Govt companies in Central Asia are the focus on of a advanced espionage campaign that leverages a earlier undocumented pressure of malware dubbed DownEx.
Bitdefender, in a report shared with The Hacker News, claimed the activity remains active, with evidence likely pointing to the involvement of Russia-based mostly danger actors.
The Romanian cybersecurity agency stated it very first detected the malware in a extremely focused attack aimed at international government institutions in Kazakhstan in late 2022. Subsequently, a different attack was observed in Afghanistan.
The use of a diplomat-themed lure document and the campaign’s focus on details exfiltration implies the involvement of a condition-sponsored group, despite the fact that the precise id of the hacking outfit remains indeterminate at this stage.
The original intrusion vector for the campaign is suspected to be a spear-phishing email bearing a booby-trapped payload, which is a loader executable that masquerades as a Microsoft Term file.
Opening the attachment sales opportunities to the extraction of two information, which includes a decoy doc that is shown to the victim although a destructive HTML software (.HTA) with embedded VBScript code operates in the background.
The HTA file, for its aspect, is made to establish call with a distant command-and-regulate (C2) server to retrieve a subsequent-stage payload. When the correct nature of the malware is not not known, it really is reported to be a backdoor to create persistence.
The attacks are also notable for utilizing a variety of personalized tools for carrying out article-exploitation activities. This features –
- Two C/C++-dependent binaries (wnet.exe and utility.exe) to enumerate all the means on a network,
- A Python script (aid.py) to create an infinite conversation loop with the C2 server and obtain guidance to steal files with specified extensions, delete information made by other malware, and seize screenshots, and
- A C++-dependent malware (diagsvc.exe aka DownEx) which is mainly built to exfiltrate documents to the C2 server
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Two other variants of DownEx have also been earthed, the very first of which executes an intermediate VBScript to harvest and transmit the information in the form of a ZIP archive.
The other version, which is downloaded by using a VBE script (slmgr.vbe) from a remote server, eschews C++ for VBScript, but retains the very same operation as the former.
“This is a fileless attack – the DownEx script is executed in memory and never ever touches the disk,” Bitdefender explained. “This attack highlights the sophistication of a modern-day cyberattack. Cybercriminals are discovering new solutions for producing their attacks a lot more reliable.”
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Some parts of this article are sourced from:
thehackernews.com