It seems that not even the enduring Home windows emblem is secure from malware (opens in new tab) anymore, as some cybercriminals managed to efficiently cover malicious code inside it.
Cybersecurity specialists at Symantec declare to have noticed one such marketing campaign utilizing a means of hiding malicious code in in any other case innocent pictures, in any other case generally known as steganography.
It’s normally completed to keep away from detection by antivirus applications, as such options hardly ever detect pictures as malicious.
Going after governments
On this specific case, the group engaged in steganography assaults is named Witchetty, a recognized threat-actor allegedly strongly tied to the Chinese language state-sponsored actor Cicada (AKA APT10), and in addition thought of a part of the TA410 group that has focused US power suppliers prior to now.
The group kicked off its newest marketing campaign in February 2022, concentrating on at the least two governments within the Center East.
What’s extra, an assault in opposition to a inventory trade in Africa is allegedly nonetheless energetic. Witchetty used steganography assaults to cover an XOR-encrypted backdoor, which was hosted on a cloud service, minimizing its probabilities of detection. To drop webshells on weak endpoints (opens in new tab), the attackers exploited recognized Microsoft Trade ProxyShell vulnerabilities for preliminary entry: CVE-2021-34473, CVE-2021-34523, CVE-2021-31207, CVE-2021-26855, and CVE-2021-27065.
“Disguising the payload on this vogue allowed the attackers to host it on a free, trusted service,” Symantec mentioned. “Downloads from trusted hosts reminiscent of GitHub are far much less more likely to increase crimson flags than downloads from an attacker-controlled command-and-control (C&C) server.”
The XOR-encrypted backdoor permits risk actors to do quite a few issues, together with tampering with information and folders, working and terminating processes, tweaking the Home windows Registry, downloading further malware, stealing paperwork, in addition to turning the compromised endpoint right into a C2 server.
Final time we heard of Cicada was in April 2022, when researchers reported the group had abused the favored VLC media participant to distribute malware and spy on authorities businesses and adjoining organizations positioned within the US, Canada, Hong Kong, Turkey, Israel, India, Montenegro, and Italy.
By way of: BleepingComputer (opens in new tab)