Hello and welcome back to another blog post. After some time of absence due to a lot of changes in my personal life ( finished university, started a new job, etc), I am happy to finally be able to present something new.
Chapter 1: Captcha-verified Victim
This story starts with a message by one of my long time internet contacts:
Figure 1: Shit hit the Fan
I assume, some of you can already tell from this message alone that something terrible had just happend to him.
The legitimate website of the German Association for International Law had redirected him to an apparent Cloudflare Captcha site asking him to execute a Powershell command on device that does a Webrequest (iwr = Invoke-WebRequest) to a remote website (amoliera[.]com) and then pipes the response into “iex” which stands for Invoke-Expression.
Thats a text-book example for a so called FakeCaptcha attack.
For those of you that do not know what the FakeCaptcha attack technique is, let me give you a short primer:
A Captcha in itself is a legitimate method Website Owners use to differentiate between bots (automated traffic) and real human users. It often involves at-least clicking a button but can additionally require the website visitor to solve different form of small tasks like clicking certain images out of a collection of random images or identifying a bunch of obscurely written letters. The goal is to only let users visit the website that are able to solve these tasks, which are often designed to be hard for computers but easy for human beings. Well, most of the times.
Microsoft Threat Intelligence observed limited activity by an unattributed threat actor using a publicly available, static ASP.NET machine key to inject malicious code and deliver the Godzilla post-exploitation framework. In the course of investigating, remediating, and building protections against this activity, we observed an insecure practice whereby developers have incorporated various publicly disclosed ASP.NET machine keys from publicly accessible resources, such as code documentation and repositories, which threat actors have used to launch ViewState code injection attacks and perform malicious actions on target servers.
MuddyC2Go framework and custom keylogger used in attack campaign.
Iranian espionage group Seedworm (aka Muddywater) has been targeting organizations operating in the telecommunications sector in Egypt, Sudan, and Tanzania.
Seedworm has been active since at least 2017, and has targeted organizations in many countries, though it is most strongly associated with attacks on organizations in the Middle East. It has been publicly stated that Seedworm is a cyberespionage group that is believed to be a subordinate part of Iran’s Ministry of Intelligence and Security (MOIS).
Summary Snake, also known as Turla, Uroburos and Agent.BTZ, is a relatively complex malware framework used for targeted attacks. Over the past year Fox-IT has been involved in multiple incident response cases where the Snake framework was used to steal sensitive information. Targets include government institutions, military and large corporates. Researchers who have previously analyzed…
Key Takeaways
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.