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 identify service (DNS) protocol to create a covert channel and supply completely different backdoor functionalities,” Palo Alto Networks Unit 42 researcher Chema Garcia mentioned in a Friday evaluation.
Targets of the assaults span varied sectors akin 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 strategies used.
The cybersecurity agency is monitoring the cluster underneath the moniker CL-STA-0002. It is at present not clear how these organizations had been breached, and when the assaults happened.
A number of the different instruments deployed by the adversary embrace 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 device and the Agent Racoon malware have solely been present in nonprofit and government-related organizations’ environments,” Garcia defined.
It is price 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 have been focused by CL-STA-0002.
Agent Raccoon, executed by way of 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 no less than 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 knowledge exfiltration from Microsoft Trade Server environments, ensuing within the theft of emails matching completely different search standards. The risk actor has additionally been discovered to reap victims’ Roaming Profile.
“This device set is just not but related to a selected risk actor, and never fully restricted to a single cluster or marketing campaign,” Garcia mentioned.
