Home Malware Multiple Hacker Groups Capitalizing on Ukraine Conflict for Distributing Malware

Multiple Hacker Groups Capitalizing on Ukraine Conflict for Distributing Malware

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At least three different advanced persistent threat (APT) groups from across the world have launched spear-phishing campaigns in mid-March 2022 using the ongoing Russo-Ukrainian war as a lure to distribute malware and steal sensitive information.

The campaigns, undertaken by El Machete, Lyceum, and SideWinder, have targeted a variety of sectors, including energy, financial, and governmental sectors in Nicaragua, Venezuela, Israel, Saudi Arabia, and Pakistan.

“The attackers use decoys ranging from official-looking documents to news articles or even job postings, depending on the targets and region,” Check Point Research said in a report. “Many of these lure documents utilize malicious macros or template injection to gain an initial foothold into the targeted organizations, and then launch malware attacks.”

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The infection chains of El Machete, a Spanish-speaking threat actor first documented in August 2014 by Kaspersky, involve the use of macro-laced decoy documents to deploy an open-source remote access trojan called Loki.Rat that’s capable of harvesting keystrokes, credentials, and clipboard data as well as carrying out file operations and executing arbitrary commands.

A second campaign is from the Iranian APT group known as Lyceum that Check Point said launched a phishing attack using an email purportedly about “Russian war crimes in Ukraine” to deliver first-stage .NET and Golang droppers, which are then used to deploy a backdoor for running files retrieved from a remote server.

Another example is SideWinder, a state-sponsored crew that’s said to operate in support of Indian political interests and with a specific focus on its neighbors China and Pakistan. The attack sequence, in this case, employs a weaponized document that exploits the Equation Editor flaw in Microsoft Office (CVE-2017-11882) to distribute information stealing malware.

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The findings echo similar warnings from Google’s Threat Analysis Group (TAG), which disclosed that nation-state-backed threat groups from Iran, China, North Korea, and Russia and numerous other criminal and financially motivated actors are leveraging war-related themes in phishing campaigns, online extortion attempts, and other malicious activities.

“Although the attention of the public does not usually linger on a single issue for an extended period, the Russian-Ukrainian war is an obvious exception,” the Israeli company said. “This war affects multiple regions around the world and has potentially far-reaching ramifications. As a result, we can expect that APT threat actors will continue to use this crisis to conduct targeted phishing campaigns for espionage purposes.”

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