A hacking group — suspected to be the Russia-linked Turla Staff — reregistered at the very least three previous domains related to the decade-old Andromeda malware, permitting the group to distribute its personal reconnaissance and surveillance instruments to Ukrainian targets.
Cybersecurity agency Mandiant acknowledged in a Thursday advisory that Turla Staff APT, additionally identified by Mandiant’s designation of UNC4210, took management of three domains that had been a part of Andromeda’s defunct command-and-control (C2) infrastructure to reconnect to the compromised methods. The endgame was to distribute a reconnaissance utility referred to as Kopiluwak and a backdoor referred to as QuietCanary.
Andromeda, an off-the-shelf industrial malware program, dates again to at the very least 2013 and compromises methods by contaminated USB drives. Publish-compromise, it connects to a listing of domains, most of which have been taken offline.
There is no such thing as a relationship between the Turla Staff and the group behind Andromeda, making the co-opting of earlier contaminated methods fairly novel, says Tyler McLellan, senior principal analyst at Mandiant.
“Co-opting the Andromeda domains and utilizing them to ship malware to Andromeda victims is a brand new one,” he says. “We have seen risk actors reregister one other group’s domains, however by no means noticed a bunch ship malware to victims of one other.”
The gradual unfold of Andromeda permits attackers to wrest management of contaminated methods at no cost.
“As older Andromeda malware continues to unfold from compromised USB units, these re-registered domains pose a danger as new risk actors can take management and ship new malware to victims,” Mandiant acknowledged within the advisory. “This novel strategy of claiming expired domains utilized by broadly distributed, financially motivated malware can allow follow-on compromises at a big selection of entities.”
Whereas the hijacking of one other group’s contaminated property is rare, it has occurred prior to now, with hackers combating over compromised machines, stealing one another’s methods, or utilizing the identical vulnerability to contaminate a system and overwrite a earlier an infection. Within the early 2000s, for instance, the MyDoom worm contaminated methods however left the compromised computer systems open to additional assault, resulting in a scramble between hackers seeking to enhance their secure of exploited methods.
Right this moment, cybercriminals usually tend to compromise methods after which promote these contaminated machines, or credentials to entry these methods, on underground boards and darkish markets as a part of the preliminary entry dealer subeconomy.
A Slowly Transferring Galaxy of Andromeda Infections
The assault started in December 2021, when an contaminated USB drive was inserted right into a system at a Ukrainian group and an worker inadvertently clicked on the malicious hyperlink. The cyberattack contaminated the system with a model of Andromeda first seen in March 2013 by the antivirus scanning service VirusTotal, Mandiant acknowledged.
Mandiant first detected the assault in September 2022. Turla is a Russian-based risk group, nevertheless it has focused all kinds of organizations in some 45 international locations over practically 20 years, in response to the MITRE ATT&CK web page.
Whereas there isn’t any relationship between Turla and Andromeda, utilizing the Andromeda malware to contaminate different methods has helped hold the Turla operation below the radar, says Tyler McLellan, senior principal analyst at Mandiant.
“Regardless of Andromeda being previous and unlikely operational as we speak, we nonetheless see plenty of victims,” he says. “As a person inserts a clear USB into an already contaminated system, that new USB can grow to be contaminated and proceed the unfold.”
Rigorously Chosen Targets: A Very Particular Risk
The attackers tried to stay as stealthy as doable by profiling methods to find out probably the most fascinating targets after which solely attacking a handful of these methods. Mandiant solely noticed the Turla-controlled servers lively for brief durations of time, often a couple of days, with weeks of downtime, the corporate acknowledged.
“Mandiant recognized a number of completely different hosts with beaconing Andromeda stager samples,” the corporate acknowledged within the advisory. “Nonetheless, we solely noticed one case wherein Turla-related malware was dropped in extra phases, suggesting a excessive degree of specificity in selecting which victims obtained a follow-on payload.”
The Turla Staff operation underscores the significance of eliminating vectors of assault and responding to incidents, even when they seem like low precedence, McLellan says.
“Firms ought to take note of what USB’s are of their surroundings and discourage staff from utilizing them the place doable,” he says. “This incident also needs to increase issues of what longer-term malware infections are in your surroundings, and will a risk actor co-opt that C2 infrastructure to achieve entry.”
