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APT43: Cyberespionage Group Targets Strategic Intelligence


APT43, also known as Kimsuky or Thallium, recently exposed by the Mandiant researchers, is a cyberespionage threat group supporting the objectives of the North Korean regime. By conducting credential harvesting attacks and successfully compromising its targets using social engineering, ATP43 concentrates on gathering strategic intelligence. 

Mandiant, which has been tracking APT43 since 2018, noted that the threat group supports the mission of the Reconnaissance General Bureau, North Korea's primary external intelligence agency. 

In terms of attribution indicators, APT43 shares infrastructure and tools with known North Korean operators and threat actors. Essentially, APT43 shares malware and tools with Lazarus. 

Targets of APT43 

Prior to 2021, the APT43 organization mostly targeted foreign policy and nuclear security challenges, but this changed in response to the global COVID-19 pandemic. 

APT43 primarily targets manufacturing products including fuel, machinery, metals, transportation vehicles, and weaponry whose sale to North Korea has been banned in South Korea, the U.S., Japan, and Europe. In addition to this, the group attacks business services, education, research and think tanks focusing on geopolitical and nuclear policy and government bodies. 

Spear Phishing and Social Engineering Techniques Used by APT 43 

Spear phishing is one of the primary methods used by APT43 to compromise its targets. The group frequently fabricates plausible personas, impersonating important figures. Ones they have succeeded in compromising one such individual, the threat group proceeds into using the person’s contact lists to aim further targets with spear phishing. 

In one such instance, exposed by Google, Archipelago (a subset of APT43) would send phishing emails where they portray themselves as a representative of a media outlet or think task asking the targeted victim for an interview. To view the questions, a link must be clicked, but doing so takes the victim to a phony Microsoft 365 or Google Drive login page. The victim is directed to a paper with questions after entering their credentials. 

According to the Google report, Archipelago tends to interact with the victim for several days in order to build trust before sending the malicious link or file. 

Another tactic used by Archipelago involves sending benign PDF files purportedly from a third party that alerts the recipient to fraudulent logins they should examine. 

Malware Families and Tools Used 

APT43 employs a variety of malware families and tools. Some of the public malware families used include Gh0st RAT, Quasar RAT, and Amadey. However, the threat group mostly uses a non-public malware called LATEOP or BabyShark, apparently developed by the group itself. 

How can you Protect Yourself from the APT43 Security Threat? 

Here, we have listed some measures that could ensure protection against  malicious APT43 attacks: 

  • Educate users about the social engineering techniques used by APT43 and Archipelago.  
  • Train users to detect phishing attempts and report them immediately to their security staff. 
  • Use security solutions to detect phishing emails or malware infection attempts. 
  • Keep operating systems and software up to date and patched. 

Moreover, professionals in the field of geopolitics and international politics are advised to be trained in detecting any approach from attackers or potential threat actors, posing as a journalist or a reporter. Careful identification and examination of such individuals approaching important figures must be taken into priority, prior to any exchange of information or intelligence.  

Using Employment Offers, North Korean Hackers Target Security Researchers

 

Security experts have been the victim of a hacking campaign by threat actors associated with the North Korean government that use cutting-edge methods and malware in an effort to infiltrate the organizations the targets work for, according to researchers.

As per researchers from security company Mandiant, they first became aware of the activity in June of last year while monitoring a phishing attempt that was aimed at a US-based client in the technology sector. By using three new malware families—Touchmove, Sideshow, and Touchshift—the hackers in this effort aimed to infect targets. In addition, while operating inside the cloud environments of their targets, the hackers in these assaults displayed new ability to evade endpoint detection technologies.

In order to communicate with their victims using WhatsApp, the attackers utilize social engineering to persuade them to do so. It is at this point that the malware payload 'PlankWalk' with a C++ backdoor, which aids in infiltrating the corporate environment of the target, is delivered.

In this operation, Mandiant believed UNC2970 targeted specifically security researchers. The North Korean threat actor, UNC2970, repeatedly breached US and European media organizations, prompting a reaction from Mandiant. In an effort to lure the targets and deceive them into installing the new virus, UNC2970 used spearphishing with a job advertisement theme.

Historically, UNC2970 has sent spearphishing emails with themes of employment recruitment to certain target organizations. The hackers approach their targets over LinkedIn and pose as recruiters for jobs before launching their attack. They eventually switched to WhatsApp to carry on the recruitment process, sharing a Word document with malicious macros.

Mandiant claims that these Word papers may occasionally be styled to fit the job descriptions they are marketing to their targets.The trojanized version of TightVNC is fetched using remote template injection performed by the Word document's macros from infected WordPress websites that act as the attacker's command and control servers.

The malware loads an encrypted DLL into the system's memory once it has been executed using reflection DLL injection.The loaded file is a malware downloader called 'LidShot,'which performs system enumeration and launches PlankWalk, the last payload that establishes a foothold on the compromised device.

Previously, North Korean hackers used phony social media identities that claimed to be vulnerability researchers to target security experts working on vulnerability and exploit development. Companies should also take into account other security measures, such as restricting macros, utilizing privileged identity management, conditional access policies, and security warnings. A dedicated admin account should be used for delicate administration tasks, and a another account should be used for email sending, web browsing, and similar activities.





Evolution of Gootkit Malware Using Obfuscations

Mandiant Managed Defense has reliably resolved GOOTLOADER infections since January 2021. When spreading GOOTLOADER, malicious actors cast a wide net, affecting a variety of industrial verticals and geographical areas.

Gootkit Malware

The Gootkit Trojan is Javascript-based malware that carries out a number of malicious tasks, such as authorizing threat actors remote access, recording video, capturing keystrokes, stealing emails, stealing passwords, and having the ability to inject malicious files to steal online banking login details.

Gootkit previously spread malware in the disguise of freeware installers, but now it deceives users into downloading these files by presenting them as legal documents. A user enters a search query into a search engine to begin the attack chain. 

Mandiant Managed Defense believes that UNC2565, a group it tracks, is the sole group that the GOOTLOADER virus and infrastructure belong to at this time. Due to these breaches' rapid detection and mitigation, Mandiant's observation of post-compromise GOOTLOADER activities has mostly been restricted to internal surveillance.

If the GOOTLOADER file is successfully executed, other payloads like FONELAUNCH and Cobalt Strike BEACON or SNOWCONE that are saved in the registry will be downloaded. Future phases include PowerShell being used to execute these payloads.

The. NET-based loader FONELAUNCH is intended to load an encoded payload into memory, while the downloader SNOWCONE is responsible for obtaining next-stage payloads, notably IcedID, through HTTP.

The primary aims of Gootkit have remained the same, however, the attack process has undergone substantial modifications. Currently, the JavaScript file contained in the ZIP archive is trojanized and contains a different JavaScript file that is obfuscated and then begins to execute the malware.

Furthermore, to avoid detection, the malware's creators allegedly used three distinct strategies to cloak Gootkit, including hiding the code inside modified versions of trustworthy JavaScript libraries like jQuery, Chroma.js, and Underscore.js. These modifications show how actively developing and expanding UNC2565's capabilities remain.


Hackers Designs Malware for Recently Patched Fortinet Zero-Day Vulnerability


Researchers who recently disclosed and patched the zero-day vulnerability in Fortinet's FortiOS SSL-VPN technology have identified a new backdoor, specifically created in order to run on Fortinet’s FortiGate firewalls. 

Initial evidence collected by Google-owned security firm Mandiant suggests that the exploitation occurred in October 2022, nearly two months before the vulnerability was patched. Targets included a government entity in Europe and a managed services provider in Africa. 

According to a report published by Mandiant, the malware appears to have been created by a China-based threat actor that conducts cyber-espionage operations against individuals and groups associated with the government. 

It is the most recent instance of attackers from the country attacking firewalls, IPS, IDS, and other technologies used by businesses to secure their networks that are internet-facing. 

BoldMove Backdoor 

The attacks involved the use of a sophisticated backdoor known as BOLDMOVE, a Linux variant created especially to run on Fortinet's FortiGate firewalls. 

The intrusion vector in question is the exploitation of CVE-2022-42475, a heap-based buffer overflow flaw in FortiOS SSL-VPN that could allow for unauthenticated remote code execution through carefully constructed requests. 

Earlier this month, Fortinet revealed that the unidentified hacking groups had taken advantage of the flaw to attack governments and other major institutions with a generic Linux implant capable of delivering additional payloads and carrying out remote server commands. 

Mandiant findings also indicate that the hackers managed to exploit the zero-day vulnerability to their advantage, accessing target networks for espionage operations. "With BOLDMOVE, the attackers not only developed an exploit, but malware that shows an in-depth understanding of systems, services, logging, and undocumented proprietary formats," Mandiant added. 

The BoldMove Backdoor malware, written in C, is apparently available in both Windows and Linux versions, with the latter being able to read data from a Fortinet-exclusive file format. 

Moreover, according to Fortinet’s report, an extended Linux sample comes with a feature that allows attackers to disable and manipulate logging features in order to evade detection. Despite the fact that no copies of the backdoor have been found in the wild, metadata analysis of the Windows variations reveals that they were created as early as 2021. 

"The exploitation of zero-day vulnerabilities in networking devices, followed by the installation of custom implants, is consistent with previous Chinese exploitation of networking devices," Mandiant noted. 

Schooled in FortiOS 

Meanwhile, Fortinet itself described the malware as a variant of “generic” Linux backdoor designed by threat actors for FortiOS. According to the company's analysis, affected systems may have had the malicious file disguising itself as a part of Fortinet's IPS engine. 

According to Fortinet, one of the malware's more advanced features included manipulating FortiOS log-in to avoid detection. The malware can search FortiOS for event logs, decompress them in memory, and search for and delete a specific string that allows it to reconstruct the logs. The malware can also completely disable logging processes. 

"The complexity of the exploit suggests an advanced actor and that it is highly targeted at governmental or government-related targets," says Fortinet. 

Fortinet adds that designing the malware would have required the threat actors to have a “deep understanding” of the FortiOS and its underlying hardware. "The use of custom implants shows that the actor has advanced capabilities, including reverse-engineering various parts of FortiOS," the vendor said.  

North Korean Hackers Exploit Systems via Deploying PuTTY SSH Tool

An attack using a new spear phishing tactic that makes use of trojanized variants of the PuTTY SSH and Telnet client has been discovered with a North Korea link.

The malicious actors identified by Mandiant as the source of such effort is 'UNC4034', also referred to as Temp.Hermit or Labyrinth Chollima. Mandiant asserted that the UNC4034 technique was currently changing.

UNC4034 made contact with the victim via WhatsApp and tricked them into downloading a malicious ISO package in the form of a bogus job offer. This caused the AIRDRY.V2 backdoor to be installed via a trojanized PuTTY instance. 

As part of a long-running operation called Operation Dream Job, North Korean state-sponsored hackers frequently use fake job lures as a means of spreading malware. One such group is the Lazarus Group. 

The ios file had a bogus amazon job offer which was the entry point for hackers to breach data. After making initial contact via email, the file was exchanged over WhatsApp. 

The archive itself contains a text file with an IP address and login information, as well as a modified version of PuTTY that loads a dropper named DAVESHELL that installs a newer version of a backdoor known as AIRDRY. 

The threat actor probably persuaded the victim to open a PuTTY session and connect to the remote host using the credentials listed in the TXT file, therefore initiating the infection. Once the program has been launched, it makes an effort to persist by adding a new, scheduled task every day at 10:30 a.m. local time.

After a target responds to a fake job lure, the criminals may use a variety of malware delivery methods, according to Mandiant. 

The most recent version of the virus has been found to forego the command-based method in favor of plugins which are downloaded and processed in memory, in contrast to prior versions of the malware that included roughly 30 commands for transferring files, file systems, and command execution.

Several technical indicators are also included in the Mandiant alert to aid businesses in identifying UNC4034-related activities. Days before its publication, US authorities confiscated $30 million in North Korean cryptocurrency that had been stolen.

LastPass Hacked, Customer Data and Vaults Secure

The password manager, LastPass recently unveiled that the attackers who breached its security in August 2020 also had access to its network for four days. 
 
As per the latest statements by LastPass, the company suffered from the interference of cyber attackers for four days in august 2022. Luckily, the company was able to detect and remove malicious actors during this period. 

With regards to the investigation updates concerning the security breach, the CEO of LastPass, Karim Toubba published a notice, stating, “We have completed the investigation and forensics process in partnership with Mandiant.” 
 
Furtermore, the company also stated, “There is no evidence of any threat actor activity beyond the established timeline. We can also confirm that there is no evidence that this incident involved any access to customer data or encrypted password vaults.” 
 
During the investigation, the company found that the malicious actors got access to the development environment by compromising a developer’s endpoint. After the developer completed its multi-factor authentication, the cyber attackers used their persistent access in imitating the developer and entered the development environment. 
 
However, the company commented that the system design and controls of the developer environment prevented threat actors from meddling with customer data or coded password vaults. 
 
The security measures of LastPass include a master password, which is required to access the vaults and decrypt the data. However, LastPass does not store that master password, which invalidates any other attempt of accessing other than by the user himself. In essence, LastPass does not have access to its users' master passwords. 

In an analysis of source code and production, it was found that as LastPass does not allow any developer from the development environment to push source code into a production environment without a fixed process, the threat actors were also unable to inject any code-poisoning or malicious code. 
 
In order to extend support to LastPass’s customers, Toubab further assured in the notice that they "have deployed enhanced security controls including additional endpoint security controls and monitoring.” The company has worked jointly with Mandiant, an American cybersecurity firm and a subsidiary of Google – to conclude that no sensitive data has been compromised. 

In 2015, the company witnessed a security incident that impacted email addresses, authentication hashes, and password reminders along with other data. Today, LastPass has approximately 33 million customers, thus a similar security breach would have a more jarring impact and hence is a matter of utmost concern. LastPass persuaded customers that their private data and passwords are safe with them as there was no evidence suggesting that any customer data was compromised. 


Iranian Hackers Allegedly Exploiting Israeli Entities

Mandiant has been analyzing UNC3890, a group of hackers that uses social engineering lures and a possible watering hole to target Israeli maritime, government, energy, and healthcare institutions, for the past year.

With a major emphasis on shipping and the current marine war between Iran and Israel, Mandiant estimates with a low degree of confidence that this actor is connected to Iran. Although experts believe this actor is primarily interested in gathering intelligence, the data is used to assist a range of actions, from hack-and-leak to enabling kinetic warfare strikes like those that have recently hit the marine sector. 

According to John Hultquist, vice president of threat intelligence at Mandiant, "the maritime industry or the global supply chain is highly vulnerable to disruption, especially in countries where a state of the low-level conflict already exists."

Luring method 

Watering holes and data theft have been the primary entry points for UNC3890. The latter collected passwords and sent phishing lures using the group's C2 servers, which it posed as reputable services. 

The servers display false job offers and bogus advertising, and fake login pages for services like Office 365 and social media sites like LinkedIn and Facebook.

Additionally, the researchers discovered a UNC3890 server that included Facebook and Instagram account data that had been spoofed and might have been utilized in social engineering attempts.

A.xls file posed as a job offer but intended to install Sugardump—one of two distinct tools being utilized by the hackers —was probably one potential phishing lure employed by the attackers. 

A credential harvesting program called Sugardump can get passwords out of Chromium-based browsers. The second device is called Sugarush, a backdoor that may be used to connect to an implanted C2 and run CMD instructions. 

A reverse shell is established over TCP using Sugarush, as per experts, they call it "a modest but efficient backdoor." It scans for internet access. If connectivity is possible, Sugarush creates a fresh TCP connection via port 4585 to a built-in C&C address and waits for a response. The response is treated as a CMD command that should be executed.

Other tools utilized by UNC3890 include Metasploit, Northstar C2, and Unicorn (a tool for running a PowerShell downgrade attack and injecting shellcode into memory.)

Sugardump was discovered in several forms. The earliest includes two variations and dates until early 2021. This initial version merely keeps login details without exposing them. It might be partial malware or software made to work with other tools to exfiltrate data.

The second variant, which was created in late 2021 or early 2022, uses SMTP for C2 communication and Yahoo, Yandex, and Gmail accounts for exfiltration. The researchers make a connection between a specific phishing appeal and a social engineering movie that has an advertisement for an AI-powered robotic doll.





Quantum Ransomware was Detected in Several Network Attacks

 

Quantum ransomware, originally spotted in August 2021, has been found carrying out fast attacks which expand quickly, leaving defenders with little time to react. The assault began with the installation of an IcedID payload on a user endpoint, followed by the launch of Quantum ransomware 3 hours and 44 minutes later. It was identified by DFIR Report researchers as one of the fastest ransomware attacks it had ever seen. IcedID and ISO files have recently been utilized in other attacks, as these files are great for getting past email security safeguards.

According to Mandiant's M-Trends 2022 study, the threat actors began encrypting the victim's data only 29 hours after the first breach in a Ryuk ransomware assault in October 2020. The median global dwell period for ransomware is around 5 days. However, once the ransomware has been installed, the data of the victim may be encrypted in minutes. According to a recent analysis from Splunk, ransomware encrypts data in an average of 43 minutes, with the fastest encryption time being less than 6 minutes. 

The IcedID payload was stored within an ISO image which was presumably distributed by email in the examined Quantum ransomware outbreak. The malware was disguised as a "document" file, which was an LNK file designed to run a DLL (IcedID). Several discovery activities were run when the DLL was executed, utilizing various built-in Windows functions, and a scheduled job was constructed to ensure persistence. 

Cobalt Strike was installed into the victim system about two hours after the first breach, allowing the attackers to begin 'hands-on-keyboard' behavior. The fraudsters then began network reconnaissance, which included identifying each host in the environment as well as the active directory structure of the target organization. After releasing the memory of LSASS, the intruders were able to steal Windows domain credentials and spread laterally via the network. 

Cobalt Strike was also used by the attackers to collect credentials and test them for remote WMI detection tasks. The credentials enabled the adversary to log in to a target server through the remote desktop protocol (RDP), from which they attempted to distribute Cobalt Strike Beacon. The malicious actors then used RDP to access other servers in the system, where they prepared to deliver Quantum ransomware per each host. Threat actors eventually used WMI and PsExec to deliver the Quantum ransomware payload and encrypt devices via WMI and PsExec. 

The Quantum Locker ransomware is a rebranded version of the MountLocker malware, which first appeared in September 2020. Since then, the ransomware gang has gone by several names, including AstroLocker, XingLocker, and Quantum Locker, which is now in its current phase. 

While the DFIR report claims since no data exfiltration activity was detected in the assault they investigated, researchers claim the ransom demands for this gang fluctuate based on the victim, with some attacks seeking $150,000 in exchange for a decryptor. Quantum Locker, unlike its prior versions, is not a highly active operation, with only a few attacks per month.

Researchers Found Three New Malware Strains in a Phishing Campaign

 

A global phishing program used never-before-seen malware strains distributed by specially-tailored lures to attack global organizations across a broad range of industries. According to a Mandiant report released today, the attacks targeted at least 50 organizations from a diverse range of sectors in two waves, on December 2nd and between December 11th and 18th. 

UNC2529 is the name of the threat actors behind the malware, who are identified as "experienced and well-resourced." Organizations in the United States, the EMEA zone, Asia, and Australia have been attacked in two waves so far. 

Threat actors would also pose as account executives touting services suitable for various industries, such as security, medication, transportation, the military, and electronics, in phishing messages sent to prospective victims. 

The global phishing scheme was controlled by over 50 domains in total. UNC2529 hacked a domain owned by a US heating and cooling services company, tampered with its DNS data, and used this structure to conduct phishing attacks against at least 22 entities in one successful attack. The lure emails included links to URLs that led to malicious.PDF payloads and a JavaScript file stored in a.zip folder. The records, which were obtained from public databases, were compromised to the point that they were unreadable, prompting victims to double-click the.js file in an effort to read the content. 

"The threat actor made extensive use of obfuscation and file-less malware to complicate detection to deliver a well-coded and extensible backdoor," Mandiant said. 

The threat group used phishing emails with links to a JavaScript-based downloader (labeled DOUBLEDRAG) or an Excel document with an embedded macro that downloaded an in-memory PowerShell-based dropper (labeled DOUBLEDROP) from attackers' command-and-control (C2) servers during the two waves of attacks. The DOUBLEDROP dropper includes 32-bit and 64-bit versions of the DOUBLEBACK backdoor, which is implemented as a PE dynamic library. 

"The backdoor, once it has the execution control, loads its plugins and then enters a communication loop, fetching commands from its [command-and-control] C2 server and dispatching them," Mandiant notes. "One interesting fact about the whole ecosystem is that only the downloader exists in the file system. The rest of the components are serialized in the registry database, which makes their detection somewhat harder, especially by file-based antivirus engines."

Hacker Attacked a Water Plant in Florida

 

A hacker penetrated computer networks at Oldsmar, Florida, water treatment plant, remotely delivering a 100-fold boost in a chemical that is exceptionally perilous in concentrated sums. In an assault with the possibility to harm public health, the hacker on February 5 accessed a city computer and changed the level of sodium hydroxide which is utilized to eliminate metals and control acidity, from 100 parts for each million to 11,100 parts for every million, as per Bob Gualtieri, who serves as the sheriff of Pinellas County. 

This is a “significant and potentially dangerous increase,” Gualtieri said at a Monday press conference. The attacker momentarily entered the computer system at 8 a.m. on Feb. 5, before leaving and returning at about 1:30 p.m. for roughly three to five minutes, Gualtieri said. In that window, the operator of the water plant could see the attacker on screen, “with the mouse being moved about to open various software functions that control the water being treated in the system,” Gualtieri said. 

When the hacker left the computer system, the operator whose computer was remotely taken over promptly brought down the level of the chemical, otherwise called lye. This move forestalled any harm to people in general and the drinking water, Gualtieri said. He said there were extra counteraction measures inside the water system that would have kept polluted water from reaching the public. It isn't yet known whether the break originated from the U.S., or outside of the country, Gualtieri said. Oldsmar, with a population of almost 15,000, is situated around 15 miles northwest of Tampa.

“Many of the victims appear to have been selected arbitrarily, such as small critical infrastructure asset owners and operators who serve a limited population set,” said Daniel Kapellmann Zafra, manager of analysis at Mandiant Threat Intelligence. Through “remote interaction with these systems,” the hackers have engaged in “limited-impact operations.” None of those examples brought about any damage to individuals or infrastructure, Zafra said. “We believe that the increasing interest of low sophisticated actors in industrial control systems is the result of the increased availability of tools and resources that allow malicious actors to learn about interactions with these systems,” he added.