Russian Hackers Tomiris Targeting Central Asia for Intelligence Gathering

The Russian-speaking menace actor behind a backdoor acknowledged as Tomiris is primarily centered on accumulating intelligence in Central Asia, refreshing conclusions from Kaspersky reveal.

“Tomiris’s endgame consistently seems to be the frequent theft of interior documents,” security scientists Pierre Delcher and Ivan Kwiatkowski mentioned in an evaluation released these days. “The danger actor targets authorities and diplomatic entities in the CIS.”

The Russian cybersecurity firm’s latest evaluation is centered on three new attack campaigns mounted by the hacking crew concerning 2021 and 2023.

Tomiris very first came to mild in September 2021 when Kaspersky highlighted its opportunity connections to Nobelium (aka APT29, Cozy Bear, or Midnight Blizzard), the Russian nation-condition team at the rear of the SolarWinds provide chain attack.

Similarities have also been unearthed involving the backdoor and another malware pressure dubbed Kazuar, which is attributed to the Turla team (aka Krypton, Mystery Blizzard, Venomous Bear, or Uroburos).

Spear-phishing attacks mounted by the team have leveraged a “polyglot toolset” comprising a range of minimal-sophistication “burner” implants that are coded in distinct programming languages and frequently deployed versus the exact targets.

Other than employing open up resource or commercially readily available offensive equipment, the tailor made malware arsenal applied by the group falls into just one of the a few categories: downloaders, backdoors, and facts stealers –

• Telemiris – A Python backdoor that works by using Telegram as a command-and-command (C2) channel.
• Roopy – A Pascal-based file stealer that’s built to hoover files of fascination each 40-80 minutes and exfiltrate them to a distant server.
• JLORAT – A file stealer published in Rust that gathers system details, runs commands issued by the C2 server, upload and down load files, and seize screenshots.

Kaspersky’s investigation of the assaults has even further recognized overlaps with a Turla cluster tracked by Google-owned Mandiant less than the name UNC4210, uncovering that the QUIETCANARY (aka TunnusSched) implant experienced been deployed in opposition to a authorities target in the CIS by means of Telemiris.

“Much more specifically, on September 13, 2022, about 05:40 UTC, an operator attempted to deploy numerous recognised Tomiris implants by way of Telemiris: 1st a Python Meterpreter loader, then JLORAT and Roopy,” the researchers spelled out.

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“These initiatives ended up thwarted by security products, which led the attacker to make repeated attempts, from different areas on the filesystem. All these attempts ended in failure. Following a a single-hour pause, the operator tried once again at 07:19 UTC, this time working with a TunnusSched/QUIETCANARY sample. The TunnusSched sample was blocked as nicely.”

That said, inspite of the potential ties among the two teams, Tomiris is explained to be individual from Turla owing to distinctions in their targeting and tradecrafts, at the time yet again increasing the possibility of a wrong flag operation.

On the other hand, it is really also extremely possible that Turla and Tomiris collaborate on choose operations or that equally the actors count on a widespread software package service provider, as exemplified by Russian military intelligence agencies’ use of instruments provided by a Moscow-primarily based IT contractor named NTC Vulkan.

“General, Tomiris is a pretty agile and identified actor, open up to experimentation,” the scientists stated, incorporating “there exists a sort of deliberate cooperation among Tomiris and Turla.”

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