For a subset of compromised accounts, the attackers used AzureHound and ROADtools, two open-source frameworks that can be utilized to conduct reconnaissance in Microsoft Entra ID (previously Azure Energetic Listing) environments by interacting with the Microsoft Graph and REST APIs with the purpose of exfiltrating knowledge of curiosity from a sufferer’s cloud account.
“AzureHound and Roadtools have performance that’s utilized by defenders, purple groups, and adversaries,” Microsoft stated in its report. “The identical options that make these instruments helpful to authentic customers, like pre-built capabilities to discover and seamlessly dump knowledge in a single database, additionally make these instruments enticing choices for adversaries in search of details about or from a goal’s setting.”
To realize persistence, the attackers arrange new Azure subscriptions on victims’ tenants, which had been used to ascertain command-and-control communication with infrastructure operated by the group. Additionally they put in the Azure Arc consumer on units in compromised environments and related it to an Azure subscription they managed, giving them distant management capabilities over these units. Azure Arc is a functionality that enables the distant administration of Home windows and Linux methods in an Azure AD setting.
Different post-compromise instruments and strategies
After attaining persistence, the Peach Sandstorm attackers deployed quite a lot of publicly accessible and customized instruments, together with AnyDesk, a business distant monitoring and administration (RMM) instrument, and EagleRelay, a customized site visitors tunneling instrument that the attackers deployed on newly created digital machines in sufferer environments.
Different strategies employed by the group embody abuse of the distant desktop protocol (RDP), executing malicious code by performing DLL hijacking with a authentic VMWare executable and launching a Golden SAML assault.
“In a Golden SAML assault, an adversary steals non-public keys from a goal’s on-premises Energetic Listing Federated Providers (AD FS) server and makes use of the stolen keys to mint a SAML token trusted by a goal’s Microsoft 365 setting,” Microsoft stated. “If profitable, a risk actor might bypass AD FS authentication and entry federated providers as any consumer.”
