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:

  • Healthcare company WebTPA discloses breach affecting 2.5 million people

    May 17, 2024

    A Texas-based company that provides health insurance and benefit plans disclosed a data breach affecting almost 2.5 million people, some of whom had their Social Security number stolen. WebTPA said in a data breach notice published earlier this month that the company detected “evidence of suspicious activity” on December 28, 2023, which prompted the company to ...

  • Positive Technologies detects a series of attacks via Microsoft Exchange Server

    May 17, 2024

    While responding to an incident, the Incident Response team of Positive Technologies Expert Security Center (PT ESC) discovered an unknown keylogger embedded in the main Microsoft Exchange Server page of one of our customers. This keylogger was collecting account credentials into a file accessible via a special path from the internet. The team identified over 30 ...

  • Springtail: New Linux Backdoor Added to Toolkit

    May 16, 2024

    Symantec’s Threat Hunter Team has uncovered a new Linux backdoor developed by the North Korean Springtail espionage group (aka Kimsuky) that is linked to malware used in a recent campaign against organizations in South Korea. The backdoor (Linux.Gomir) appears to be a Linux version of the GoBear backdoor, which was used in a recent Springtail campaign ...

  • Tracking the Progression of Earth Hundun’s Cyberespionage Campaign in 2024

    May 16, 2024

    In their previous report, Trend Micro researchers introduced the sophisticated cyberespionage campaign orchestrated by Earth Hundun, a threat actor known for targeting the Asia-Pacific region using the Waterbear malware and its latest iteration, Deuterbear. We first observed Deuterbear being used by Earth Hundun in October 2022, and it has since been part of the group’s ...

  • Payload Trends in Malicious OneNote Samples

    May 16, 2024

    In this post, Unt 42 researchers look at the types of embedded payloads that attackers leverage to abuse Microsoft OneNote files. Our analysis of roughly 6,000 malicious OneNote samples from WildFire reveals that these samples have a phishing-like theme where attackers use one or more images to lure people into clicking or interacting with OneNote ...

  • Scammers can easily phish your multi-factor authentication codes – here’s how to avoid it

    May 16, 2024

    More and more websites and services are making multi-factor-authentication (MFA) mandatory, which makes it much harder for cybercriminals to access your accounts. That’s a great thing. But as security evolves, so do cybercriminals who are always looking for new ways to scam us. A type of phishing we’re calling authentication-in-the-middle is showing up in online media. ...