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:

  • The future of cyberconflicts

    December 21, 2020

    The ever-increasing role of technology in every aspect of our society has turned cybersecurity into a major sovereignty issue for all states. Due to their asymmetrical nature, offensive cyber-capabilities have been embraced by many countries that wouldn’t otherwise have the resources to compete on a military or economic level with the most powerful nations of ...

  • Zero-click iOS zero-day found deployed against Al Jazeera employees

    December 20, 2020

    At least 36 Al Jazeera journalists, producers, anchors, and executives, along with a journalist at London-based Al Araby TV, had their iPhones hacked using a no-user-interaction zero-day vulnerability in the iOS iMessage app, an academic research group said today. Citizen Lab, a cybersecurity and human rights abuse research group at the University of Toronto, said the ...

  • Sunburst: connecting the dots in the DNS requests

    December 19, 2020

    On December 13, 2020 FireEye published important details of a newly discovered supply chain attack. An unknown attacker, referred to as UNC2452 or DarkHalo planted a backdoor in the SolarWinds Orion IT software. This backdoor, which comes in the form of a .NET module, has some really interesting and rather unique features. We spent the past ...

  • Stealthy Magecart malware mistakenly leaks list of hacked stores

    December 19, 2020

    A list of dozens of online stores hacked by a web skimming group was inadvertently leaked by a dropper used to deploy a stealthy remote access trojan (RAT) on compromised e-commerce sites. The threat actors use this RAT for maintaining persistence and for regaining access to the servers of hacked online shops. Once they connect to the ...

  • Microsoft Caught Up in SolarWinds Spy Effort, Joining Federal Agencies

    December 18, 2020

    Microsoft has become the latest victim of the ever-widening SolarWinds-driven cyberattack that has impacted rafts of federal agencies and tech targets. Its president, Brad Smith, warned late Thursday to expect many more victims to come to light as investigations continue. Adversaries were able to use SolarWinds’ Orion network management platform to infect users with a stealth ...

  • Negasteal Uses Hastebin for Fileless Delivery of Crysis Ransomware

    December 18, 2020

    Trend Micro researchers have recently encountered a Negasteal (also known as Agent Tesla) variant that used hastebin for the fileless delivery of the Crysis (also known as Dharma) ransomware. This is the first time that we have observed Negasteal with a ransomware payload. Only a few months ago, Deep Instinct published the first reported case of ...