Organizations within the Center East, Africa, and the U.S. have been focused by an unknown risk actor to distribute a brand new backdoor referred to as Agent Racoon.
“This malware household is written utilizing the .NET framework and leverages the area title service (DNS) protocol to create a covert channel and supply totally different backdoor functionalities,” Palo Alto Networks Unit 42 researcher Chema Garcia mentioned in a Friday evaluation.
Targets of the assaults span numerous sectors similar to training, actual property, retail, non-profits, telecom, and governments. The exercise has not been attributed to a identified risk actor, though it is assessed to be a nation-state aligned owing to the victimology sample and the detection and protection evasion methods used.
The cybersecurity agency is monitoring the cluster beneath the moniker CL-STA-0002. It is at the moment not clear how these organizations had been breached, and when the assaults came about.
A number of the different instruments deployed by the adversary embody a personalized model of Mimikatz referred to as Mimilite in addition to a brand new utility referred to as Ntospy, which makes use of a customized DLL module implementing a community supplier to steal credentials to a distant server.
“Whereas the attackers generally used Ntospy throughout the affected organizations, the Mimilite software and the Agent Racoon malware have solely been present in nonprofit and government-related organizations’ environments,” Garcia defined.
It is value stating a beforehand recognized risk exercise cluster often known as CL-STA-0043 has additionally been linked to using Ntospy, with the adversary additionally concentrating on two organizations which were focused by CL-STA-0002.
Agent Raccoon, executed via scheduled duties, permits for command execution, file importing, and file downloading, whereas disguising itself as Google Replace and Microsoft OneDrive Updater binaries.
The command-and-control (C2) infrastructure utilized in reference to the implant dates again to a minimum of August 2020. An examination of VirusTotal submissions of the Agent Racoon artifacts exhibits that the earliest pattern was uploaded in July 2022.
Unit 42 mentioned it additionally uncovered proof of profitable information exfiltration from Microsoft Alternate Server environments, ensuing within the theft of emails matching totally different search standards. The risk actor has additionally been discovered to reap victims’ Roaming Profile.
“This software set is just not but related to a selected risk actor, and never fully restricted to a single cluster or marketing campaign,” Garcia mentioned.
