Security scientists at ESET have noticed a new malware campaign by the APT group known as Evasive Panda (as properly as Daggerfly and Bronze Highland), relying on a personalized backdoor identified as MgBot.
“To the most effective of our awareness, the backdoor has not been utilized by any other team,” wrote ESET security intelligence analyst and malware researcher Facundo Muñoz in an advisory revealed right now. “In this cluster of destructive activity, only the MgBot malware was noticed deployed on victimized machines, together with its toolkit of plugins.”
The new marketing campaign was initial learned by ESET in January 2022, but additional investigation showed malicious activity connected with the menace actor was detected as significantly back as 2020.
“Chinese end users were the target of this malicious exercise, which ESET telemetry reveals beginning in 2020 and continuing throughout 2021,” Muñoz spelled out. “The greater part of the Chinese victims are associates of an worldwide NGO.”
Through its investigation, The ESET crew found out that a legitimate application software package component secretly downloaded MgBot backdoor installers from URLs and IP addresses though updating mechanically.
“When we analyzed the probability of various methods that could describe how the attackers managed to produce malware through respectable updates, we ended up left with two eventualities: source-chain compromise and adversary-in-the-middle attacks,” Muñoz wrote.
As for MgBot, the ESET security specialist claimed it is the most important Windows backdoor utilised by Evasive Panda.
“It was produced in C++ with an object-oriented style and design and has the capabilities to converse by using TCP and UDP and prolong its performance by means of plugin modules.”
The checklist of modules (DLL documents) features the Kstrcs keylogger, the sebasek file stealer, the Cbmrpa clipboard logger, the pRsm audio stream capturer, the mailLFPassword and agentpwd credential stealers, the qmsdp Tencent QQ database stealer, the wcdbcrk Tencent WeChat data stealer, and the Gmck cookies stealer.
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“The the greater part of the plugins are made to steal facts from very well-known Chinese applications such as QQ, WeChat, QQBrowser, and Foxmail – all of them programs made by Tencent,” Muñoz added.
Far more info about each and every of the modules is offered in the advisory. Its publication arrives times right after Symantec released a separate investigation detailing an Evasive Panda campaign targeting an African telecoms firm.
Some parts of this article are sourced from:
www.infosecurity-journal.com