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Organizations within the Middle East, Africa, and the U.S. have been focused by an unknown menace actor to distribute a brand new backdoor known as Agent Racoon.
“This malware household is written utilizing the .NET framework and leverages the area title service (DNS) protocol to create a covert channel and supply completely different backdoor functionalities,” Palo Alto Networks Unit 42 researcher Chema Garcia stated in a Friday evaluation.
Targets of the assaults span varied sectors equivalent to training, actual property, retail, non-profits, telecom, and governments. The exercise has not been attributed to a identified menace actor, though it is assessed to be a nation-state aligned owing to the victimology sample and the detection and protection evasion strategies used.
The cybersecurity agency is monitoring the cluster beneath the moniker CL-STA-0002. It’s at present not clear how these organizations had been breached, and when the assaults befell.
Some of the opposite instruments deployed by the adversary embrace a personalized model of Mimikatz known as Mimilite in addition to a brand new utility known as Ntospy, which makes use of a customized DLL module implementing a community supplier to steal credentials to a distant server.
“While the attackers generally used Ntospy throughout the affected organizations, the Mimilite instrument and the Agent Racoon malware have solely been present in nonprofit and government-related organizations’ environments,” Garcia defined.
It’s price stating a beforehand recognized menace exercise cluster referred to as CL-STA-0043 has additionally been linked to using Ntospy, with the adversary additionally focusing on two organizations which were focused by CL-STA-0002.
Agent Raccoon, executed by the use of scheduled duties, permits for command execution, file importing, and file downloading, whereas disguising itself as Google Update and Microsoft OneDrive Updater binaries.
The command-and-control (C2) infrastructure utilized in reference to the implant dates again to at the least August 2020. An examination of VirusTotal submissions of the Agent Racoon artifacts exhibits that the earliest pattern was uploaded in July 2022.
Unit 42 stated it additionally uncovered proof of profitable knowledge exfiltration from Microsoft Exchange Server environments, ensuing within the theft of emails matching completely different search standards. The menace actor has additionally been discovered to reap victims’ Roaming Profile.
“This instrument set is just not but related to a selected menace actor, and never solely restricted to a single cluster or marketing campaign,” Garcia stated.