The PolySwarm Blog

Overview

• Ongoing political tensions between Russia and Ukraine are at a breaking point, with the US and other NATO nations preparing to assist Ukraine if a military conflict arises.
• Russia and Ukraine have a long history of state-sponsored cyber conflicts, including both espionage and disruptive attacks.
• Recent cyber activity targeting Ukraine includes multiple government website defacements and WhisperGate, a wiper malware disguised as ransomware. IOCs for PolySwarm’s samples of WhisperGate are provided.
• Hacktivists recently attacked Belarus Railway to protest Russian troop transport and demand the release of “political prisoners.” This incident marked the first time hacktivists have leveraged ransomware in pursuit of political objectives.
• The cyber struggle between Russia and Ukraine has the potential to spill over and have a real-world kinetic impact. Our analysts provide a list of implications.

“SecondWrite is excited to join Polyswarm’s marketplace as an engine. Our mission is to secure computers and networks using our market-leading technology to detect malware. Polyswarm enables us to reach a large community of users and provides us with additional recent samples for our threat intelligence.” stated Rajeev Barua, CEO of SecondWrite.

Verticals Affected: Financial, Various
Victim Location: US, UK, Germany, Canada
Related Malware Families: TrickBot, Ryuk, QakBot, Zloader

A number of threat intelligence companies have recently reported on the return of the Emotet banking trojan. We first saw new variants of Emotet in our marketplace on November 15, 2021, before any industry in-depth analysis reports were released.

"As a unique malware detection and threat intelligence data platform, PolySwarm's crowdsourced model substantially improves the ability to explore, enrich, and mine malware data, which directly benefits the infosec community. Qi An Xin is excited to partner with PolySwarm to continue to innovate” Liejun Wang, Director of Threat Intelligence at QiAnXin.

We recently completed the “New Engine Claiming and Management” milestone on our development roadmap. Our goal was to make it easier for Engine owners to build, configure and test an engine, and then join the PolySwarm Marketplace, so we’ve completely redesigned the architecture.

Today we introduce a new utility use for PolySwarm’s Nectar token for average users: distributing rewards for security-relevant data about TLS certificates, DNS resolutions, and potentially malicious files encountered in daily computer use. Many of these telemetry sources are already collected from user devices by Antivirus (AV) providers. Still, there are a number of serious issues with how they are collected, how users are compensated for their information, and how these results are shared. By re-imagining how this marketplace works, we can increase collection transparency, fairly compensate all participants in the marketplace, and, most importantly, create a more unified source of security telemetry that will better protect users worldwide.

SentinelOne joined PolySwarm’s marketplace, and their threat detection engine is now live. The US-based company, a pioneer in advanced endpoint protection, leverages machine learning designed to identify unknown malware and remediate threats in real-time.