The U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) on Friday disclosed information of a “novel persistent backdoor” identified as SUBMARINE deployed by menace actors in connection with the hack on Barracuda Email Security Gateway (ESG) appliances.
“SUBMARINE contains many artifacts — which includes a SQL bring about, shell scripts, and a loaded library for a Linux daemon — that jointly help execution with root privileges, persistence, command and management, and cleanup,” the company reported.
The conclusions come from an evaluation of malware samples acquired from an unnamed firm that had been compromised by threat actors exploiting a critical flaw in ESG units, CVE-2023-2868 (CVSS rating: 9.8), which will allow for distant command injection.
Evidence gathered so much shows that the attackers behind the activity, a suspected China nexus-actor tracked by Mandiant as UNC4841, leveraged the flaw as a zero-day in October 2022 to obtain first access to sufferer environments and implanted backdoors to build and keep persistence.
To that conclude, the infection chain concerned sending phishing e-mails with booby-trapped TAR file attachments to induce exploitation, major to the deployment of a reverse shell payload to establish conversation with the risk actor’s command-and-management (C2) server, from in which a passive backdoor acknowledged as SEASPY is downloaded for executing arbitrary commands on the unit.
SUBMARINE, also codenamed DEPTHCHARGE by the Google-owned threat intelligence company, is the newest malware spouse and children to be found out in connection with the operation, which resides in a Structured Query Language (SQL) database on the ESG appliance.
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It’s considered to have been “deployed in reaction to remediation initiatives,” echoing Mandiant’s characterization of the adversary as an aggressive actor capable of swiftly altering their malware and utilizing more persistence mechanisms in an endeavor to sustain their access.
The agency even more reported it “analyzed artifacts relevant to SUBMARINE that contained the contents of the compromised SQL databases,” and that it “poses a significant risk for lateral motion.”
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Some parts of this article are sourced from:
thehackernews.com