Russian APT28 Hackers Targeting High-Value Orgs with NTLM Relay Attacks

Russian point out-sponsored actors have staged NT LAN Manager (NTLM) v2 hash relay attacks by means of many strategies from April 2022 to November 2023, targeting significant-benefit targets all over the world.

The attacks, attributed to an “aggressive” hacking crew termed APT28, have set their eyes on corporations dealing with overseas affairs, electrical power, defense, and transportation, as well as people concerned with labor, social welfare, finance, parenthood, and nearby metropolis councils.

Cybersecurity company Trend Micro assessed these intrusions as a “expense-economical technique of automating makes an attempt to brute-drive its way into the networks” of its targets, noting the adversary may well have compromised hundreds of email accounts around time.

APT28 is also tracked by the broader cybersecurity neighborhood below the names Blue Athena, BlueDelta, Extravagant Bear, Preventing Ursa, Forest Blizzard (formerly Strontium), FROZENLAKE, Iron Twilight, ITG05, Pawn Storm, Sednit, Sofacy, and TA422.

The team, thought to be energetic considering the fact that at the very least 2009, is operated by Russia’s GRU armed forces intelligence service and has a keep track of report of orchestrating spear-phishing made up of malicious attachments or strategic web compromises to activate the an infection chains.

In April 2023, APT28 was implicated in attacks leveraging now-patched flaws in networking equipment from Cisco to conduct reconnaissance and deploy malware towards choose targets.

The nation-condition actor, in December, arrived beneath the highlight for exploiting a privilege escalation flaw in Microsoft Outlook (CVE-2023-23397, CVSS score: 9.8) and WinRAR (CVE-2023-38831, CVSS rating: 7.8) to obtain a user’s Net-NTLMv2 hash and use it to stage an NTLM Relay attack towards an additional company to authenticate as the person.

An exploit for CVE-2023-23397 is mentioned to have been applied to target Ukrainian entities as early as April 2022, according to a March 2023 advisory from CERT-EU.

It has also been noticed leveraging lures related to the ongoing Israel-Hamas war to aid the shipping and delivery of a custom backdoor termed HeadLace, alongside putting Ukrainian govt entities and Polish corporations with phishing messages made to deploy backdoors and info stealers like OCEANMAP, MASEPIE, and STEELHOOK.

1 of the substantial elements of the threat actor’s assaults is the steady try to strengthen its operational playbook, good-tuning and tinkering with its techniques to evade detection.

This contains the addition of anonymization layers these types of as VPN services, Tor, facts centre IP addresses, and compromised EdgeOS routers to have out scanning and probing actions. An additional tactic involves sending spear-phishing messages from compromised email accounts more than Tor or VPN.

“Pawn Storm has also been making use of EdgeOS routers to send spear-phishing e-mail, perform callbacks of CVE-2023-23397 exploits in Outlook, and proxy credential theft on credential phishing websites,” security researchers Feike Hacquebord and Fernando Merces mentioned.

“Part of the group’s post-exploitation pursuits involve the modification of folder permissions within the victim’s mailbox, leading to improved persistence,” the researchers claimed. “Working with the victim’s email accounts, lateral movement is probable by sending extra destructive email messages from within just the target business.”

It is at present not known if the danger actor themselves breached these routers, or if it is using routers that ended up by now compromised by a 3rd-get together actor. That explained, no less than 100 EdgeOS routers are estimated to have been contaminated.

Moreover, recent credential harvesting campaigns from European governments have employed bogus login internet pages mimicking Microsoft Outlook that are hosted on webhook[.]website URLs, a sample beforehand attributed to the team.

An October 2022 phishing campaign, however, singled out embassies and other high-profile entities to provide a “very simple” facts stealer by means of emails that captured documents matching distinct extensions and exfiltrated them to a cost-free file-sharing support named Hold.sh.

“The loudness of the repetitive, quite often crude and aggressive campaigns, drown out the silence, subtlety, and complexity of the first intrusion, as perfectly as the submit-exploitation steps that may well take place the moment Pawn Storm will get an first foothold in sufferer companies,” the scientists stated.

The advancement arrives as Recorded Long run News discovered an ongoing hacking campaign carried out by the Russian menace actor COLDRIVER (aka Calisto, Iron Frontier, or Star Blizzard) that impersonates scientists and teachers to redirect future victims to credential harvesting web pages.

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