The Trellix Advanced Research Center has recently observed an uptick of LockBit-related cyber activity surrounding vulnerabilities in ScreenConnect. This surge suggests that despite the Law Enforcement's (LE) "Operation Cronos" aimed at dismantling LockBit's infrastructure, the ransomware operators somehow managed to survive and stay a float. It appears that the cybercriminals group behind LockBit ransomware partially restored their infrastructure and created an impression that the LE actions did not affect their normal operation. Concurrently, alongside the resurgence of LockBit's exploitation of ScreenConnect vulnerabilities, we have seen other threat actors have either impersonated LockBit ransomware or incorporated LockBit into their own cyber attack campaigns.
There are several malicious fake updates campaigns being run across thousands of compromised websites. Here I will walk through one with a pattern that doesn’t match with others I’ve been tracking. This campaign appears to have started around July 19th, 2023. Based on a search on PublicWWW of the injection base64 there are at least 434 infected sites.
I’m calling this one ClearFake until I see a previously used name for it. The name is a reference to the majority of the Javascript being used without obfuscation. I say majority because base64 is used three times. That’s it. All the variable names are in the clear, no obfuscation on them.
One noticeable difference from SocGholish is that there appears to be no tracking of visits by IP or cookies. As an analyst you can you go back to the compromised site over and over coming from the same IP and not clearing your browser cache. This also means the site owner is more likely to see the infection as well.
Cluster25 researchers analyzed several campaigns (also publicly reported by CERT-AGID) that used phishing emails to spread an InfoStealer malware written in .NET through an infection chain that involves Windows Shortcut (LNK) files and Batch Scripts (BAT). Taking into account the used TTPs and extracted evidence, the attacks seem perpetrated by the same adversary (internally named AUI001).
OpenAI chat has exploded in popularity over the last couple of weeks. People are using it to do all sorts of interesting things. If you are unfamiliar with OpenAI Chat and GPT-3, you can find a primer here. The gist is that it’s an artificial intelligence model that you can chat with as if it were a person. It can do all kinds of things like answer questions, write code, find bugs in code, and more. It also remembers context, so you can refer to something you already mentioned at it is able to follow along. I thought maybe this could be a useful tool for building email phishing campaigns for my pentesting work, so I thought I’d try it out and see what I could get it to do.
n April, VMware patched a vulnerability CVE-2022-22954. It causes server-side template injection because of the lack of sanitization on parameters “deviceUdid” and “devicetype”. It allows attackers to inject a payload and achieve remote code execution on VMware Workspace ONE Access and Identity Manager. FortiGuard Labs published Threat Signal Report about it and also developed IPS signature in April.
RECALLS the relevant conclusions of the European Council1 and the Council2, ACKNOWLEDGES that state and non-state actors are increasingly using hybrid tactics, posing a growing threat to the security of the EU, its Member States and its partners3. RECOGNISES that, for some actors applying such tactics, peacetime is a period for covert malign activities, when a conflict can continue or be prepared for in a less open form. EMPHASISES that state actors and non-state actors also use information manipulation and other tactics to interfere in democratic processes and to mislead and deceive citizens. NOTES that Russia’s armed aggression against Ukraine is showing the readiness to use the highest level of military force, regardless of legal or humanitarian considerations, combined with hybrid tactics, cyberattacks, foreign information manipulation and interference, economic and energy coercion and an aggressive nuclear rhetoric, and ACKNOWLEDGES the related risks of potential spillover effects in EU neighbourhoods that could harm the interests of the EU.