Chinese Attacks On Russian Government Agencies
Cyber security researchers have uncovered an apparently new Advanced Persistent Threat (APT) group targeting Russian government entities, known as CloudSorcerer.
They use a sophisticated cyber espionage tool, discovered by Kaspersky and reported is an advisory they published, in June, is designed for covert data collection and exfiltration, using Microsoft Graph, Yandex Cloud and Dropbox for its command and control (C2) infrastructure.
In late July 2024, a series of targeted cyber attacks on dozens of computers at Russian government organisations and IT companies was detected. This campaign was described in detail by Kaspersky, who named it EastWind.
The threat actors infected devices using phishing emails with malicious shortcut attachments. These shortcuts were used to deliver malware that received commands via the Dropbox cloud service. Attackers used this malware to download additional payloads onto infected computers, in particular tools previously that have been used before by the Chinese APT31 group.
Interesting features about the implants used in this campaign:-
- The malware downloaded by the attackers from Dropbox has been used by APT31 since at least 2021.
- The attackers updated the The CloudSorcerer backdoor and it currently uses LiveJournal (a social network popular in Russia) and Quora profiles as initial C2 servers.
- The attacks additionally deploy a previously unknown implant with a classic backdoor functionality. It is loaded via the CloudSorcerer backdoor, and its command set is quite extensive. It supports three different protocols for communicating with C2.
The attackers used spear phishing to gain an initial foothold into the organisations and they sent malicious emails with attached RAR archives to target organisational email addresses. After running the tool, the attackers downloaded the following files to the infected machine:-
- A file with the .ini extension, containing the encrypted payload. The name of this file varied across infected machines.
- The renamed legitimate application dbgsrv.exe (example name: WinDRMs.exe), signed by Microsoft.
- The malicious library dll.
The implants identified during the attack significantly differ from each other and, because of this complicating feature, experts advise that it is necessary to use a separate set of Indicators of Compromise (IoCs) to identify each malware used in any compromise.
In attacks on government organisations, threat actors often use toolkits that implement a wide variety of techniques and tactics. In developing these tools, they go to the greatest lengths possible to hide malicious activity in network traffic. The attackers behind the EastWind campaign used popular network services (GitHub, Dropbox, Quora, LiveJournal and Yandex.Disk) as C2 servers.
Notably, the EastWind campaign bore traces of malware from two different Chinese-speaking groups: APT27 and APT31.
This clearly shows that APT groups very often team up, actively sharing knowledge and tools. To successfully counter such collaborations, there are now monitors of the techniques and tactics of APT groups operating around the world.
Kaspersky | Fortinet | Securelist | Reuters | Profero.io | Industrial Cyber | Infosecurity-magazine |
Image: Ideogram
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