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.
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.
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.
Our Threat Recon team continues to collect and analyze activity-related data from multiple APT groups. We analyzed malware used in hacking activities targeting organizations located in South Korea, the US, and East Asia earlier this year.
On or around June 27, 2018, personal particulars of almost 1.5 million people was exfiltrated from a SingHealth database in Singapore where information on patients was stored. Multiple pieces and types of malware was used in this attack which took place over almost a year. This is our analysis into one of the RATs that was used.
SectorD02 is a state sponsored threat actor group which mainly targets governments and organizations around the Middle East. In this case, the target of this malware was Turkey, although it has been reported that they also sometimes target countries outside of the Middle East. One characteristic of SectorD02 is their incrementally changing PowerShell backdoor.
We came across two of SectorD02’s such backdoors at the end of 2018, and we analyzed these variants then identified them as the group’s PowerShell malware.
In early January 2019, an email containing malware was distributed to 77 reporters from the Unification Ministry of South Korea. We analysed these malware and identified them as malware used by SectorA05, and we confirm that they have been using a specific C2 server located in Korea for at least 26 months continuously. We decided to group these wave of attacks under what we call “Operation Kitty Phishing”.
This is an analysis of a custom proxy utility tool used by SectorA01 in attacks on financial organizations globally over the years.