From Social Engineering to DMARC Abuse: TA427’s Art of Information Gathering


Proofpoint researchers track numerous state-sponsored and state-aligned threat actors.

TA427 (also known as Emerald Sleet, APT43, THALLIUM or Kimsuky), a Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK or North Korea) aligned group working in support of the Reconnaissance General Bureau, is particularly prolific in email phishing campaigns targeting experts for insight into US and the Republic of Korea (ROK or South Korea) foreign policy. Since 2023, TA427 has directly solicited foreign policy experts for their opinions on nuclear disarmament, US-ROK policies, and sanction topics via benign conversation starting emails. In recent months, Proofpoint researchers have observed a steady, and at times increasing, stream of this activity.

Read more…
Source: Proofpoint


Sign up for our Newsletter


Related:

  • TA422’s Dedicated Exploitation Loop – the Same Week After Week

    December 5, 2023

    Starting in March 2023, Proofpoint researchers have observed the Russian advanced persistent threat (APT) TA422 readily use patched vulnerabilities to target a variety of organizations in Europe and North America. TA422 overlaps with the aliases APT28, Forest Blizzard, Pawn Storm, Fancy Bear, and BlueDelta, and is attributed by the United States Intelligence Community to the Russian ...

  • FBI: IRGC-Affiliated Cyber Actors Exploit PLCs in Multiple Sectors, Including U.S. Water and Wastewater Systems Facilities

    December 1, 2023

    The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), National Security Agency (NSA), Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), and the Israel National Cyber Directorate (INCD) are disseminating this joint Cybersecurity Advisory (CSA) to highlight continued malicious cyber activity against operational technology devices by Iranian Government Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC)-affiliated Advanced Persistent Threat ...

  • AeroBlade on the hunt targeting the U.S. Aerospace industry

    November 30, 2023

    BlackBerry has uncovered a previously unknown threat actor targeting an aerospace organization in the United States, with the apparent goal of conducting commercial and competitive cyber espionage. The BlackBerry Threat Research and Intelligence team is tracking this threat actor as AeroBlade. The actor used spear-phishing as a delivery mechanism: A weaponized document, sent as an email ...

  • Hellhounds: Operation Lahat

    November 30, 2023

    In 2023, Positive Technologies Computer Security Incident Response Team (PT CSIRT) discovered that a certain power company was compromised by the Decoy Dog trojan. According to the PT CSIRT investigation, Decoy Dog has been actively used in cyberattacks on Russian companies and government organizations since at least September 2022. This trojan was previously discussed by NCIRCC, Infoblox, ...

  • Israel-Hamas war spotlight: Shaking the rust off SysJoker

    November 23, 2023

    Amid tensions in the ongoing Israel-Hamas war, Check Point Research has been conducting active threat hunting in an effort to discover, attribute, and mitigate relevant regional threats. Among those, some new variants of the SysJoker malware, including one coded in Rust, recently caught our attention. Check Point assessment is that these were used in targeted attacks ...

  • HrServ – Previously unknown web shell used in APT attack

    November 22, 2023

    In the course of our routine investigation, we discovered a DLL file, identified as hrserv.dll, which is a previously unknown web shell exhibiting sophisticated features such as custom encoding methods for client communication and in-memory execution. Kaspersky analysis of the sample led to the discovery of related variants compiled in 2021, indicating a potential correlation between ...