New campaign uses government, union-themed lures to deliver Cobalt Strike beacons


Cisco Talos recently discovered a malicious campaign with a modularised attack technique to deliver Cobalt Strike beacons on infected endpoints.

The initial vector of this attack is a phishing email with a malicious Microsoft Word document attachment containing an exploit that attempts to exploit the vulnerability CVE-2017-0199, a remote code execution issue in Microsoft Office. If a victim opens the maldoc, it downloads a malicious Word document template hosted on an attacker-controlled Bitbucket repository.

Talos discovered two attack methodologies employed by the attacker in this campaign: One in which the downloaded DOTM template executes an embedded malicious Visual Basic script, which leads to the generation and execution of other obfuscated VB and PowerShell scripts and another that involves the malicious VB downloading and running a Windows executable that executes malicious PowerShell commands to download and implant the payload.

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Source: Cisco Talos