Monthly Threat Actor Group Intelligence Report, August 2019
This is a summary of activity of suspected state sponsored Threat Actor Groups analyzed by the ThreatRecon Team, based on data and information collected from July 21 to August 20, 2019.
We are the Cyber Threat Intelligence division of NSHC RedAlert Labs. We track Threat Actor Groups activities worldwide and aim to release some of our findings.
This is a summary of activity of suspected state sponsored Threat Actor Groups analyzed by the ThreatRecon Team, based on data and information collected from July 21 to August 20, 2019.
“Hagga” is the username of a Pastebin account used since December last year by a pervasive known group of threat actors which targets thousands of users around the world both for cyber espionage and cyber crime purposes using malspam. Their activities were first discovered in 2017, and the ThreatRecon Team tracks both this group and the members behind “Hagga” collectively as the SectorH01 group.
SectorJ04 is a Russian-based cybercrime group that began operating about five years ago and conducted hacking activities for financial profit using malware such as banking trojans and ransomware against national and industrial sectors located across Europe, North America and West Africa.
This is a summary of activity of suspected state sponsored Threat Actor Groups analyzed by the ThreatRecon Team, based on data and information collected from May 21 to June 20, 2019.
From March to July this year, the ThreatRecon team noticed a spear phishing campaign by the SectorE02 group going on against the Government of Pakistan and organizations there related to defense and intelligence. Spear phishing emails are sent to their victims via Excel XLS files, which asks their victims to enable macros which will end up executing the downloader.
Since 2013, there has been a hacking group receiving support from the national level which conducts cyber espionage campaigns against countries in the South China Sea. We refer to this group as SectorF01. From 2017, their activities have increased significantly. They mainly carry out these campaigns against government agencies and diplomatic, military, and research institutions in neighboring countries, and surveillance activities against opposing forces in their own countries.
This is a summary of activity of suspected state sponsored Threat Actor Groups analyzed by the ThreatRecon Team, based on data and information collected from April 21 to May 20, 2019.
Unlike other state sponsored threat actors, SectorC08 appears to be only concerned with a single target: Ukraine. Artifacts of their likely activity have been found as far back as 2013 and up till today their modus operandi in their initial stages of operation has not changed much.
This is a summary of activity of suspected state sponsored Threat Actor Groups analyzed by the Threat Recon Team, based on data and information collected from March 21, 2019 to April 20, 2019.
SectorB06 is a state sponsored threat actor group active especially within Asia. They have been exploiting vulnerabilities in Microsoft Office’s Equation Editor which Microsoft removed in January 2018, which in this case seems to be a highly obfuscated version of CVE-2017-11882. The malware we analyzed in this case are sent seemingly only after they already have a basic foothold in their target organizations.