15-October-2024
Welcome to the weekly threat detection update report from Stamus Networks. Each week, you will receive this email with a summary of the updates.
Current Stamus Threat Intelligence (STI) release version: 1173
This week, in addition to daily ruleset and IOC updates, we provided Stamus Security Platform customers with the following improved defense(s):
Note: a "method" as referenced below, is a discrete detection vector for a given threat.
The following detections were added to your Stamus Security Platform (SSP) this past week:
The term info stealer is self-explanatory. This type of malware resides in an infected computer and gathers data in order to send it to the attacker. Typical targets are credentials used in online banking services, social media sites, emails, or FTP accounts.
Info stealers may use many methods of data acquisition. The most common are:
hooking browsers (and sometimes other applications) and stealing credentials that are typed by the user using web injection scripts that are adding extra fields to web forms and submitting information from them to a server owned by the attacker form grabbing (finding specific opened windows and stealing their content) keylogging stealing passwords saved in the system and cookies Modern info stealers are usually parts of botnets. Sometimes the target of attack and related events are configured remotely by the command sent from the Command and Control server (C&C). Malwarebytes
ESET researchers have discovered several targeted campaigns against governmental institutions in Thailand, starting in 2023, where massive amounts of data have been exfiltrated. The campaigns misused legitimate file-sharing services such as Dropbox, PixelDrain, GitHub, and OneDrive in the process. Based on the findings, ESET researchers decided to track this activity cluster as the work of a separate threat actor, which ESET named CeranaKeeper. The numerous occurrences of the string “bectrl” in the code of the group’s tools inspired the name: a wordplay between the word beekeeper and the bee species Apis Cerana, or the Asian honeybee. ESET presented its findings about CeranaKeeper and the compromise in Thailand at the 2024 Virus Bulletin conference.
The threat actor behind the attacks on the Thai government, CeranaKeeper, seems particularly relentless, as the plethora of tools and techniques used by the group keeps evolving at a rapid rate. The operators write and rewrite their toolset as needed and react rather quickly to avoid detection. This group’s goal is to harvest as many files as possible and it develops specific components to that end. CeranaKeeper uses cloud and file-sharing services for exfiltration and probably relies on the fact that traffic to these popular services would mostly seem legitimate and harder to block when identified. Eset
The following detections were updated this past week with changes to kill chain phase(s) or MITRE ATT&CK tactic(s)/technique(s):
APT28 (also known as - Fancy Bear/Sofacy/Strontum) is a threat group that has been attributed to Russia's Main Intelligence Directorate of the Russian General Staff by a July 2018 U.S. Department of Justice indictment.
This group reportedly compromised the Hillary Clinton campaign, the Democratic National Committee, and the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee in 2016 in an attempt to interfere with the U.S. presidential election. APT28 has been active since at least 2004.
A signed application is used by abusing Github and redirecting the victim from a copy of a legitimate site. Anyrun
Attackers are utilizing hacked web sites that promote fake browser updates to infect targets with banking trojans. In some cases, post exploitation toolkits are later executed to encrypt the compromised network with ransomware.
Between May and September 2019, FireEye has conducted multiple incident response cases where enterprise customers were infected with malware through fake browser updates.
Hacked sites would display these "fakeupdates" through JavaScript alerts that state the user is using an old version of a web browser and that they should download an offered "update" to keep the browser running "smoothly and securely".
Phishing is a type of online scam that targets consumers by sending them an e-mail that appears to be from a well-known source – an internet service provider, a bank, or a mortgage company, for example. It asks the consumer to provide personal identifying information. Then a scammer uses the information to open new accounts, or invade the consumer’s existing accounts. There are several tips that consumers can follow to avoid phishing scams, such as not responding to e-mails or pop-up messages that ask for personal or financial information.
Loaders, for the most part, have one job: grab malicious executables or payloads from an attacker-controlled server. But that doesn’t mean there isn’t more happening under the hood of some, such as a user-friendly UI, self-healing capabilities, or the equivalent of a retail shop where a botmaster can sell his bots to potential clients.
Loaders are essentially basic remote access Trojans that give an attacker the ability to remotely interact with and control a compromised computer, or bot. While traditionally lightweight (smaller than 50 KB in size) in order to bypass detection by antivirus and other security monitoring technology, loaders evolve, and their viability to cybercriminals remains.
Havoc is a modern and malleable post-exploitation command and control framework, created by @C5pider Github
Cyber criminals violated the law TDS (Traffic Direction System) platform Keitaro and used it to redirect them users in exploit kits RIG and Fallout in order to infect them with malicious software.
TDS platforms are designed for redirection of users in particular sites. Legitimate TDS platforms, such as Keitaro, are mainly used by individuals and companies that want to advertise services or their products. Platforms drive users to the pages that companies want, targeting specific customers and promoting an ad campaign. techbizweb
There are a handful of fake update variants. The most popular is SocGholish. We’ve often observed some of the other fake update variants referred to as SocGholish, but we try to make the distinction. Some of the other variants include Clear Fake, and Smart Ape. There’s also a new variant that is being referenced as ClickFix. This collaboration between Casey Kuwada, April Bucaneg, and Aaron Samala introduces the LandUpdate808 Fake Update Variant that we’ve been tracking. Malasada
Lumma is an information stealer written in C, sold as a Malware-as-a-Service by LummaC on Russian-speaking underground forums and Telegram since at least August 2022. Lumma's capabilities are those of a classic stealer, with a focus on cryptocurrency wallets, and file grabber capabilities. Malpedia
OilRig is a suspected Iranian threat group that has targeted Middle Eastern and international victims since at least 2014. The group has targeted a variety of industries, including financial, government, energy, chemical, and telecommunications, and has largely focused its operations within the Middle East. It appears the group carries out supply chain attacks, leveraging the trust relationship between organizations to attack their primary targets. FireEye assesses that the group works on behalf of the Iranian government based on infrastructure details that contain references to Iran, use of Iranian infrastructure, and targeting that aligns with nation-state interests.This group was previously tracked under two distinct groups, APT34 and OilRig, but was combined due to additional reporting giving higher confidence about the overlap of the activity. MITRE
It leverages compromised websites and performs some of the most creative fingerprinting checks we’ve seen, before delivering its payload (NetSupport RAT). Malwarebytes
The term info stealer is self-explanatory. This type of malware resides in an infected computer and gathers data in order to send it to the attacker. Typical targets are credentials used in online banking services, social media sites, emails, or FTP accounts.
Info stealers may use many methods of data acquisition. The most common are:
hooking browsers (and sometimes other applications) and stealing credentials that are typed by the user using web injection scripts that are adding extra fields to web forms and submitting information from them to a server owned by the attacker form grabbing (finding specific opened windows and stealing their content) keylogging stealing passwords saved in the system and cookies Modern info stealers are usually parts of botnets. Sometimes the target of attack and related events are configured remotely by the command sent from the Command and Control server (C&C). Malwarebytes
We took action against a previously unreported hacking group from Iran that targeted or spoofed companies in multiple industries around the world. This included energy companies in Saudi Arabia, Canada, Italy, and Russia; the information technology industry in India and United Arab Emirates; the maritime logistics industry in UAE, Iceland, Norway, Saudi Arabia, US, Israel, and India; telecommunications companies in Saudi Arabia and UAE; and the semiconductor industry in Israel, US, and Germany. This activity had the hallmarks of a well-resourced and persistent operation while obfuscating who’s behind it. This group used similar TTPs to another threat actor dubbed Tortoiseshell that we reported on last year, but in this case we saw different targeting, technical infrastructure, and distinct malware. Meta
An advanced persistent threat (APT) is a stealthy computer network threat actor, typically a nation state or state-sponsored group, which gains unauthorized access to a computer network and remains undetected for an extended period. In recent times, the term may also refer to non-state sponsored groups conducting large-scale targeted intrusions for specific goals.
Such threat actors' motivations are typically political or economic. To date, every major business sector has recorded instances of attacks by advanced actors with specific goals seeking to steal, spy or disrupt. These include government, defense, financial services, legal services, industrial, telecoms, consumer goods, and many more. Some groups utilize traditional espionage vectors, including social engineering, human intelligence and infiltration to gain access to a physical location to enable network attacks. The purpose of these attacks is to place custom malicious code on one or multiple computers for specific tasks.
Source: Wikipedia
An advanced persistent threat (APT) is a stealthy computer network threat actor, typically a nation state or state-sponsored group, which gains unauthorized access to a computer network and remains undetected for an extended period. In recent times, the term may also refer to non-state sponsored groups conducting large-scale targeted intrusions for specific goals.
Such threat actors' motivations are typically political or economic. To date, every major business sector has recorded instances of attacks by advanced actors with specific goals seeking to steal, spy or disrupt. These include government, defense, financial services, legal services, industrial, telecoms, consumer goods, and many more. Some groups utilize traditional espionage vectors, including social engineering, human intelligence and infiltration to gain access to a physical location to enable network attacks. The purpose of these attacks is to place custom malicious code on one or multiple computers for specific tasks.
Source: Wikipedia
Again, the generic nature of this detection means that the Payloads performed by this group of trojans may be highly variable, and therefore difficult to describe specifically. This group of trojans has been observed to perform any, or all, of the following actions:
redirect Web traffic
- manipulate certain Windows or third-party applications including settings or configurations
- drop or install additional malicious programs
- download and run additional malicious programs
Please note that this list is not exhaustive.
Microsoft
During a routine threat-hunting exercise, Cyble research labs discovered a dark web post where a malware developer was advertising a powerful Windows RAT. Cyble
The following threat detection(s) were improved this past week with new or updated threat methods.
| Name of threat | New coverage | Total coverage | Last updated | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| New Detection methods | Kill chain phases | Protocols involved | Detection methods | Kill chain phases | Protocols involved | ||
| APT28 | 1 | command and control | http | 796 | actions on objectives, command and control, delivery, exploitation | dns, http, tcp, tcp-pkt, tls | 2024-10-09 |
| CeranaKeeper APT | 3 | command and control | http | 3 | command and control | http | 2024-10-09 |
| DeerStealer | 1 | command and control | http | 55 | command and control | dns, http, tls | 2024-10-09 |
| Fake Browser | 18 | exploitation | dns, tls, http | 1027 | command and control, delivery, exploitation | dns, http, tls | 2024-10-11 |
| Fake Service | 1 | delivery | http | 145 | actions on objectives, command and control, delivery, installation | dns, http, tcp, tls | 2024-10-09 |
| Generic Loader | 82 | delivery, command and control | http, dns, tls | 141 | actions on objectives, command and control, delivery | dns, http, tcp, tcp-pkt, tls | 2024-10-10 |
| Havoc | 7 | command and control | dns, tls, http | 13 | command and control | dns, http, tls | 2024-10-09 |
| Keitaro | 1 | exploitation | http | 392 | command and control, delivery, exploitation | dns, http, tls | 2024-10-11 |
| LandUpdate808 | 3 | command and control | dns, tls, http | 32 | command and control, delivery | dns, http, tls | 2024-10-08 |
| Lumma | 79 | command and control | http, dns, tls | 2215 | actions on objectives, command and control, installation | dns, http, tls | 2024-10-11 |
| OilRig | 1 | command and control | http | 70 | actions on objectives, command and control, delivery | dns, http, tls, udp | 2024-10-09 |
| Rodmacer Stealer | 1 | actions on objectives | http | 1 | actions on objectives | http | 2024-10-09 |
| SocGholish | 3 | command and control | dns, tls, http | 1051 | actions on objectives, command and control, delivery, exploitation, reconnaissance | dns, http, tcp, tcp-pkt, tls | 2024-10-09 |
| Stealer and Exfiltration | 3 | command and control, actions on objectives | dns, tls, http | 446 | actions on objectives, command and control, delivery, exploitation, installation | dns, ftp, http, smtp, tcp, tcp-pkt, tls | 2024-10-10 |
| TA455 | 67 | command and control | dns, tls, http | 521 | command and control, installation | dns, http, tls | 2024-10-08 |
| TA4903 | 15 | delivery | dns, tls, http | 1171 | delivery | dns, http, tls | 2024-10-11 |
| TA582 | 6 | command and control | dns, http, tls | 326 | command and control | dns, http, tls | 2024-10-08 |
| Trojan Agent | 4 | command and control | http, dns, tls | 598 | actions on objectives, command and control, delivery, installation | dns, http, ip, smtp, tcp, tcp-pkt, tcp-stream, tls, udp | 2024-10-09 |
| XWorm | 37 | command and control | tcp-pkt | 1616 | command and control, delivery | dns, http, tcp, tcp-pkt, tls | 2024-10-09 |
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Stamus Networks believes in a world where defenders are heroes, and a future where those they protect remain safe. As organizations face threats from well-funded adversaries, we relentlessly pursue solutions that make the defender’s job easier and more impactful. The global leader in Suricata-based network security solutions, Stamus Networks helps enterprise security teams know more, respond sooner and mitigate their risk with insights gathered from cloud and on-premise network activity. Our Stamus Security Platform combines the best of intrusion detection (IDS), network security monitoring (NSM), and network detection and response (NDR) systems into a single solution that exposes serious and imminent threats to critical assets and empowers rapid response.
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