APT29 Exploited a Windows Feature to Compromise European Diplomatic Entity Network

The Russia-joined APT29 nation-condition actor has been uncovered leveraging a “lesser-identified” Windows feature called Credential Roaming as portion of its attack against an unnamed European diplomatic entity.

“The diplomatic-centric concentrating on is constant with Russian strategic priorities as well as historic APT29 concentrating on,” Mandiant researcher Thibault Van Geluwe de Berlaere mentioned in a specialized produce-up.

APT29, a Russian espionage team also referred to as Cozy Bear, Iron Hemlock, and The Dukes, is identified for its intrusions aimed at accumulating intelligence that align with the country’s strategic aims. It is considered to be sponsored by the International Intelligence Assistance (SVR).

Some of the adversarial collective’s cyber actions are tracked publicly less than the moniker Nobelium, a risk cluster responsible for the widespread provide chain compromise by way of SolarWinds software program in December 2020.

The Google-owned danger intelligence and incident response business said it identified the use of Credential Roaming all through the time APT29 was existing within the victim network in early 2022, at which position “numerous LDAP queries with atypical properties” were performed against the Lively Listing system.

Introduced in Windows Server 2003 Company Pack 1 (SP1), Credential Roaming is a system that permits customers to accessibility their credentials (i.e., private keys and certificates) in a protected manner across distinctive workstations in a Windows area.

Investigating its internal workings more, Mandiant highlighted the discovery of an arbitrary file publish vulnerability that could be weaponized by a danger actor to attain remote code execution in the context of the logged-in victim.

The shortcoming, tracked as CVE-2022-30170, was addressed by Microsoft as aspect of Patch Tuesday updates shipped on September 13, 2022, with the organization emphasizing that exploitation necessitates a user to log in to Windows.

“An attacker who efficiently exploited the vulnerability could get distant interactive logon rights to a equipment where by the victim’s account would not generally keep such privilege,” it pointed out.

Mandiant stated the investigation “delivers perception into why APT29 is actively querying the related LDAP attributes in Lively Directory,” urging organizations to apply the September 2022 patches to protected towards the flaw.

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Some parts of this article are sourced from:
thehackernews.com