ESET to highlight new cyber espionage at VB2020

ESET, today announced that it will highlight its top research for 2020 during the VB2020 localhost conference. This year, the Virus Bulletin international conference will go entirely online and will take place over three days from September 30 to October 2.

ESET researchers will hold four presentations and participate in one panel debate. Two notable research presentations, which have not been published before, are the discovery of knowledge sharing among Latin American financial cyber criminals and a previously undisclosed cyber espionage operation targeting several governments in Eastern Europe, the Balkans and Russia. The conference is free this year, with registration required.

First to present will be Jakub Souček and Martin Jirkal, from ESET’s R&D center in Prague, about Latin American financial cybercriminals – competitors in crime who benefit from sharing tactics, techniques and procedures. Even though knowledge sharing among cybercriminals is not unusual, seeing so many examples of it in region-specific malware families with the same focus caught the attention of ESET researchers. The presentation will take place on October 1, 19:45-20:15 CEST.

The second presentation will cover a discovery ESET researchers made earlier this year: a previously undisclosed cyber espionage operation targeting several governments in Eastern Europe, the Balkans and Russia. The presentation, headlined “XDSpy: Stealing government secrets since 2011,” will be held by ESET Montreal researchers Matthieu Faou and Francis Labelle on October 2, 20:15-20:45 CEST.

The final live online talk, based on a recent ESET white paper, will be given by researcher Zuzana Hromcova on October 2, 21:00-21.30 CEST. The presentation, “InvisiMole: First-class persistence through second-class exploits,” will discuss the InvisiMole group’s surprisingly effective strategy to evade detection using old exploits.

You can join the livestreamed presentations anytime, and re-watch, rewind or pause them.

The fourth presentation will be a recorded one by Ignacio Sanmillan on “Ramsay: A cyber-espionage toolkit tailored for air-gapped networks.This research was first published in May 2020.

ESET Senior Research Fellow Righard Zwienenberg will participate in a recorded panel debate on “Flattening the Curve of Cyber-Risks” in the Threat Intelligence Practitioners’ Summit track.