Threat Insight 2019 in Review: Year of the RAT

guest · Jan 16, 2020

Threat Insight 2019 in Review: Year of the RAT
January 13, 2020
https://www.proofpoint.com/us/threat-insight/post/threat-insight-2019-review-year-rat

The rise in popularity of the Remote Access Trojan, or RAT, among financially motivated threat actors tracked by Proofpoint researchers, was a key highlight in 2019 that is still asserting itself well into the new year.

Actors that gained an affinity for RATs in 2019 include the highly prolific TA505, which introduced the FlawedGrace RAT along with a new backdoor, ServHelper, in early January last year and continued distributing RATs using two new downloaders, AndroMut and Get2, as well as a new RAT, SDBbot, over the summer.

TA516, who can be viewed as a barometer for threat actor trends given the diversity of their malware payloads, spent a large portion of Q2 and Q3 2019 distributing Remcos RAT campaigns and ended its year with a new Remcos campaign on December 31.
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Conclusion
In 2019, tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs) that exploited the Human Factor such as phishing lures and other forms of social engineering continued to be the primary threat to organizations worldwide. Robust malware such as banking Trojans like Ursnif and modular bots like Emotet were still the overall volume leaders among malware tracked by Proofpoint researchers

However, based on activity observed throughout the past year, even more, full-featured malware like RATs and backdoors are becoming increasingly common, leaving the threat landscape dominated by multipurpose malware that provides threat actors future flexibility, whether they want to keep stealing credentials, drop ransomware, capture desktop video for extortion, or profile a network.
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Threat Insight 2019 in Review: Year of the RAT

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