VB2016 video: On the StrongPity waterhole attacks targeting Italian and Belgian encryption users

Last week,

Microsoft


published a paper

on two attack groups, dubbed PROMETHIUM and NEODYMIUM, that targeted individuals in Europe and that both used the then unknown and unpatched vulnerability CVE-2016-4117 in

Abobe Flash Player

.

However,

Microsoft

wasn’t the first company to write about the PROMETHIUM group and the Truvasys malware it used. At VB2016 in Denver,

Kaspersky Lab

researcher Kurt Baumgartner gave a presentation on the same group, which

Kaspersky

calls StrongPity, and which used watering hole attacks to target the users of encryption tools such as

TrueCrypt

and

WinRAR

.

We have now uploaded the video of Kurt’s presentation to our

YouTube

channel. Since this was a “last-minute presentation” at VB2016, there is no written paper to accompany it, but Kurt did publish an accompanying

blog post

on

Kaspersky

‘s

Securelist

site.