This promise places a lot of trust in the extorter, because they cannot prove they deleted the data, and we believe they don’t intend to delete the data. Paying provides them vital information about the value of the stolen dataset which we believe will be useful for fraud operations after this wave is complete.
A key component of SLSH’s efforts to convince victims to pay, Nixon said, involves manipulating the media into hyping the threat posed by this group. This approach also borrows a page from the playbook of sextortion attacks, she said, which encourages predators to keep targets continuously engaged and worrying about the consequences of non-compliance.
“On days where SLSH had no substantial criminal ‘win’ to announce, they focused on announcing death threats and harassment to keep law enforcement, journalists, and cybercrime industry professionals focused on this group,” she said.
An excerpt from a sextortion tutorial from a Com-based Telegram channel. Image: Unit 221B.
Nixon knows a thing or two about being threatened by SLSH: For the past several months, the group’s Telegram channels have been replete with threats of physical violence against her, against Yours Truly, and against other security researchers. These threats, she said, are just another way the group seeks to generate media attention and achieve a veneer of credibility, but they are useful as indicators of compromise because SLSH members tend to name drop and malign security researchers even in their communications with victims.
“Watch for the following behaviors in their communications to you or their public statements,” Nixon said. “Repeated abusive mentions of Allison Nixon (or “A.N”), Unit 221B, or cybersecurity journalists—especially Brian Krebs—or any other cybersecurity employee, or cybersecurity company. Any threats to kill, or commit terrorism, or violence against internal employees, cybersecurity employees, investigators, and journalists.”
Unit 221B says that while the pressure campaign during an extortion attempt may be traumatizing to employees, executives, and their family members, entering into drawn-out negotiations with SLSH incentivizes the group to increase the level of harm and risk, which could include the physical safety of employees and their families.
“The breached data will never go back to the way it was, but we can assure you that the harassment will end,” Nixon said. “So, your decision to pay should be a separate issue from the harassment. We believe that when you separate these issues, you will objectively see that the best course of action to protect your interests, in both the short and long term, is to refuse payment.”
Krebs on Security – Read More
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