A risk actor, earlier recognized for placing corporations in the electricity and telecommunications sectors throughout the Middle East as early as April 2018, has advanced its malware arsenal to strike two entities in Tunisia.
Security scientists at Kaspersky, who offered their conclusions at the VirusBulletin VB2021 convention before this thirty day period, attributed the assaults to a team tracked as Lyceum (aka Hexane), which was first publicly documented in 2019 by Secureworks.
“The victims we observed were all substantial-profile Tunisian organizations, these types of as telecommunications or aviation firms,” researchers Aseel Kayal, Mark Lechtik, and Paul Rascagneres in-depth. “Based on the specific industries, we believe that the attackers could have been intrigued in compromising this sort of entities to observe the movements and communications of people today of desire to them.”
Investigation of the danger actor’s toolset has proven that the attacks have shifted from leveraging a blend of PowerShell scripts and a .NET-primarily based distant administration resource referred identified as “DanBot” to two new malware variants penned in C++ referred to as “James” and “Kevin” owing to the recurring use of the names in the PDB paths of the underlying samples.
While the “James” sample is seriously based on the DanBot, “Kevin” arrives with major adjustments in architecture and conversation protocol, with the group predominantly relying on the latter as of December 2020, indicating an attempt to revamp its attack infrastructure in response to general public disclosure.
That claimed, the two the artifacts guidance interaction with a remote command-and-server server via personalized-developed protocols tunneled over DNS or HTTP, mirroring the exact same approach as that of DanBot. In addition, the attackers are also considered to have deployed a custom made keylogger as very well as a PowerShell script in compromised environments to file keystrokes and plunder credentials stored in web browsers.
The Russian cybersecurity seller said that the attack solutions utilized in the marketing campaign in opposition to Tunisian corporations resembled tactics previously attributed to hacking operations linked with the DNSpionage team, which, in transform, has exhibited tradecraft overlaps to an Iranian risk actor dubbed OilRig (aka APT34), while contacting out the “significant similarities” amongst lure paperwork delivered by Lyceum in 2018-2019 and those people employed by DNSpionage.
“With appreciable revelations on the activity of DNSpionage in 2018, as perfectly as further information points that get rid of light-weight on an apparent relationship with APT34, […] the latter may perhaps have adjusted some of its modus operandi and organizational construction, manifesting into new operational entities, instruments and strategies,” the researchers mentioned. “One these types of entity is the Lyceum group, which immediately after further exposure by Secureworks in 2019, experienced to retool but yet another time.”
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Some parts of this article are sourced from:
thehackernews.com
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