A Russian threat actor Palo Alto Unit 42 track as Fighting Ursa advertised a car for sale as a lure to distribute HeadLace backdoor malware. The campaign likely targeted diplomats and began as early as March 2024.
Fighting Ursa (aka APT28, Fancy Bear and Sofacy) has been associated with Russian military intelligence and classified as an advanced persistent threat (APT). Diplomatic-car-for-sale phishing lure themes have been used by Russian threat actors for years. These lures tend to resonate with diplomats and get targets to click on the malicious content.
Read more…
Source: Palo Alto
Related:
- Operation AppleJeus Sequel
January 10, 2020
The Lazarus group is currently one of the most active and prolific APT actors. In 2018, Kaspersky published a report on one of their campaigns, named Operation AppleJeus. Notably, this operation marked the first time Lazarus had targeted macOS users, with the group inventing a fake company in order to deliver their manipulated application and exploit ...
- Rancor: Cyber Espionage Group Uses New Custom Malware to Attack Southeast Asia
December 17, 2019
In late June 2018, Unit 42 revealed a previously unknown cyber espionage group we dubbed Rancor, which conducted targeted attacks in Southeast Asia throughout 2017 and 2018. In recent attacks, the group has persistently targeted at least one government organization in Cambodia from December 2018 through January 2019. While researching these attacks, we discovered an undocumented, ...
- More than a Dozen Obfuscated APT33 Botnets Used for Extreme Narrow Targeting
December 12, 2019
The threat group regularly referred to as APT33 is known to target the oil and aviation industries aggressively. This threat group has been reported on consistently for years, but our recent findings show that the group has been using about a dozen live Command and Control (C&C) servers for extremely narrow targeting. The group puts up multiple layers of obfuscation to ...
- Waterbear is Back, Uses API Hooking to Evade Security Product Detection
December 11, 2019
Waterbear, which has been around for several years, is a campaign that uses modular malware capable of including additional functions remotely. It is associated with the cyberespionage group BlackTech, which mainly targets technology companies and government agencies in East Asia (specifically Taiwan, and in some instances, Japan and Hong Kong) and is responsible for some infamous campaigns ...
- Mobile Cyberespionage Campaign Distributed Through CallerSpy Mounts Initial Phase of a Targeted Attack
December 2, 2019
Trend Micro found a new spyware family disguised as chat apps on a phishing website. We believe that the apps, which exhibit many cyberespionage behaviors, are initially used for a targeted attack campaign. We first came across the threat in May on the site http://goooglepress/, which was advertising a chat app called “Chatrious.” Users can ...
- Operation ENDTRADE: Finding Multi-Stage Backdoors that TICK
November 29, 2019
While we have been following cyberespionage group TICK (a.k.a. “BRONZE BUTLER” or “REDBALDKNIGHT”) since 2008, we noticed an unusual increase in malware development and deployments towards November 2018. We already know that the group uses previously deployed malware and modified tools for obfuscation, but we also found TICK developing new malware families capable of detection ...

