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A hacking group — suspected to be the Russia-linked Turla Team — reregistered a minimum of three previous domains related to the decade-old Andromeda malware, permitting the group to distribute its personal reconnaissance and surveillance instruments to Ukrainian targets.
Cybersecurity agency Mandiant said in a Thursday advisory that Turla Team APT, additionally recognized by Mandiant’s designation of UNC4210, took management of three domains that had been a part of Andromeda’s defunct command-and-control (C2) infrastructure to reconnect to the compromised methods. The endgame was to distribute a reconnaissance utility generally known as Kopiluwak and a backdoor generally known as QuietCanary.
Andromeda, an off-the-shelf industrial malware program, dates again to a minimum of 2013 and compromises methods by way of contaminated USB drives. Post-compromise, it connects to a listing of domains, most of which have been taken offline.
There is not any relationship between the Turla Team and the group behind Andromeda, making the co-opting of earlier contaminated methods fairly novel, says Tyler McLellan, senior principal analyst at Mandiant.
“Co-opting the Andromeda domains and utilizing them to ship malware to Andromeda victims is a brand new one,” he says. “We’ve seen risk actors reregister one other group’s domains, however by no means noticed a gaggle ship malware to victims of one other.”
The sluggish unfold of Andromeda permits attackers to wrest management of contaminated methods free of charge.
“As older Andromeda malware continues to unfold from compromised USB gadgets, these re-registered domains pose a threat as new risk actors can take management and ship new malware to victims,” Mandiant said within the advisory. “This novel strategy of claiming expired domains utilized by broadly distributed, financially motivated malware can allow follow-on compromises at a wide selection of entities.”
While the hijacking of one other group’s contaminated property is rare, it has occurred prior to now, with hackers preventing over compromised machines, stealing one another’s methods, or utilizing the identical vulnerability to contaminate a system and overwrite a earlier an infection. In the early 2000s, for instance, the MyDoom worm contaminated methods however left the compromised computer systems open to additional assault, resulting in a scramble between hackers trying to enhance their steady of exploited methods.
Today, cybercriminals usually tend to compromise methods after which promote these contaminated machines, or credentials to entry these methods, on underground boards and darkish markets as a part of the preliminary entry dealer subeconomy.
A Slowly Moving Galaxy of Andromeda Infections
The assault started in December 2021, when an contaminated USB drive was inserted right into a system at a Ukrainian group and an worker inadvertently clicked on the malicious hyperlink. The cyberattack contaminated the system with a model of Andromeda first seen in March 2013 by the antivirus scanning service VirusTotal, Mandiant said.
Mandiant first detected the assault in September 2022. Turla is a Russian-based risk group, however it has focused all kinds of organizations in some 45 nations over practically twenty years, in keeping with the MITRE ATT&CK web page.
While there isn’t a relationship between Turla and Andromeda, utilizing the Andromeda malware to contaminate different methods has helped maintain the Turla operation underneath the radar, says Tyler McLellan, senior principal analyst at Mandiant.
“Despite Andromeda being previous and unlikely operational at present, we nonetheless see a whole lot of victims,” he says. “As a consumer inserts a clear USB into an already contaminated system, that new USB can turn out to be contaminated and proceed the unfold.”
Carefully Selected Targets: A Very Specific Threat
The attackers tried to stay as stealthy as potential by profiling methods to find out essentially the most attention-grabbing targets after which solely attacking a handful of these methods. Mandiant solely noticed the Turla-controlled servers lively for brief intervals of time, normally a number of days, with weeks of downtime, the corporate said.
“Mandiant recognized a number of totally different hosts with beaconing Andromeda stager samples,” the corporate said within the advisory. “However, we solely noticed one case by which Turla-related malware was dropped in extra levels, suggesting a excessive degree of specificity in selecting which victims acquired a follow-on payload.”
The Turla Team operation underscores the significance of eliminating vectors of assault and responding to incidents, even when they look like low precedence, McLellan says.
“Companies ought to take note of what USB’s are of their atmosphere and discourage workers from utilizing them the place potential,” he says. “This incident also needs to increase issues of what longer-term malware infections are in your atmosphere, and will a risk actor co-opt that C2 infrastructure to realize entry.”