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:

  • TA571 Delivers IcedID Forked Loader

    October 30, 2023

    Proofpoint researchers identified TA571 delivering the Forked variant of IcedID in two campaigns on 11 and 18 October 2023. Both campaigns included over 6,000 messages, each impacting over 1,200 customers in a variety of industries globally. Emails in the campaigns purported to be replies to existing threads. This is known as thread hijacking. The emails contained ...

  • ING CISO says data sharing is key to financial cybersecurity

    October 30, 2023

    Compliance has been the traditional focus of IT departments in financial institutions, but as cyber threats continue to evolve, the financial industry needs to look to each other to help protect the wider ecosystem. Finextra spoke with Beate Zwijnenberg, chief information security officer at ING, about some of the challenges the bank is facing across ...

  • Casio Data Breach Impacts Customers in 149 Countries

    October 27, 2023

    Japanese electronics colossus Casio Computer Co., Ltd. has suffered a data breach on its ClassPad education platform, impacting customers in 149 countries. A technical failure on October 11, 2023, alerted Casio to the cyber intrusion that culminated in an unauthorized entity accessing the ClassPad development database on October 12, 2023. Casio launched an investigation and confirmed ...

  • Police warn Israelis not to answer unknown calls

    October 27, 2023

    The Israel Police warned citizens on Friday not to answer phone or video calls from numbers they don’t recognize—particularly from abroad—following a surge of suspicious calls reported to authorities. “The purpose of the calls may be to cause panic and harassment and may be part of attempts to take over the WhatsApp accounts,” per a ...

  • A cascade of compromise: unveiling Lazarus’ new campaign

    October 27, 2023

    Earlier this year, a software vendor was compromised by the Lazarus malware delivered through unpatched legitimate software. What’s remarkable is that these software vulnerabilities were not new, and despite warnings and patches from the vendor, many of the vendor’s systems continued to use the flawed software, allowing the threat actor to exploit them. Upon further investigation, ...

  • Increasing transparency in AI security

    October 26, 2023

    New AI innovations and applications are reaching consumers and businesses on an almost-daily basis. Building AI securely is a paramount concern, and we believe that Google’s Secure AI Framework (SAIF) can help chart a path for creating AI applications that users can trust. Today, we’re highlighting two new ways to make information about AI supply ...