Russia-linked Hackers Directly Targeting Diplomats: Report

The Russia-linked cyber espionage group Sofacy has been targeting foreign affairs agencies and ministries worldwide in a recently discovered campaign, Palo Alto Networks warns.

The hacking group, also known as APT28, Fancy Bear, Pawn Storm, Sednit, Tsar Team, and Strontium, has been highly active recently, and new evidence shows activity directly targeting diplomats in North America and Europe, including those at a European embassy in Moscow.

Sofacy was supposedly behind the attacks on the 2016 United States presidential election, but also hit Ukraine and NATO countries. In fact, the group heavily targeted NATO in early 2017, when it even used zero-day exploits, but then started to shift its focus towards the Middle East and Central Asia.

Palo Alto Networks has now uncovered two parallel efforts within a new Sofacy campaign, each using its own set of tools for attacks. One of the efforts was observed in the beginning of February 2018 to use phishing emails as the attack vector, to target an organization in Europe and another in North America.

The message spoofed the sender address of Jane’s by IHSMarkit, a well-known supplier of information and analysis. The email carried an attachment claiming to be a calendar of events relevant to the targeted organizations, but was a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet containing a malicious macro script.

The attackers used a white font color to hide the content of the document to the victim and lure them into enabling macros. Once that happens, the script changes the text color to black.

The macro also retrieves content from several cells to obtain a base64 encoded payload, writes it to a text file in the ProgramData folder, and leverages the command certutil -decode to decode the contents to an .exe file, which it runs after two seconds.

The executable is a loader Trojan that decrypts an embedded payload (DLL) and saves it to a file. Next, it creates a batch file to run the DLL payload, and writes the path to the batch file to a registry key, for persistence.

The installed malware is a variant of SofacyCarberp, which has been extensively used by the threat group in attacks. The malware performs initial reconnaissance by gathering system information, then sends the data to the command and control (C&C) server and fetches additional tools.

Both the loader and the SofacyCarberp variant used in the attack are similar to samples previously analyzed, yet they include several differences, such as a new hashing algorithm to resolve API functions and find browser processes for injection, and modified C&C communication mechanisms.

The security researchers also believe the group may have used the Luckystrike open-source tool to generate the malicious document and/or the macro, as the macro in the document closely resembles those found within the Microsoft PowerShell-based tool. The only difference between the two, besides random function name and random cell values, would be the path to the “.txt” and “.exe” files.

The security researchers also noticed that the Sofacy group registered new domains as part of the campaign, but that it used a default landing page they employed in other attacks as well. The domain used in this attack, cdnverify[.]net was registered on January 30, 2018.

“No other parts of the C&C infrastructure amongst these domains contained any overlapping artifacts. Instead, the actual content within the body of the websites was an exact match in each instance,” Palo Alto notes.

“The Sofacy group should no longer be an unfamiliar threat at this stage. They have been well documented and well researched with much of their attack methodologies exposed. They continue to be persistent in their attack campaigns and continue to use similar tooling as in the past. This leads us to believe that their attack attempts are likely still succeeding, even with the wealth of threat intelligence available in the public domain,” Palo Alto concludes.

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