Ukrainian CERT Discloses New Data-Wiping Campaign

Ukrainian cyber-authorities have found a new attack marketing campaign by suspected Russian threat actors that compromises victims’ VPN accounts to accessibility and encrypt networked methods.

The country’s Laptop or computer Crisis Response Crew (CERT) pointed out in a new assertion that the so-termed Somnia ransomware was remaining used by the FRwL (aka Z-Team), also recognized as UAC-0118.

First compromise is reached by tricking victims into downloading “Advanced IP Scanner” program which really includes Vidar malware. CERTU-UA believes this was accomplished by preliminary entry brokers (IABs) functioning for the Russians.

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“It need to be noted that the Vidar stealer, amongst other factors, steals Telegram session information, which, in the absence of configured two-factor authentication and a passcode, allows unauthorized access to the victim’s account,” the assertion continued.

“As it turned out, the victim’s Telegram was employed to transfer VPN connection configuration information (together with certificates and authentication details) to end users. Supplied the deficiency of two-factor authentication when creating a VPN relationship, attackers had been ready to acquire an unauthorized relationship to the company network.”

Once within, attackers executed reconnaissance do the job applying the Netscan resource and then launched Cobalt Strike Beacon, exfiltrating data working with the Rclone software. There are also indicators of the risk actors using Anydesk and Ngrok at this phase.

It is unclear how common the campaign was, even though “several” Ukrainian companies are believed to have been impacted given that spring 2022.

Most pointedly, CERT-UA confirmed that the stop target is not to generate earnings from a ransom but to damage victim environments.

“Note that the Somnia malware has also been through adjustments. The first edition of the application applied the symmetric 3DES algorithm. In the next edition, the AES algorithm is executed,” it concluded.

“At the identical time, getting into account the dynamics of the vital and the initialization vector, this variation of Somnia, in accordance to the attackers’ theoretical plan, does not present for the likelihood of knowledge decryption.”