Cybersecurity scientists have disclosed particulars of a risk actor known as Sticky Werewolf that has been joined to cyber attacks focusing on entities in Russia and Belarus.
The phishing attacks have been aimed at a pharmaceutical corporation, a Russian investigate institute working with microbiology and vaccine development, and the aviation sector, increasing over and above their initial concentrate of authorities organizations, Morphisec explained in a report past week.
“In prior strategies, the an infection chain started with phishing e-mail that contains a hyperlink to down load a malicious file from platforms like gofile.io,” security researcher Arnold Osipov said. “This latest marketing campaign utilised archive files containing LNK documents pointing to a payload stored on WebDAV servers.”
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Sticky Werewolf, a single of the numerous danger actors concentrating on Russia and Belarus such as Cloud Werewolf (aka Inception and Cloud Atlas), Quartz Wolf, Crimson Wolf (aka RedCurl), and Scaly Wolf, was initially documented by BI.ZONE in October 2023. The group is considered to be energetic due to the fact at minimum April 2023.
Earlier attacks documented by the cybersecurity firm leveraged phishing e-mails with one-way links to destructive payloads that culminated in the deployment of the NetWire distant accessibility trojan (RAT), which experienced its infrastructure taken down early last 12 months next a regulation enforcement procedure.
The new attack chain noticed by Morphisec will involve the use of a RAR archive attachment that, when extracted, incorporates two LNK data files and a decoy PDF document, with the latter professing to be an invitation to a movie conference and urging the recipients to click on on the LNK data files to get the meeting agenda and the email distribution record.
Opening either of the LNK documents triggers the execution of a binary hosted on a WebDAV server, which leads to the launch of an obfuscated Windows batch script. The script, in flip, is developed to run an AutoIt script that in the end injects the remaining payload, at the very same time bypassing security software and assessment tries.
“This executable is an NSIS self-extracting archive which is section of a earlier acknowledged crypter named CypherIT,” Osipov claimed. “Whilst the authentic CypherIT crypter is no extended becoming marketed, the recent executable is a variant of it, as noticed in a few of hacking community forums.”
The close goal of the campaign is to produce commodity RATs and information and facts stealer malware this kind of as Rhadamanthys and Ozone RAT.
“When there is no definitive evidence pointing to a precise nationwide origin for the Sticky Werewolf group, the geopolitical context implies feasible inbound links to a pro-Ukrainian cyberespionage group or hacktivists, but this attribution stays uncertain,” Osipov claimed.
The growth comes as BI.ZONE unveiled an action cluster codenamed Sapphire Werewolf that has been attributed as at the rear of extra than 300 attacks on Russian instruction, producing, IT, defense, and aerospace engineering sectors applying Amethyst, an offshoot of the well known open‑source SapphireStealer.
The Russian organization, in March 2024, also uncovered clusters referred to as Fluffy Wolf and Mysterious Werewolf that have employed spear-phishing lures to distribute Remote Utilities, XMRig miner, WarZone RAT, and a bespoke backdoor dubbed RingSpy.
“The RingSpy backdoor allows an adversary to remotely execute commands, get hold of their final results, and down load information from network means,” it famous. “The backdoor’s [command-and-control] server is a Telegram bot.”
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Some components of this report are sourced from:
thehackernews.com
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