For the Lazarus threat actor, financial gain is one of the prime motivations, with a particular emphasis on the cryptocurrency business. As the price of cryptocurrency surges, and the popularity of non-fungible token (NFT) and decentralized finance (DeFi) businesses continues to swell, the Lazarus group’s targeting of the financial industry keeps evolving.
We recently discovered a Trojanized DeFi application that was compiled in November 2021. This application contains a legitimate program called DeFi Wallet that saves and manages a cryptocurrency wallet, but also implants a malicious file when executed. This malware is a full-featured backdoor containing sufficient capabilities to control the compromised victim. After looking into the functionalities of this backdoor, we discovered numerous overlaps with other tools used by the Lazarus group.
The malware operator exclusively used compromised web servers located in South Korea for this attack. To take over the servers, we worked closely with the KrCERT and, as a result of this effort, we had an opportunity to investigate a Lazarus group C2 server. The threat actor configured this infrastructure with servers set up as multiple stages. The first stage is the source for the backdoor while the goal of the second stage servers is to communicate with the implants. This is a common scheme used in Lazarus infrastructure.
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Source: Kaspersky