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:

  • Examining Log4j Vulnerabilities in Connected Cars and Charging Stations

    December 23, 2021

    Since its disclosure on Dec. 9, a vast number of articles have been written on the remote code execution (RCE) vulnerability in the library Apache Log4j — a reflection of its impact. The library is used by innumerable programs to easily release log statements without modifying the code. This means that it has an expansive ...

  • Stealthy BLISTER malware slips in unnoticed on Windows systems

    December 23, 2021

    Security researchers have uncovered a malicious campaign that relies on a valid code-signing certificate to disguise malicious code as legitimate executables. One of the payloads that the researchers called Blister, acts as a loader for other malware and appears to be a novel threat that enjoys a low detection rate. The threat actor behind Blister has been ...

  • Fulfilling Security Requirements for the Transportation Sector

    December 23, 2021

    Protecting our critical infrastructure against the threat of ransomware remains a top priority for both the private sector and the federal government. In fact, a recent survey from Tripwire found that security professionals in both sectors still identify ransomware as a top security concern. More than half (53%) of respondents in that study said they ...

  • Honeypot experiment reveals what hackers want from IoT devices

    December 22, 2021

    A three-year-long honeypot experiment featuring simulated low-interaction IoT devices of various types and locations gives a clear idea of why actors target specific devices. More specifically, the honeypot was meant to create a sufficiently diverse ecosystem and cluster the generated data in a way that determines the goals of adversaries. IoT (Internet of Things) devices are a ...

  • Microsoft Teams bug allowing phishing unpatched since March

    December 22, 2021

    Microsoft said it won’t fix or is delaying patches for several security flaws impacting Microsoft Teams’ link preview feature reported since March 2021. German IT security consultancy firm Positive Security’s co-founder Fabian Bräunlein discovered four vulnerabilities leading to Server-Side Request Forgery (SSRF), URL preview spoofing, IP address leak (Android), and denial of service (DoS) dubbed Message ...

  • What to Do About Log4j

    December 21, 2021

    Log4j poses some deep challenges to IT. In this article I’ll discuss some tactical measures people are already taking now and over the next week or two, and some strategic guidance for what to do after the immediate crisis abates. The Problem Log4j is a very useful tool incorporated in much Java code. There are so many ...