Category: APT

APT Kimsuky !

The United States has warned of a cyber attack by a North Korean hacking group known as “Kimsuky.”

The Federal Bureau of Investigation(FBI), Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency(CISA) and U.S. Cyber Command(USCC) issued the warning to the private sector.

The agencies said the hackers engaged in advanced persistent threat(APT) and tend to run intelligence-gathering intrusions against targets in South Korea, Japan and the U.S., focusing on nuclear, deterrence and foreign policy issues concerning the Korean Peninsula.

The alert said the hackers typically approach victims by pretending to be a journalist arranging an interview, then sending spearphishing emails and watering holes to trick them into giving up information.

The U.S. said Kimsuky’s operations, which have been active since at least 2012, are “most likely tasked by the North Korean regime.”

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Abaddon RAT ! Sophisticated C2C

The new ‘Abaddon‘ remote access trojan may be the first to use Discord as a full-fledged command and control server that instructs the malware on what tasks to perform on an infected PC.

Threat actors abusing Discord for malicious activity is nothing new.

A new ‘Abaddon’ remote access trojan (RAT) could be the first malware that uses Discord as a full-fledge command and control server.

When started, Abaddon will automatically steal the following data from an infected PC:

  • Chrome cookies, saved credit cards, and credentials.
  • Steam credentials and list of installed games
  • Discord tokens and MFA information.
  • File listings
  • System information such as country, IP address, and hardware information.

Abaddon will then connect to the Discord command and control server to check for new commands to execute, as shown by the image below.

Receive a task from the Discord server

These commands will tell the malware to perform one of the following tasks:

  • Steal a file or entire directories from the computer
  • Get a list of drives
  • Open a reverse shell that allows the attacker to execute commands on the infected PC.
  • Launch in-development ransomware (more later on this).
  • Send back any collected information and clear the existing collection of data.

The malware will connect to the C2 every ten seconds for new tasks to execute.

Using a Discord C2 server, the threat actor can continually monitor their collection of infected PCs for new data and execute further commands or malware on the computer like encryption and decryption after paying ransom

With ransomware being extremely lucrative, it would not be surprising to see this feature completed in the future.

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Energetic Bear ! Strikes US

The US government said today that a Russian state-sponsored hacking group has targeted and successfully breached US government networks , said by advisory of CISA & FBI

Intruders identified as Russian hacker group, Energetic Bear a codename used by the cybersecurity industry. Other names for the same group also include TEMP.Isotope, Berserk Bear, TeamSpy, Dragonfly, Havex, Crouching Yeti, and Koala.

The two agencies said Energetic Bear “successfully compromised network infrastructure, and as of October 1, 2020, exfiltrated data from at least two victim servers.”

Networking Gear has been the target of attack

Russian hackers used publicly known vulnerabilities to breach networking gear, pivot to internal networks, elevate privileges, and steal sensitive data.

Targeted devices included Citrix access gateways (CVE-2019-19781), Microsoft Exchange email servers (CVE-2020-0688), Exim mail agents (CVE 2019-10149), and Fortinet SSL VPNs (CVE-2018-13379).

To move laterally across compromised networks, they used the Zerologon vulnerability in Windows Servers (CVE-2020-1472) to access and steal Windows Active Directory (AD) credentials.

Below are some of the details that are compromised and ex-filtrated by the group

  • Sensitive network configurations and passwords.
  • Standard operating procedures (SOP), such as enrolling in multi-factor authentication (MFA).
  • IT instructions, such as requesting password resets.
  • Vendors and purchasing information.
  • Printing access badges.

This recent malicious activity has been directed at SLTT government networks, there may be some risk to elections information housed on SLTT government networks. But nothing known to be till now.

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T-RAT ! via Telegram with some $

Security researchers have discovered a new remote access trojan (RAT) being advertised on Underground hacking network.Named T-RAT, the malware is available for only $45 via a Telegram channel,. Access to the infected machine will be grabbed at lighting high speed before it gets detected

It supports commands like, when typed inside the main chat window, allow the RAT owner to retrieve browser passwords and cookies, navigate the victim’s filesystem and search for sensitive data, deploy a keylogger, record audio via the microphone, take screenshots of the victim’s desktop, take pictures via webcam, and retrieve clipboard contents.

T-RAT owners can also deploy a clipboard hijacking mechanism that replaces strings that look like cryptocurrency and digital currency addresses with alternatives, allowing the attacker to hijack transactions for payment solutions like Qiwi, WMR, WMZ, WME, WMX, Yandex money, Payeer, CC, BTC, BTCG, Ripple, Dogecoin, and Tron.

The RAT can also run terminal commands (CMD and PowerShell), block access to certain websites, kill processes , and even disable the taskbar and the task manager.

Distribution vector remains unknown
For now, the threat from T-RAT is relative low. It usually takes a few months before threat actors learn to trust a new commercial malware strain.

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