Patchwork APT !

Patchwork is an Indian threat actor that has been active since December 2015 and usually targets Pakistan via spear phishing attacks. Patchwork has used malicious RTF files to drop a variant of the BADNEWS (Ragnatela) RAT in recent campaign targeting medical researchers

Ragnatela

A new variant of the BADNEWS RAT called Ragnatela being distributed via spear phishing emails to targets of interest in Pakistan. Ragnatela, which means spider web in Italian, is also the project name and panel used by Patchwork APT.

Ragnatela RAT features with the following capabilities:

Executing commands via cmd
Capturing screenshots
Logging Keystrokes
Collecting list of all the files in victim’s machine
Collecting list of the running applications in the victim’s machine at a specific time periods
Downing addition payloads
Uploading files

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Patchwork lures them with documents impersonating Pakistani authorities for distribution. For example, a document called EOIForm.rtf was uploaded by the threat actor onto their own server at karachidha[.]org/docs/. The file contains an exploit which is meant to compromise the victim’s computer and execute the final payload (RAT).That payload is stored within the RTF document as an OLE object.

Ragnatela RAT communicates with the attacker’s infrastructure via a server located at bgre.kozow[.]com. Prior to launching this campaign, the threat actor tested that their server was up and running properly.

Victims

Ministry of Defense- Government of Pakistan
National Defense University of Islam Abad
Faculty of Bio-Science, UVAS University, Lahore, Pakistan
International center for chemical and biological sciences
HEJ Research institute of chemistry, International center for chemical and biological sciences, univeristy of Karachi
SHU University, Molecular medicine