During our routine threat-hunting exercise, Cyble Research & Intelligence Labs (CRIL) came across a Twitter post wherein a researcher mentioned an interesting infection chain of the Bumblebee loader malware being distributed via spam campaigns.
Bumblebee is a replacement for the BazarLoader malware, which acts as a downloader and delivers known attack frameworks and open-source tools such as Cobalt Strike, Shellcode, Sliver, Meterpreter, etc.…
Play is a new ransomware that takes a page out of Hive and Nokoyawa’s playbook. The many similarities among them indicate that Play, like Nokoyawa, are operated by the same people.
In July, we investigated a spate of ransomware cases in the Latin American region that targeted government entitles, which was initially attributed to a new player known as Play ransomware.…
Mitiga spotted a sophisticated, advanced business email compromise (BEC) campaign, directly targeting relevant executives of organizations (mostly CEOs and CFOs) usingOffice 365. The attackers combine high-end spear-phishing with an adversary-in-the-middle (AiTM) attack to circumvent multi-factor authentication (MFA) and a Microsoft 365 design flaw that allows them to create access persistency with MFA.…
Summary
Actions for ZCS administrators to take today to mitigate malicious cyber activity:
• Patch all systems and prioritize patching known exploited vulnerabilities.
• Deploy detection signatures and hunt for indicators of compromise (IOCs).
• If ZCS was compromised, remediate malicious activity.
Updated November 10, 2022: This product was written by the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) and the Multi-State Information Sharing and Analysis Center (MS-ISAC) with contributions by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI).…
As we continue to monitor the cyber situation in Ukraine, the data we are seeing shows some interesting trends. Not only has the volume of attacks continued rising throughout the war in Ukraine, the types of attacks have been varied. A common tactic of cyber criminals is to run automated exploit attempts, hitting as many possible targets as they can to see what gets a result.…
Recently, a simple and short email with a suspicious RTF attachment that had been sent to a telecommunications agency in South Asia caught the attention of FortiGuard Labs. The email was disguised as having come from a Pakistan government division and delivered the PivNoxy malware.
Affected Platforms: WindowsImpacted Parties: Windows usersImpact: Controls victim’s machine and collects sensitive informationSeverity Level: Medium
This blog describes how the attack works, suggests who the threat actor behind the operation might be, and details the techniques used by the attacker.…
DarkTortilla is a complex and highly configurable .NET-based crypter that has possibly been active since at least August 2015. It typically delivers popular information stealers and remote access trojans (RATs) such as AgentTesla, AsyncRat, NanoCore, and RedLine. While it appears to primarily deliver commodity malware, Secureworks® Counter Threat Unit™ (CTU) researchers identified DarkTortilla samples delivering targeted payloads such as Cobalt Strike and Metasploit.…
Resecurity, Inc. (USA), a Los Angeles-based cybersecurity company providing managed threat detection and response for Fortune 500’s, identified threat actors leveraging Open Redirect Vulnerabilities popular in online services and apps to bypass spam filters to ultimately deliver phishing content.
Using highly trusted service domains like Snapchat and other online-services, they create special URLs which lead to malicious resources with phishing kits.…
This post is also available in: 日本語 (Japanese)
Executive SummaryAmong the threat actors distributing Bumblebee is Projector Libra. Also known as EXOTIC LILY, Projector Libra is a criminal group that uses file sharing services to distribute malware after direct email correspondence with a potential victim.…
By Edmund Brumaghin, Azim Khodjibaev and Matt Thaxton, with contributions from Arnaud Zobec.
Executive Summary Dark Utilities, released in early 2022, is a platform that provides full-featured C2 capabilities to adversaries. It is marketed as a means to enable remote access, command execution, distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks and cryptocurrency mining operations on infected systems.…By: Joshua Platt and Jason Reaves
PrivateLoader[1,2,3,4] continues to function as an effective loading service, recently leveraging the use of SmokeLoader for their loads.
A recent sample of their SmokeLoader can be seen here(b01195c3e828d9a79c958e4c810a363d804d51996337db89a5d248096846b27a), the C2 domains for the sample are a hallmark for PrivateLoader:
host-file-host6.comhost-host-file8.com…This paper investigates a recent Emotet intrusion and details how the final Emotet payload is installed onto the system. The key observations are:
Obfuscated Excel macros used to download and run the Emotet loader. Emotet loader executed using regsvr32.exe. Encrypted Emotet payload embedded in loader’s .rsrc…A few months ago, we reported on an interesting site called the Chameleon Phishing Page. These websites have the capability to change their background and logo depending on the user’s domain. The phishing site is stored in IPFS (InterPlanetary File System) and after reviewing the URLs used by the attacker, we noticed an increasing number of phishing emails containing IPFS URLs as their payload. …
In June 2022, LockBit revealed version 3.0 of its ransomware. In this blog entry, we discuss the findings from our own technical analysis of this variant and its behaviors, many of which are similar to those of the BlackMatter ransomware.
In March 2022, less than a year after LockBit 2.0 first emerged, researchers caught wind of an upcoming new variant of the LockBit ransomware. LockBit…
During a routine threat-hunting exercise, Cyble Research Labs came across a Twitter post wherein a researcher shared new IoCs related to the infamous Qakbot malware.
For initial infection, Qakbot uses an email mass spamming campaign. The Qakbot Threat Actors (TAs) have continuously evolved their infection techniques ever since it was initially identified in the wild.…
Fortinet’s FortiGuard Labs captured a phishing email as part of a phishing campaign spreading a new variant of QakBot. Also known as QBot, QuackBot, or Pinkslipbot, QakBot is an information stealer and banking Trojan that has been captured and analyzed by security researchers since 2007.
I performed a deep analysis on this phishing campaign and the new QakBot variant using the captured email.…
日前，安天副总工程师李柏松接受《环球时报》记者的采访，披露了安天CERT近期发现的印度APT组织“Confucius”，及其针对巴基斯坦政府、军事机构的攻击活动（环球网文章详见今日第二条转载文章）。本篇为详细分析报告。
01 概述近期，安天CERT在对来自南亚次大陆方向的攻击事件进行追踪和梳理时，发现一起Confucius组织针对巴基斯坦政府、军事机构的攻击活动。
该组织的命名最早出自国外安全厂商Palo Alto Networks在2016年发布的分析报告[1]，在该报告中，Palo Alto Networks披露了一个印度攻击组织的攻击活动，该组织攻击活动最早可追溯至2013年，其擅长使用鱼叉式钓鱼邮件、水坑攻击以及钓鱼网站，配合丰富的社会工程学手段对中国、巴基斯坦、孟加拉国等印度周边国家政府、军事、能源等领域开展以窃取敏感资料为目的的攻击活动。该组织在早期攻击活动中，曾借助具备留言互动功能的国际知名网站（例如Quora，类似我国的知乎），在公开的留言中夹带经过加密编码处理的木马远控服务器地址。该组织使用的木马被植入受害主机后，可从这类公开留言中获取内容，解密还原真正远控服务器地址。因此，木马在受害主机的首次网络访问行为会被视为正常的网页请求，而攻击者却可以借助这些国际知名网站持续更换远控地址或下发其他指令。Palo Alto Networks在相关恶意代码连接的一个Quora页面中，发现攻击者张贴的内容有“Confucius says”字样，即“孔夫子说”，或“子曰”，于是把这个组织称为Confucius。可见攻击者持续攻击中国过程中，也对中国的文化进行了研究。
在安天CERT发现的本次攻击活动中，该组织主要伪装成巴基斯坦政府工作人员向目标投递鱼叉式钓鱼邮件，通过钓鱼邮件内容诱骗目标下载、打开嵌入恶意宏代码的文档，从而向目标机器植入开源木马QuasarRAT、自研C++后门木马、C#窃密木马以及JScript下载者木马。
目前，该起攻击活动已引起巴基斯坦政府相关部门注意，其中巴基斯坦国家电信和信息技术安全委员会（NTISB）多次发出全国网络威胁预警[2][3]，称攻击者正在向政府官员和公众发送模仿巴基斯坦总理办公室的虚假网络钓鱼电子邮件，因此要求政府官员和公众保持警惕，不要通过电子邮件和社交媒体链接提供任何信息。 本报告对从2021年至今的Confucius组织攻击活动、手法和工具做一定程度的总结，整体活动的特征可简要总结如下表：表1‑1 整体攻击活动特征总结
攻击时间
2021年至今
攻击意图
持续控制、窃密
针对目标
巴基斯坦
针对行业/领域
政府、军事机构
攻击手法
鱼叉邮件、钓鱼网站、利用第三方云存储服务存放恶意载荷
目标系统平台
Windows
诱饵类型
诱饵PDF文件、恶意宏文档、恶意RTF文件、恶意快捷方式等
开发语言
C++、VBScript、C#以及JScript
武器装备
C++后门木马，C#窃密木马、C#下载者木马、开源木马QuasarRAT、JScript下载者木马
02 活动分析 从2021年下半年至今，安天CERT陆续捕获到Confucius组织针对巴基斯坦进行攻击的样本文件，捕获样本的攻击时间线如下： 2021年6月份利用巴基斯坦军队牺牲者名单有关内容的恶意RTF文档进行攻击； 2021年8月份利用巴基斯坦军方关于Pegasus间谍软件警告内容的宏文档进行攻击； 2021年8月份利用巴基斯坦联邦税务局税务申报有关内容的宏文档进行攻击； 2022年2月份利用伪装成图片文件的恶意快捷方式文件进行攻击； 2022年2月份利用巴基斯坦政府员工COVID-19疫苗接种状态表、数字资产审计表等有关内容的宏文档进行攻击； 2022年5月份利用巴基斯坦总理办公室员工职位申请表有关内容的宏文档进行攻击； 2022年6月份利用巴基斯坦外交部有关内容的恶意宏文档进行攻击。 在此次攻击活动中，攻击者主要以巴基斯坦政府工作人员的名义向目标投递鱼叉式钓鱼邮件，钓鱼邮件的内容大多数与巴基斯坦政府有关，例如，以巴基斯坦总理办公室的名义要求政府工作人员更新COVID-19疫苗接种情况。图2‑1 钓鱼邮件
攻击者在钓鱼邮件的正文中、附件PDF文件中嵌入了不同类型的恶意链接，当目标查阅钓鱼邮件后便会被攻击者精心设计的邮件正文、PDF文件内容诱骗，从而点击恶意链接下载具有恶意宏代码的文档。 攻击者使用的恶意链接主要分为以下三种： ▶ 仿冒政府网站的钓鱼网站访问链接：攻击者利用HTTrack等网站克隆工具，搭建仿冒政府部门官网的钓鱼网站（如巴基斯坦总理办公室、巴基斯坦国防大学学报、巴基斯坦联邦税务局），当目标通过钓鱼网站访问链接访问钓鱼网站时，攻击者通过网站内容诱骗目标下载携带恶意宏的文档。 表2‑1 仿冒域名域名
仿冒对象
pmogov.info…
Authored by Lakshya Mathur
An LNK file is a Windows Shortcut that serves as a pointer to open a file, folder, or application. LNK files are based on the Shell Link binary file format, which holds information used to access another data object. These files can be created manually using the standard right-click create shortcut option or sometimes they are created automatically while running an application.…
DarkComet is a Remote Access Trojan (RAT) application that may run in the background and silently collect information about the system, connected users, and network activity.
It may attempt to steal stored credentials, usernames and passwords, and other personal and confidential information. This information may be transmitted to a destination specified by the author. …
During our routine threat-hunting exercise, Cyble Research Labs came across a Twitter post wherein a researcher mentioned an interesting infection chain of Xloader malware.
The malware uses multiple file types such as PDF, XLSX, and RTF for its initial infection and execution. It is also designed to drop three modules in memory and execute the final payload using the Process-Hollowing technique.…