Over the past year, this group has extended its targeting beyond telecommunication companies to also include financial institutions and government entities. During this period, we have identified several connections between GALLIUM infrastructure and targeted entities across Afghanistan, Australia, Belgium, Cambodia, Malaysia, Mozambique, the Philippines, Russia and Vietnam. Most importantly, we have also identified the group’s use of a new remote access trojan named PingPull.
PingPull has the capability to leverage three protocols (ICMP, HTTP(S) and raw TCP) for command and control (C2). While the use of ICMP tunneling is not a new technique, PingPull uses ICMP to make it more difficult to detect its C2 communications, as few organizations implement inspection of ICMP traffic on their networks. This blog provides a detailed breakdown of this new tool as well as the GALLIUM group’s recent infrastructure.
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Source: Palo Alto/Unit 42