New Star Blizzard spear-phishing campaign targets WhatsApp accounts


Star Blizzard’s new spear-phishing campaign, while novel in that it uses and targets WhatsApp for the first time, exhibits familiar spear-phishing TTPs for Star Blizzard, with the threat actor initiating email contact with their targets, to engage them, before sending them a second message containing a malicious link.

The sender address used by the threat actor in this campaign impersonates a US government official, continuing Star Blizzard’s practice of impersonating known political/diplomatic figures, to further ensure target engagement. The initial email sent to targets contains a quick response (QR) code purporting to direct users to join a WhatsApp group on “the latest non-governmental initiatives aimed at supporting Ukraine NGOs.”

Read more…
Source: Microsoft


Sign up for our Newsletter


Related:

  • Rise in XorDdos: A deeper look at the stealthy DDoS malware targeting Linux devices

    May 19, 2022

    In the last six months, we observed a 254% increase in activity from a Linux trojan called XorDdos. First discovered in 2014 by the research group MalwareMustDie, XorDdos was named after its denial-of-service-related activities on Linux endpoints and servers as well as its usage of XOR-based encryption for its communications. XorDdos depicts the trend of malware ...

  • Bruised but Not Broken: The Resurgence of the Emotet Botnet Malware

    May 19, 2022

    The Emotet botnet malware is well known in the cybersecurity industry for its success in using spam emails to compromise machines and then selling access to these machines as part of its infamous malware-as-a-service (MaaS) scheme. Operators behind notorious threats such as the Trickbot trojan and the Ryuk or Conti ransomware are among the malicious ...

  • Weaponization of Excel Add-Ins Part 2: Dridex Infection Chain Case Studies

    May 19, 2022

    In Part 1 of this two-part blog series, Unit 42 researchers discussed briefly how XLL files are exploited to deploy Agent Tesla. During December 2021, they continued to observe Dridex and Agent Tesla exploiting XLL in different ways for initial payload delivery. A more in-depth look at the Dridex infection chain follows. Threat actors behind Dridex ...

  • Protecting Android users from 0-Day attacks

    May 19, 2022

    To protect our users, Google’s Threat Analysis Group (TAG) routinely hunts for 0-day vulnerabilities exploited in-the-wild. In 2021, we reported nine 0-days affecting Chrome, Android, Apple and Microsoft, leading to patches to protect users from these attacks. This blog is a follow up to our July 2021 post on four 0-day vulnerabilities we discovered in 2021, ...

  • Threat Actors Chaining Unpatched VMware Vulnerabilities for Full System Control

    May 18, 2022

    The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) is releasing this Cybersecurity Advisory (CSA) to warn organizations that malicious cyber actors, likely advanced persistent threat (APT) actors, are exploiting CVE-2022-22954 and CVE-2022-22960 separately and in combination. These vulnerabilities affect certain versions of VMware Workspace ONE Access, VMware Identity Manager (vIDM), VMware vRealize Automation (vRA), VMware Cloud ...

  • Hydra with Three Heads: BlackByte & The Future of Ransomware Subsidiary Groups

    May 18, 2022

    On February 13, 2022, a novel, lesser-known ransomware collective posted the alleged financial documents of the San Francisco 49ers football team on their underground site. The threat group, known as BlackByte, was widely credited with the orchestration of the attack—However, AdvIntel’s sensitive primary-source intelligence and factual data evidence (including IOCs) point to a different conclusion: ...