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:

  • How BPF-Enabled Malware Works

    October 19, 2023

    Berkeley Packet Filtering (BPF) is a kind of technology that allows programs to effectively execute code in the kernels of modern operating systems, such as Linux and Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD) variants. Soon, Windows will also add support for BPF. While many defenders might be unaware of its existence, cybercriminals have already started using BPF ...

  • Ransomware actor exploits unsupported ColdFusion servers – but comes away empty-handed

    October 19, 2023

    Servers are always a point of interest for threat actors as they are one of the most efficient attack vectors to penetrate an organization. Server-related accounts often have the highest privilege levels, making lateral movement to other machines in the network easily achievable. Sophos X-Ops has observed a wide variety of threats being delivered to ...

  • Another InfoStealer Enters the Field, ExelaStealer

    October 19, 2023

    In 2023, the InfoStealer market is a reasonably crowded affair. The likes of RedLine, Raccoon, and Vidar own a significant market share, with new entrants such as SaphireStealer appearing frequently. The latest entry, ExelaStealer has now taken the field. Very little backstory is available on ExelaStealer, with the earliest public mentions FortiGuard Labs could locate ...

  • Hacker leaks millions more 23andMe user records on cybercrime forum

    October 18, 2023

    The same hacker who leaked a trove of user data stolen from the genetic testing company 23andMe two weeks ago has now leaked millions of new user records. On Tuesday, a hacker who goes by Golem published a new dataset of 23andMe user information containing records of four million users on the known cybercrime forum ...

  • Multiple North Korean threat actors exploiting the TeamCity CVE-2023-42793 vulnerability

    October 18, 2023

    Since early October 2023, Microsoft has observed two North Korean nation-state threat actors – Diamond Sleet and Onyx Sleet – exploiting CVE-2023-42793, a remote-code execution vulnerability affecting multiple versions of JetBrains TeamCity server. TeamCity is a continuous integration/continuous deployment (CI/CD) application used by organizations for DevOps and other software development activities. In past operations, Diamond ...

  • Government-backed actors exploiting WinRAR vulnerability

    October 18, 2023

    In recent weeks, Google’s Threat Analysis Group’s (TAG) has observed multiple government-backed hacking groups exploiting the known vulnerability, CVE-2023-38831, in WinRAR, which is a popular file archiver tool for Windows. Cybercrime groups began exploiting the vulnerability in early 2023, when the bug was still unknown to defenders. A patch is now available, but many users still ...