Executive Summary
In late February, APT29 used a new backdoor variant publicly tracked as WINELOADER to target German political parties with a CDU-themed lure.
This is the first time we have seen this APT29 cluster target political parties, indicating a possible area of emerging operational focus beyond the typical targeting of diplomatic missions.…
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Author: Mandiant
During the course of an intrusion investigation in late October 2023, Mandiant observed novel N-day exploitation of CVE-2023-46747 affecting F5 BIG-IP Traffic Management User Interface. Additionally, in February 2024, we observed exploitation of Connectwise ScreenConnect CVE-2024-1709 by the same actor. This mix of custom tooling and the SUPERSHELL framework leveraged in these incidents is assessed with moderate confidence to be unique to a People’s Republic of China (PRC) threat actor, UNC5174.…
📉 Exploit kit (EK) use has declined since late 2016, but some activity persists.
🌏 The Magnitude Exploit Kit remains active, especially in the APAC region.
🔄 The first reappearance of Magnitude EK on Oct. 15, 2017, came from a malvertising redirection from the domain fastprofit[.]loan.…
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Security professionals are often overwhelmed by the number of management consoles or platforms they need to jump between on any given day. Automating and sharing information into existing workflows can unburden these teams by eliminating mundane tasks and reducing human error.
Mandiant SaaS integrations save time and help make security teams more proactive.…
Today Mandiant is releasing a blog post about suspected Iran-nexus espionage activity targeting the aerospace, aviation and defense industries in Middle East countries, including Israel and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and potentially Turkey, India, and Albania.
Mandiant attributes this activity with moderate confidence to the Iranian actor UNC1549, which overlaps with Tortoiseshell—a threat actor that has been publicly linked to Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC).…
Mandiant and Ivanti’s investigations into widespread Ivanti zero-day exploitation have continued across a variety of industry verticals, including the U.S. defense industrial base sector. Following the initial publication on Jan. 10, 2024, Mandiant observed mass attempts to exploit these vulnerabilities by a small number of China-nexus threat actors, and development of a mitigation bypass exploit targeting CVE-2024-21893 used by UNC5325, which we introduced in our “Cutting Edge, Part 2” blog post. …
capa is the FLARE team’s open source tool that detects capabilities in executable files. Ghidra is an open source software reverse engineering framework created and maintained by the National Security Agency Research Directorate. With the release of capa v7, we have integrated capa with Ghidra, bringing capa’s detection capabilities directly to Ghidra’s user interface.…
On Jan. 12, 2024, Mandiant published a blog post detailing two high-impact zero-day vulnerabilities, CVE-2023-46805 and CVE-2024-21887, affecting Ivanti Connect Secure VPN (CS, formerly Pulse Secure) and Ivanti Policy Secure (PS) appliances. On Jan. 31, 2024, Ivanti disclosed two additional vulnerabilities impacting CS and PS devices, CVE-2024-21888 and CVE-2024-21893.
The vulnerabilities allow for an unauthenticated threat actor to execute arbitrary commands on the appliance with elevated privileges.…
Mandiant Managed Defense has been tracking UNC4990, an actor who heavily uses USB devices for initial infection. UNC4990 primarily targets users based in Italy and is likely motivated by financial gain. Our research shows this campaign has been ongoing since at least 2020.
Despite relying on the age-old tactic of weaponizing USB drives, UNC4990 continues to evolve their tools, tactics and procedures (TTPs).…
Update (Jan. 31): We released a follow-up blog post containing additional details from our investigations into this threat, along with more recommendations for defenders.
Note: This is a developing campaign under active analysis by Mandiant and Ivanti. We will continue to add more indicators, detections, and information to this blog post as needed.…
Earlier this year, Mandiant’s Managed Defense threat hunting team identified an UNC2975 malicious advertising (“malvertising”) campaign presented to users in sponsored search engine results and social media posts, consistent with activity reported in From DarkGate to DanaBot. This campaign dates back to at least June 19, 2023, and has abused search engine traffic and leveraged malicious advertisements to affect multiple organizations, which resulted in the delivery of the DANABOT and DARKGATE backdoors.…
In late 2022, Mandiant responded to a disruptive cyber physical incident in which the Russia-linked threat actor Sandworm targeted a Ukrainian critical infrastructure organization. This incident was a multi-event cyber attack that leveraged a novel technique for impacting industrial control systems (ICS) / operational technology (OT).…
Key Insights
APT29’s pace of operations and emphasis on Ukraine increased in the first half of 2023 as Kyiv launched its counteroffensive, pointing to the SVR’s central role in collecting intelligence concerning the current pivotal phase of the war.
During this period, Mandiant has tracked substantial changes in APT29’s tooling and tradecraft, likely designed to support the increased frequency and scope of operations and hinder forensic analysis. …
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On June 15, 2023, Mandiant released a blog post detailing an 8-month-long global espionage campaign conducted by a Chinese-nexus threat group tracked as UNC4841. In this follow-up blog post, we will detail additional tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs) employed by UNC4841 that have since been uncovered through Mandiant’s incident response engagements, as well as through collaborative efforts with Barracuda Networks and our International Government partners. …
Artificial intelligence (AI) and large language models (LLMs) can help threat intelligence teams to detect and understand novel threats at scale, reduce burnout-inducing toil, and grow their existing talent by democratizing access to subject matter expertise. However, broad access to foundational Open Source Intelligence (OSINT) data and AI/ML technologies has quickly led to an overwhelming amount of noise for users to sift through.…
Mandiant recently published a blog post about the compromise of Citrix NetScaler Application Delivery Controller (ADC) and NetScaler Gateway Appliances related to the zero-day vulnerability tracked as CVE-2023-3519. CVE-2023-3519 is a zero-day vulnerability that can enable remote code execution, and has been observed being exploited in the wild by a threat actor consistent with a China-nexus based on known capabilities and history of targeting Citrix ADCs.…
In July 2023, Mandiant Consulting responded to a supply chain compromise affecting a US-based software solutions entity. We believe the compromise ultimately began as a result of a sophisticated spear phishing campaign aimed at JumpCloud, a zero-trust directory platform service used for identity and access management.…
In the first half of 2023, Mandiant Managed Defense has observed a threefold increase in the number of attacks using infected USB drives to steal secrets. Mandiant tracked all of the cases and found that the majority of the incidents could be attributed to several active USB-based operation campaigns affecting both the public and private sectors globally.…
On May 23, 2023, Barracuda announced that a zero-day vulnerability (CVE-2023-2868) in the Barracuda Email Security Gateway (ESG) had been exploited in-the-wild as early as October 2022 and that they engaged Mandiant to assist in the investigation. Through the investigation, Mandiant identified a suspected China-nexus actor, currently tracked as UNC4841, targeting a subset of Barracuda ESG appliances to utilize as a vector for espionage, spanning a multitude of regions and sectors.…
Imagine you are a homeowner who wants to protect your valuable assets against theft. Vulnerability management is like installing a security system in your home. If someone tries to break in, it will help alert you to an unexpected open door or broken window. However, it cannot eliminate risk entirely.…