In July, we came across a phishing email purporting to be a new order notification, which contains a malicious attachment that leads to the remote access tool Remcos RAT (detected by Trend Micro as BKDR_SOCMER.SM). This attack delivers Remcos using an AutoIt wrapper that incorporates various obfuscation and anti-debugging techniques to evade detection, which is a common method for distributing known malware.
Remcos RAT emerged in 2016 being peddled as a service in hacking forums — advertised, sold, and offered cracked on various sites and forums. The RAT appears to still be actively pushed by cybercriminals. In 2017, we reported spotting Remcos being delivered via a malicious PowerPoint slideshow, embedded with an exploit for CVE-2017-0199. Recently, the RAT has made its way to phishing emails.
The malicious actor behind the phishing email appears to use the email address rud-division@alkuhaimi[.]com (with a legitimate domain) and the subject “RE: NEW ORDER 573923”. The email includes the malicious attachment using the ACE compressed file format, Purchase order201900512.ace, which has the loader/wrapper Boom.exe.
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Source: Trend Micro