Senior Security Researcher at Kaspersky`s GReAT
As a computer-sciences engineer, Pierre walked his first miles on the cybersecurity road pentesting industrial systems and designing security architectures, applications and operating systems for critical infrastructures. He then worked for eight years within French government (ANSSI, MoD), where he notably designed national cybersecurity crisis plans, conducted large-scale incident-response operations on critical infrastructures, managed a threat-intelligence team, and drove international partnerships. Pierre also worked as CISO for a multinational corporation. Pierre is an organized and creative thinker, who likes tuning all the knobs to get actionable results – from embedded microcontrollers development to policies. He joined Kaspersky GReAT in 2020 to get his hands back on threat-intelligence operations.An unknown actor targeted an electric utility in southern Africa with Cobalt Strike beacons and DroxiDat, a new variant of the SystemBC payload. We speculate that this incident was in the initial stages of a ransomware attack.
This is our latest summary of the significant events and findings, focusing on activities that we observed during Q2 2023.
While monitoring the traffic of our own corporate Wi-Fi network, we noticed suspicious activity that originated from several iOS-based phones. We created offline backups of the devices, inspected them and discovered traces of compromise.
GoldenJackal is an APT group, active since 2019, that usually targets government and diplomatic entities in the Middle East and South Asia. The main feature of this group is a specific toolset of .NET malware, JackalControl, JackalWorm, JackalSteal, JackalPerInfo and JackalScreenWatcher.