Cyware Weekly Threat Intelligence - September 26–30

The Good

The explosion of IoT devices and services has called for additional security measures from government authorities. In this attempt, the Atlantic Council think tank has issued a set of recommended security measures to secure the IoT landscape across the U.K., the U.S., Singapore, and Australia. In other news, the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) has provided additional guidance on telehealth security and privacy risks.

• The Atlantic Council think tank has published a paper, recommending actions and strategies for securing the IoT landscape in countries such as the U.K, the U.S., Singapore, and Australia. One of the recommendations includes mandating the use of cybersecurity certifications and labels for IoT devices.
• The CISA and the US Treasury are making preparations to establish a federal cyber insurance program. With this, they plan to create warped incentives in the industry, especially in the wake of ransomware attacks across the country.
• After conducting a review of the medicare telehealth services delivered during the pandemic, the US Government Accountability Office (GAO) has provided additional guidance to improve the security and protect the privacy of patients’ data.

The Bad

Beware of fake job offers that are making rounds on the internet. Conducted by Lazarus, and its affiliate group ZINC, the campaigns use a variety of job lures to target employees in organizations across multiple industries including media, defense, aerospace, and crypto. Meanwhile, the Royal ransomware group has raised its stakes in the ever-evolving extortion scheme, demanding a ransom of up to $2 million from victim organizations.

• The Internal Revenue Service (IRS) warned U.S. taxpayers about an exponential increase in smishing attacks that stole personal and financial information from victims. Around thousands of fake domains designed to pilfer details have been discovered so far.
• Over 1800 misconfigured apps across Android and iOS gave access to AWS credentials. These apps were found using the same AWS tokens and could lead to a serious supply chain attack.
• The new Royal ransomware gang has ramped up its ransom demands. It is now targeting organizations and asking ransoms ranging between $250,000 and $2 million. The group has been found to be active since January.
• Multiple npm packages published by crypto exchange dYdX, and used by at least 44 cryptocurrency projects, were compromised to run infostealers on systems. The infostealer was used to steal AWS IAM credentials, SSH keys, and GitHub tokens.
• The U.S. arm of Israeli defense contractor Elbit Systems was compromised in early June. As a result, the personal information of 369 employees was stolen, which included names, addresses, dates of birth, direct deposit information, and social security numbers.
• A new Bl00dy ransomware gang is leveraging the leaked LockBit 3.0 ransomware builder to launch targeted attacks against companies. One of the victims was an organization in Ukraine.
• A data breach at the West Virginia-based Physician’s Business Office affected the personal details of around 190,000 patients. The information was stolen during a hack of its network five months ago.
• Cisco Talos discovered a malicious phishing campaign that delivered Cobalt Strike beacons through lures related to a government organization in the U.S and a trade union in New Zealand. The attack involved a multistage and modular infection chain with fileless, malicious scripts.
• Microsoft confirmed that two zero-day security vulnerabilities impacting Exchange Server 2013, 2016, and 2019 are being exploited in the wild. These flaws, identified as CVE-2022-41040 and CVE-2022-41082, can allow remote code execution attacks.
• Lazarus is now targeting macOS users looking for jobs in Coinbase in the latest iteration of its Operation Dream Job attack campaign that has been ongoing since 2020. Currently, it is not clear how the malware is being distributed.
• A threat actor tracked as ZINC, who is believed to be a subgroup of Lazarus, is weaponizing legitimate open-source software in a wide range of social engineering campaigns to target employees in organizations across multiple industries including media, defense, aerospace, and IT services. The affected organizations are located in the U.S., the U.K., India, and Russia.
• DeFi cryptocurrency platform BXH suffered a loss of around $40,000 due to a flash loan attack. This is the second time that the organization was attacked after losing an amount of nearly $2.5 million in a hack that occurred on September 23rd.

New Threats

Virtual machines (VMs) are again on the attack list of threat actors as Mandiant released technical details of two new backdoors. Dubbed VIRTUALPITA and VIRTUALPIE, the malware leverage a wide variety of VMs to evade detection during the infection process. A new Golang-based malware, named Chaos, which is believed to be an evolution of Kaiji malware, has also been found launching DDoS and cryptomining attacks.

• A newly found NullMixer malware dropper is being used to drop a variety of malware such as RedLine Stealer, Vidar, SmokeLoader, PsuedoManuscrypt, and Danbot. The malware dropper spreads via malicious websites found on search engines. These websites are related to cracks, keygens, and activators for downloading software illegally.

• Mandiant researchers have released details about two new malware that are targeting VMware ESXi servers, Linux-based VMware vCenter servers, and Windows virtual machines. Dubbed VIRTUALPITA and VIRTUALPIE, the malware are likely attributed to a China-backed threat actor group tracked as UNC3886.

• A new Chaos malware, written in the Go language, is leveraging known security vulnerabilities to launch DDoS and cryptomining attacks. The malware is capable of targeting both Windows and Linux systems.

• Multiple hacking attempts were discovered abusing remote code execution vulnerability in TP-Link routers. Researchers found that the leaked credentials of TP-Link products found on dark web forums were leveraged as a part of the attack.

• Prilex has evolved from an ATM-focused malware to a PoS malware. The malware spreads via phishing emails from fake technicians, asking recipients to update their PoS software.

• Researchers have encountered a new technique used by the Hello ransomware gang in the wild. The technique can enable attackers to delete volume shadow copies on systems they encrypted.

• Sucuri discovered a campaign using fake Cloudflare CAPTCHA dialog boxes to trick users into downloading and installing malware on their devices. The malware used in the attack enabled threat actors to gain full access to systems, paving way for a ransomware infection or banking trojan attack.

• Agent Tesla, using a builder named ‘Quantum Builder,’ was observed in a new campaign that leveraged Living Off the Land Binaries (LOLBins) to evade detection. The keylogger is executed on the targeted machine with administrative privileges.

• A highly-targeted phishing attack campaign dubbed STEEP#MAVERICK was found deploying an unknown payload on compromised machines belonging to military and weapons contractor companies. The attacks were carried out in late summer 2022.

• The Witchetty espionage group has been progressively updating its toolset to target government sectors in the Middle East and Africa. Among the new tools used by the group is a backdoor named Stegmap. The malware is distributed via the rarely used steganography technique.

• Fancy Bear hacking group used a new code execution technique that exploits mouse movement in PowerPoint files to distribute the Graphite malware. The group leveraged the SyncAppvPublishingServer utility for this purpose.