APT (Targeted attacks)

For the last two years we have been monitoring a Russian-language cyberespionage actor that focuses on Central Asian users. We named the actor DustSquad and have provided reports on four of their campaigns. In this blogpost we cover a malicious program for Windows called Octopus that mostly targets diplomatic entities.

For this blogpost we gathered all the sinkhole data for Dutch IPs in the last four years, which amounts to around 85,000 entries. The aim is to give an overview of which APT groups are active in the Netherlands and what they are interested in.

MuddyWater is a relatively new APT that surfaced in 2017. It has focused mainly on governmental targets in Iraq and Saudi Arabia, according to past telemetry. However, the group behind MuddyWater has been known to target other countries in the Middle East, Europe and the US.

Turla, also known as Venomous Bear, Waterbug, and Uroboros, may be best known for what was at the time an “ultra complex” snake rootkit focused on NATO-related targets, but their malware set and activity is much broader. Our current focus is on more recent and upcoming activity from this APT.

Since March 2018 we have discovered several infections where a previously unknown Trojan was injected into the lsass.exe system process memory. This campaign was active immediately prior to Central Asian high-level meeting and we suppose that actor behind still follows regional political agenda.

In early 2018 we found a suspicious Android sample that, as it turned out, belonged to an unknown spyware family. Further investigation showed that the malware, which we named BusyGasper, is not all that sophisticated, but demonstrates some unusual features for this type of threat.

While investigating a cryptocurrency exchange attacked by Lazarus, we made an unexpected discovery. The victim had been infected with the help of a trojanized cryptocurrency trading application, which had been recommended to the company over email.

Dark Tequila is a complex malicious campaign targeting Mexican users, with the primary purpose of stealing financial information, as well as login credentials to popular websites that range from code versioning repositories to public file storage accounts and domain registrars.

Olympic Destroyer worm, Roaming Mantis mobile banker, Operation Parliament cyber-espionage campaign, SynAck ransomware and other notable targeted attacks and malware campaigns of Q2 2018.

These summaries are a representative snapshot of what has been discussed in greater detail in our private reports during Q2 2018. They aim to highlight the significant events and findings that we feel people should be aware of.

In May-June 2018 we discovered new spear-phishing documents that closely resembled weaponized documents used by Olympic Destroyer in the past. This and other TTPs led us to believe that we were looking at the same actor again. However, this time the attacker has new targets.

In March 2018 we detected an ongoing campaign targeting a national data center in the Central Asia that we believe has been active since autumn 2017. The choice of target made this campaign especially significant – it meant the attackers gained access to a wide range of government resources at one fell swoop.

Our colleagues from Cisco Talos published their excellent analysis of VPNFilter, an IoT / router malware which exhibits some worrying characteristics. We’ve decided to look a bit into the C&C mechanism for the persistent malware payload.

In May, while monitoring Roaming Mantis, aka MoqHao and XLoader, we observed significant changes in their M.O. The group’s activity expanded geographically and they broadened their attack/evasion methods. Their landing pages and malicious apk files now support 27 languages covering Europe and the Middle East.

ZooPark is a cyberespionage operation that has been focusing on Middle Eastern targets since at least June 2015. The threat actors behind the operation infect Android devices using several generations of malware, with the attackers including new features in each iteration.