Cisco Talos has observed new cyber attacks targeting Turkey and other Asian countries we believe with high confidence are from groups operating under the MuddyWater umbrella of APT groups. U.S. Cyber Command recently connected MuddyWater to Iran’s Ministry of Intelligence and Security (MOIS).
These campaigns primarily utilize malicious documents (maldocs) to deploy downloaders and RATs implemented in a variety of languages, such as PowerShell, Visual Basic and JavaScript.…
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Tag: GOVERNMENT
What Global Network Visibility Reveals about the Resurgence of One of the World’s Most Notorious Botnets
Executive Summary
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Since its reemergence on Nov. 14, 2021, Black Lotus Labs has once again been tracking Emotet, one of the world’s most prolific malware distribution families which previously infected more than 1.6M devices and caused hundreds of millions of dollars in damage across critical infrastructure, healthcare, government organizations and enterprises around the world.…
For additional information regarding deserialization exploits and our new hunting rule generation tool ‘HeySerial’, read our blog post, Now You Serial, Now You Don’t — Systematically Hunting for Deserialization Exploits.
USAHerds (CVE-2021-44207) Zero-DayIn three investigations from 2021, APT41 exploited a zero-day vulnerability in the USAHerds web application.…
In the past few months, a new wave of cyberattacks has been flooding Iran. These attacks are far from minor website defacements – the recent wave is hitting national infrastructure and causing major disruptions to public services.
This article provides an in-depth technical analysis of one of the attacks against the Iranian national media corporation, Islamic Republic of Iran Broadcasting (IRIB) which occurred in late January 2022.…
Over the past year, FortiEDR has prevented multiple attacks that attempted to exploit various Microsoft Exchange server vulnerabilities, some of which we have previously covered.
Among these attacks, we identified a campaign operated by Moses Staff, a geo-political motivated threat group believed to be sponsored by the Iranian government.…
Executive Summary
Our research attributes a decade of activity to a threat actor we call ModifiedElephant.
ModifiedElephant is responsible for targeted attacks on human rights activists, human rights defenders, academics, and lawyers across India with the objective of planting incriminating digital evidence.
ModifiedElephant has been operating since at least 2012, and has repeatedly targeted specific individuals.…
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In recent months, there has been continuous media coverage of the geopolitical tensions in Eastern Europe around the threats of a Russian invasion of Ukraine. As one may expect, there has been an observable uptick in cyberattacks on related government networks and personnel. One notable case is the so-called “#WhisperGate” malware which is destructive to the systems which it infects.…
Summary
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The ShadowPad advanced modular remote access trojan (RAT) has been deployed by the Chinese government-sponsored BRONZE ATLAS threat group since at least 2017. A growing list of other Chinese threat groups have deployed it globally since 2019 in attacks against organizations in various industry verticals.…
Recently, we’ve been researching several threat actors operating in South Asia: Transparent Tribe, SideCopy, etc., that deploy a range of remote access trojans (RATs). After a hunting session in our malware sample repositories and VirusTotal while looking into these actors, we gathered a small collection of VBA code samples that eventually allowed us to connect certain IOCs to individual threat actors based on the final payload, victimology and submission locations.…
February 3, 2022
[UPDATE] On February 4, 2022, Zimbra provided an update regarding this zero-day exploit vulnerability and reported that a hotfix for 8.8.15 P30 would be available on February 5, 2022. This vulnerability was later assigned CVE-2022-24682 and was fixed in version 8.8.15P30 Update 2 of Zimbra Collaboration Suite.…
A new phishing campaign is using specially crafted CSV text files to infect users’ devices with the BazarBackdoor malware.
A comma-separated values (CSV) file is a text file containing lines of text with columns of data separated by commas. In many cases, the first line of text is the header, or description, for each column.…
Over the past months, the Cybereason Nocturnus Team has been tracking the Iranian hacker group known as Moses Staff. The group was first spotted in October 2021 and claims their motivation is to harm Israeli companies by leaking sensitive, stolen data. …
Cisco Talos has observed a new campaign targeting Turkish private organizations alongside governmental institutions.
Talos attributes this campaign with high confidence to MuddyWater — an APT group recently attributed to Iran’s Ministry of Intelligence and Security (MOIS) by the U.S. Cyber Command. This campaign utilizes malicious PDFs, XLS files and Windows executables to deploy malicious PowerShell-based downloaders acting as initial footholds into the target’s enterprise.…Broadcom Software, has found evidence of attempted attacks against a number of organizations in the country.
Active since at least 2013, Shuckworm specializes in cyber-espionage campaigns mainly against entities in Ukraine. The group is known to use phishing emails to distribute either freely available remote access tools, including Remote Manipulator System (RMS) and UltraVNC, or customized malware called Pterodo/Pteranodon to targets.…
StellarParticle is a campaign tracked by CrowdStrike as related to the SUNSPOT implant from the SolarWinds intrusion in December 2020 and associated with COZY BEAR (aka APT29, “The Dukes”).
The StellarParticle campaign has continued against multiple organizations, with COZY BEAR using novel tools and techniques to complete their objectives, as identified by CrowdStrike incident responders and the CrowdStrike Intelligence team.…
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The Belarusian Cyber Partisans have shared documents related to another hack, and explained that Curated Intel member, SttyK, would “understand some of the methods used.”
Written by @BushidoToken and edited by @SteveD3
On Monday 24 January 2022, a Belarusian hacktivist group going by the name Belarusian Cyber-Partisans claimed responsibility for a limited attack against the national railway company.…We investigated the most recent activities of APT36, also known as Earth Karkaddan, a politically motivated advanced persistent threat (APT) group, and discuss its use of CapraRAT, an Android RAT with clear similarities in design to the group’s favored Windows malware, Crimson RAT.
APT36, also known as Earth Karkaddan, a politically motivated advanced persistent threat (APT) group, has historically targeted Indian military and diplomatic resources.…
Donot Team (also known as APT-C-35 and SectorE02) is a threat actor operating since at least 2016 and known for targeting organizations and individuals in South Asia with Windows and Android malware. A recent report by Amnesty International links the group’s malware to an Indian cybersecurity company that may be selling the spyware or offering a hackers-for-hire service to governments of the region.…
During the back half of 2021, INKY began detecting phishing emails that impersonated the United States Department of Labor (DoL). Eventually, the campaign grew to hundreds of instances.
INKY caught enough of these attempts to do a thorough analysis of the campaign, which is set out in this edition of Fresh Phish.…