APT (Targeted attacks)

Last year, we visited The MITRE Corporation and took part in the MITRE ATT&CK Evaluation Round 2. During this assessment, our technologies were tested against emulated attack techniques of the APT29 threat group.

For more than two years, the Global Research and Analysis Team (GReAT) at Kaspersky has been publishing quarterly summaries of advanced persistent threat (APT) activity. This is our latest installment, focusing on activities that we observed during Q1 2020.

In July 2019, a sophisticated backdoor trojan in Google Play was reported. We conducted an inquiry of our own, discovering a long-term campaign, which we dubbed “PhantomLance”, its earliest registered domain dating back to December 2015.

On December 4, 2019, we discovered watering hole websites that were compromised to selectively trigger a drive-by download attack with fake Adobe Flash update warnings.

A watering hole was discovered on January 10, 2020 utilizing a full remote iOS exploit chain to deploy a feature-rich implant named LightSpy. The site appears to have been designed to target users in Hong Kong based on the content of the landing page.

Kaspersky discovered a malicious campaign distributing a fully fledged C++ Trojan that we call Milum. All the victims we registered were organizations from the Middle East. At least some of them are related to industrial sector.

Kaspersky has continued to track the Roaming Mantis campaign. The group’s attack methods have improved and new targets continuously added in order to steal more funds.

To attack macOS users, the Lazarus group has developed homemade macOS malware, and added an authentication mechanism to deliver the next stage payload very carefully, as well as loading the next-stage payload without touching the disk.

After we wrote our private report on the OilRig leak, we decided to scan our archives with our YARA rule, to hunt for new and older samples. Aside from finding some new samples, we believe we also succeeded in finding some of the first Poison Frog samples.

What were the most interesting developments in terms of APT activity during the year and what can we learn from them?

Mobile espionage targeting the Middle East, new FinSpy iOS and Android implants, Dtrack banking malware and other security news

RevengeHotels is a targeted cybercrime malware campaign against hotels, hostels, hospitality and tourism companies, mainly, but not exclusively, located in Brazil. We have confirmed more than 20 hotels that are victims of the group.

This is what we think might happen in the coming months, based on the knowledge of experts in this field and our observation of APT attacks – since APT threat actors have historically been the center of innovation.

Platinum is one of the most technologically advanced APT actors with a traditional focus on the APAC region. During recent analysis we discovered Platinum using a new backdoor that we call Titanium.

Well-known ‘Lost in Translation’ leak, among other things, contained an interesting script that checked for traces of other APTs in the compromised system. In 2018, we found an APT described as the 27th function of this script, which we call ‘DarkUniverse’.