Mirage Kitten – also known as UNC1549, Smoke Sandstorm, and Nimbus Manticore – is an advanced persistent threat (APT) group focused on cyber-espionage operations against aerospace, aviation, defense, and telecommunications sectors across the Middle East and Africa, using highly targeted spear-phishing campaigns, fake recruitment portals, and custom multi-stage malware to gain persistent access and exfiltrate sensitive data.
During recent threat research, Kaspersky identified a previously undocumented malware set developed and used by Mirage Kitten. The toolset includes NightLedger, a new Windows backdoor for reconnaissance, command execution, file operations, process discovery, and screenshot capture; and two custom WebSocket-based tunnelers, ArcBridge and BridgeHead, for covert network access and operator-controlled tunneling.
Read more…
Source: Kaspersky
Sign up for the Cyber Security Review Newsletter
The latest cyber security news and insights delivered right to your inbox
Related:
- Ramnit Changes Shape with Widespread Black Botnet
August 6, 2018
A massive proxy botnet is just the tip of the iceberg, a warning sign of a bigger operation in the works by the Ramnit operators. The recently uncovered “Black” botnet campaign using the Ramnit malware racked up 100,000 infections in the two months through July– but the offensive could just be a precursor to a much ...
- U.S. Payment Processing Services Targeted by BGP Hijacking Attacks
August 6, 2018
According to a new report, three United States payment processing companies were targeted by BGP hijacking attacks on their DNS servers. These Internet routing attacks were designed to redirect traffic directed at the payment processors to servers controlled by malicious actors who would then attempt to steal the data. On three separate dates in July, Oracle ...
- Google Project Zero: ‘Here’s the secret to flagging up bugs before hackers find them’
August 3, 2018
Samsung’s utterly confusing vulnerability reporting website has prompted one of Google’s top security researchers to explain how companies should help researchers report bugs and eliminate hackable flaws in products quickly. Google’s Project Zero bug hunter, Natalie Silvanovich, who Microsoft has recognized as a top 10 researcher in the world, has a few tips for vendors of all types ...
- Poor cybersecurity could destabilise increasingly complex energy grids
July 26, 2018
The future of smart energy grids, with automatic management of both supply and demand, is “looking really interesting”, says Phil Kernick, chief technology officer at security firm CQR Consulting. But the current state of the technology and its security is a problem. “The distribution systems and the generation systems were deployed a decade and a half ...
- NetSpectre — New Remote Spectre Attack Steals Data Over the Network
July 26, 2018
A team of security researchers has discovered a new Spectre attack that can be launched over the network, unlike all other Spectre variants that require some form of local code execution on the target system. Dubbed “NetSpectre,” the new remote side-channel attack, which is related to Spectre variant 1, abuses speculative execution to perform bounds-check bypass ...
- Massive Malspam Campaign Finds a New Vector for FlawedAmmyy RAT
July 20, 2018
A widespread spam campaign from the well-known financial criminal group TA505 is spreading the FlawedAmmyy RAT using a brand-new vector: Weaponized PDFs containing malicious SettingContent-ms files. The SettingContent-ms file format was introduced in Windows 10; it allows a user to create “shortcuts” to various Windows 10 setting pages. “All this file does is open the Control Panel ...