Explore cybersecurity trends, news and insights from the experts at Black Lotus Labs, the threat research and operations arm of Lumen.
Executive Summary In April 2016, Microsoft shocked the PC world when it announced the Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL). WSL is a supplemental feature that runs a Linux image in a near-native environment on Windows, allowing for functionality like command […]
Executive Summary In early June 2021, Black Lotus Labs identified ReverseRat, a remote access trojan (RAT) operated by a suspected Pakistani actor that was targeting government and energy sector organizations in South and Central Asia. After publishing our initial research, […]
Introduction “If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles. If you know yourself but not the enemy, for every victory gained you will also suffer a defeat. If you know […]
Introduction Last August, Black Lotus Labs participated in the DEF CON Red Team Village CTF. If that sentence reads as gobbledygook to you, read on as we unpack it. This blog will introduce CTFs and related security concepts, then show […]
Executive Summary Lumen’s Black Lotus Labs detected a new remote access trojan we’re calling ReverseRat. Based on our global telemetry and analysis, we identified that the actor is targeting government and energy organizations in the South and Central Asia regions […]
The Black Lotus Labs team at Lumen Technologies recently discovered a hacktivist campaign affecting internet-exposed routers and switches that occurred primarily on May 13, 2021. During this campaign, the threat actor abused the victims’ misconfigured Cisco Smart Install protocol, which […]
In recent years, Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) events have become an ever-present threat, featuring attack traffic pushing to levels measured in terabits per second (Tbps). One of the key tools in the hands of cybercriminals seeking to increase the […]
Black Lotus Labs’ analysis has uncovered a cluster of compromised websites previously used in a series of watering hole attacks. Any visitors who browsed to one of the sites would unknowingly be infected and vulnerable to the threat actor stealing […]
Since the second half of 2020, Lumen Black Lotus Labs® has observed an unsettling number of entities receiving emails containing a threat of sustained DDoS attack unless a Bitcoin ransom was paid. These attacks – known as Ransom Distributed Denial […]
Bolstered by contributions from Black Lotus Labs and others, Microsoft and FS-ISAC recently took court action to disrupt a particularly insidious botnet called TrickBot – a significant source of ransomware and banking credential theft. As the threat intelligence arm of […]
