An Escalating Cyber-Espionage Campaign In The Middle East
Cyber-attacks in the Middle East are on the rise and the US Dept. of US Homeland Security is warning US companies to “consider and assess” the possible impacts and threat of a cyberattack on their businesses following heightened tensions with Iran.
This is the first official guidance published by the government’s dedicated cyber advisory unit, the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency following the assasination of a leading Iranian military commander.
Iran-linked hackers have been running spearphishing email campaigns against governmental organisations in Turkey, Jordan and Iraq in recent months in a likely effort to gather intelligence, according to research published by Dell Secureworks.
Most of the targeting, began before the US killing of General Soleimani, the leader of the Iran’s Quds Force, in Baghdad early January.
The alert highlighted that Iranian hackers could be zeroing in on the defense industrial base, government agencies, academia and nongovernmental organisations. The campaign Secureworks’ Counter Threat Unit (CTU) has observed, with activity from mid-2019 to mid-January of 2020, has also targeted intergovernmental organisations and unknown entities in Georgia and Azerbaijan, according to the CTU, which declined to share how many entities, and which ones, have been targeted.
It’s not clear if the activity increase in these apparent espionage operations is in a response to the Soleimani killing or if it is just a natural progression of the campaigns and while lures from this group in the past have been related to intelligence themes, this espionage campaign is more “generic,” according to Secureworks.
Based on the victims and code similarities, Secureworks assesses the activity to be the work of MuddyWater, an Iranian hacking group that has been known to target Middle Eastern, European, and North American nations.
A New RAT
To execute its attack, MuddyWater has been sending targets malicious Microsoft Excel Spreadsheet files through .zip archives in their spearphishing messages, CTU assesses. In one version of the campaign, the Excel file delivers a Remote Access Trojan (RAT) that has not previously been observed, according to Secureworks.
The RAT, which CTU is dubbing “ForeLord,” uses DNS tunneling so that requests are directed to legitimate DNS servers but then rerouted to malicious servers controlled by the attackers.
The tools MuddyWater appears to be deploying after initial intrusion, such as a variant of the Mimikatz malware, appear to show Iran may be interested in gaining credentials from its targets.
“After gaining initial access to a host, the threat actors dropped several tools to collect credentials, test those credentials on the network, and create a reverse SSL tunnel to provide an additional access channel to the network,” the researchers write.
Cyber-espionage and sabotage are the chief motivations for groups carrying out such attacks, according to the report. Their preferred mode of duping targets is through spear phishing, a practice of sending emails from ostensibly a trusted sender in order to trick them into revealing information.
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