The Laptop Emergency Response Crew of Ukraine (CERT-UA) has revealed a brand new set of cyber assaults concentrating on Ukrainian establishments with information-stealing malware.
The exercise is geared toward army formations, regulation enforcement companies, and native self-government our bodies, significantly these positioned close to Ukraine’s jap border, the company mentioned.
The assaults contain distributing phishing emails containing a macro-enabled Microsoft Excel spreadsheet (XLSM), which, when opened, services the deployment of two items of malware, a PowerShell script taken from the PSSW100AVB (“Powershell Scripts With 100% AV Bypass”) GitHub repository that opens a reverse shell, and a beforehand undocumented stealer dubbed GIFTEDCROOK.
“File names and e-mail topic strains reference related and delicate points similar to demining, administrative fines, UAV manufacturing, and compensation for destroyed property,” CERT-UA mentioned.
“These spreadsheets include malicious code which, upon opening the doc and enabling macros, robotically transforms into malware and executes with out the person’s information.”
Written in C/C++, GIFTEDCROOK facilitates the theft of delicate knowledge from internet browsers like Google Chrome, Microsoft Edge, and Mozilla Firefox, similar to cookies, shopping historical past, and authentication knowledge.
The e-mail messages are despatched from compromised accounts, typically by way of the net interface of e-mail shoppers, to lend the messages a veneer of legitimacy, and trick potential victims into opening the paperwork. CERT-UA has attributed the exercise to a risk cluster UAC-0226, though it has not been linked to a particular nation.
The event comes as a suspected Russia-nexus espionage actor dubbed UNC5837 has been linked to a phishing marketing campaign concentrating on European authorities and army organizations in October 2024.
“The marketing campaign employed signed .RDP file attachments to ascertain Distant Desktop Protocol (RDP) connections from victims’ machines,” the Google Menace Intelligence Group (GTIG) said.
“Not like typical RDP assaults targeted on interactive classes, this marketing campaign creatively leveraged useful resource redirection (mapping sufferer file methods to the attacker servers) and RemoteApps (presenting attacker-controlled purposes to victims).”
It is price noting that the RDP marketing campaign was previously documented by CERT-UA, Amazon Net Companies, and Microsoft in October 2024 and subsequently by Pattern Micro in December. CERT-UA is monitoring the exercise below the identify UAC-0215, whereas the others have attributed it to the Russian state-sponsored hacking group APT29.
The assault can be notable for the possible use of an open-source instrument referred to as PyRDP to automate malicious actions similar to file exfiltration and clipboard seize, together with doubtlessly delicate knowledge like passwords.
“The marketing campaign possible enabled attackers to learn sufferer drives, steal information, seize clipboard knowledge (together with passwords), and acquire sufferer setting variables,” the GTIG mentioned in a Monday report. “UNC5837’s main goal seems to be espionage and file stealing.”
In current months, phishing campaigns have additionally been noticed utilizing fake CAPTCHAs and Cloudflare Turnstile to distribute Legion Loader (aka Satacom), which then serves as a conduit to drop a malicious Chromium-based browser extension named “Save to Google Drive.”
“The preliminary payload is unfold by way of a drive-by obtain an infection that begins when a sufferer searches for a particular doc and is lured to a malicious web site,” Netskope Menace Labs said. “The downloaded doc incorporates a CAPTCHA that, as soon as clicked by the sufferer, will redirect it to a Cloudflare Turnstile CAPTCHA after which ultimately to a notification web page.”
The web page prompts customers to permit notifications on the location, after which the victims are redirected to a second Cloudflare Turnstile CAPTCHA that, upon completion, is redirected once more to a web page that gives ClickFix-style instructions to obtain the doc they’re searching for.
In actuality, the assault paves the way in which for the supply and execution of an MSI installer file that is accountable for launching Legion Loader, which, in flip, performs a sequence of steps to obtain and run interim PowerShell scripts, in the end including the rogue browser extension to the browser.
The PowerShell script additionally terminates the browser session for the extension to be enabled, activates developer mode within the settings, and relaunches the browser. The tip purpose is to seize a variety of delicate info and exfiltrate it to the attackers.
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