Earth Koshchei Coopts Red Team Tools in Complex RDP Attacks


Red teaming provides essential tools and testing methodologies for organizations to strengthen their security defenses. Cybercriminals and advanced persistent threat (APT) actors pay close attention to new methods and tools red teams develop, and they may repurpose them with a malicious intent.

In October 2024, an APT group that Trend Micro tracks as Earth Koshchei (also known as APT29 and Midnight Blizzard), likely used a rogue remote desktop protocol (RDP) attack methodology against numerous targets. This methodology was described earlier in 2022 by Black Hills Information Security in detail. The attack technique is called “rogue RDP”, which involves an RDP relay, a rogue RDP server, and a malicious RDP configuration file. A victim of this technique would give partial control of their machine to the attacker, potentially leading to data leakage and malware installation.

Read more…
Source: Trend Micro


Sign up for our Newsletter


Related:

  • Ransomware attacks increasingly target Vietnam’s financial sector

    September 26, 2024

    At a recent conference on digital finance, Le Van Tuan, Director of the Department of Information Security under the Ministry of Information and Communications, said finance is a sector with a high ranking in digital transformation, but at the same time, the risk of information security is always lurking with the sector. According to statistics from ...

  • Storm-0501: Ransomware attacks expanding to hybrid cloud environments

    September 26, 2024

    Microsoft has observed the threat actor tracked as Storm-0501 launching a multi-staged attack where they compromised hybrid cloud environments and performed lateral movement from on-premises to cloud environment, leading to data exfiltration, credential theft, tampering, persistent backdoor access, and ransomware deployment. The said attack targeted multiple sectors in the United States, including government, manufacturing, transportation, and ...

  • Australia’s biggest medical imaging provider I-MED data breach exposes tens of thousands of patient files

    September 26, 2024

    Tens of thousands of patients from Australia’s biggest medical imaging provider I-MED have had swaths of sensitive health and personal information exposed in a data breach using details that have been public for a year. This information includes medical reports, scan images, names, addresses and other details that were stored in I-MED’s internal systems, which were ...

  • UK railway stations Wi-Fi affected by cyber attack

    September 26, 2024

    The wi-fi has been hacked at 19 UK railway stations to display a message about terror attacks. Network Rail confirmed that the wi-fi systems at stations including London Euston, Manchester Piccadilly, Liverpool Lime Street, Birmingham New Street, Edinburgh Waverley and Glasgow Central were affected. People reported logging on to the wi-fi at the stations on Wednesday ...

  • Threat landscape for industrial automation systems, Q2 2024

    September 26, 2024

    In the second quarter of 2024, the percentage of ICS computers on which malicious objects were blocked decreased by 0.9 pp from the previous quarter to 23.5%. The percentage has decreased by 3.3 pp compared to the second quarter of 2023, when the indicator reached its highest level since records began in 2022. Read more… Source: Kaspersky Sign up ...

  • From 12 to 21: How Kaspersky discovered connections between the Twelve and BlackJack groups

    September 25, 2024

    While analyzing attacks on Russian organizations, Kaspersky team regularly encounters overlapping tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs) among different cybercrime groups, and sometimes even shared tools. Kaspersky researchers recently discovered one such overlap: similar tools and tactics between two hacktivist groups – BlackJack and Twelve, which likely belong to a single cluster of activity. In this report, ...