Since 2022, Mandiant has tracked and reported on IT workers operating on behalf of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK). These workers pose as non-North Korean nationals to gain employment with organizations across a wide range of industries in order to generate revenue for the North Korean regime, particularly to evade sanctions and fund its weapons of mass destruction (WMD) and ballistic missile programs.
A U.S. government advisory in 2022 noted that these workers have also leveraged privileged access obtained through their employment in order to enable malicious cyber intrusions, an observation corroborated by Mandiant and other organizations.
Read more…
Source: Mandiant
Related:
- NSA Urgently Warns on Industrial Cyberattacks, Triconex Critical Bug
July 24, 2020
The U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) have issued an alert warning that adversaries could be targeting critical infrastructure across the U.S. Separately, ICS-CERT issued an advisory on a critical security bug in the Schneider Electric Triconex TriStation and Tricon Communication Module. These safety instrumented system (SIS) controllers are ...
- OilRig Targets Middle Eastern Telecom Organization and Adds Novel C2 Channel with Steganography to Its Inventory
July 22, 2020
While analyzing an attack against a Middle Eastern telecommunications organization, Unit 42 has discovered a variant of an OilRig-associated tool we call RDAT using a novel email-based command and control (C2) channel that relied on a technique known as steganography to hide commands and data within bitmap images attached to emails. In May 2020, Symantec published ...
- MATA: Multi-platform targeted malware framework
July 22, 2020
As the IT and OT environment becomes more complex, adversaries are quick to adapt their attack strategy. For example, as users’ work environments diversify, adversaries are busy acquiring the TTPs to infiltrate systems. Recently, we reported to our Threat Intelligence Portal customers a similar malware framework that internally we called MATA. The MATA malware framework ...
- Going Down the Spyware Rabbit Hole with SilkBean Mobile Malware
July 22, 2020
An Android spyware attack was recently discovered that targeted the Uyghur ethnic minority group – since 2013. In this in-depth Threatpost podcast Christoph Hebeisen, who leads the Security Intelligence Research Division at Lookout, shares a behind-the-scenes look at how his team discovered and tracked three never-before-seen surveillanceware tools, dubbed SilkBean, GoldenEagle and CarbonSteal. Read more… Source: ThreatPost
- Threat Brief: Microsoft DNS Server Wormable Vulnerability CVE-2020-1350
July 21, 2020
In July 2020, Microsoft released a security update, CVE-2020-1350 | Windows DNS Server Remote Code Execution Vulnerability, for a new remote code execution (RCE) vulnerability. This vulnerability exists within the Microsoft Windows Domain Name System (DNS) Server due to the improper handling of certain types of requests, specifically over port 53/TCP. Exploitation of this vulnerability is ...
- Hacker Infrastructure And Underground Hosting 101
July 21, 2020
In the cybercrime underground, a criminal’s hosting infrastructure serves as the foundation of their entire business model. It hosts anonymizing services for keeping their activities private, command-and-control (C&C) servers for taking advantage of victims’ machines, and discussion forums for communicating with other criminals. Criminal sellers provide services and infrastructures that other criminals need to execute ...