Iranian state-sponsored actors are persevering with to have interaction in social engineering campaigns focusing on researchers by impersonating a U.S. suppose tank.
“Notably the targets on this occasion have been all ladies who’re actively concerned in political affairs and human rights within the Center East area,” Secureworks Counter Menace Unit (CTU) stated in a report shared with The Hacker Information.
The cybersecurity firm attributed the exercise to a hacking group it tracks as Cobalt Phantasm, and which can also be identified by the names APT35, Charming Kitten, ITG18, Phosphorus, TA453, and Yellow Garuda.
The focusing on of teachers, activists, diplomats, journalists, politicians, and researchers by the menace actor has been well-documented over the years.
The group is suspected to be working on behalf of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) and has exhibited a sample of utilizing pretend personas to determine contact with people who’re of strategic curiosity to the federal government.
“It’s common for Cobalt Phantasm to work together with its targets a number of occasions over totally different messaging platforms,” SecureWorks stated. “The menace actors first ship benign hyperlinks and paperwork to construct rapport. They then ship a malicious hyperlink or doc to phish credentials for techniques that Cobalt Phantasm seeks to entry.”
Chief amongst its ways embody leveraging credential harvesting to realize management of victims’ mailboxes in addition to using customized instruments like HYPERSCRAPE (aka EmailDownloader) to steal knowledge from Gmail, Yahoo!, and Microsoft Outlook accounts utilizing the stolen passwords.
One other bespoke malware linked to the group is a C++-based Telegram “grabber” software that facilitates knowledge harvesting on a big scale from Telegram accounts after acquiring the goal’s credentials.
The most recent exercise includes the adversary passing off as an worker of the Atlantic Council, a U.S.-based suppose tank, and reaching out to political affairs and human rights researchers beneath the pretext of contributing to a report.
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To make the ruse convincing, the social media accounts related to the fraudulent “Sara Shokouhi” persona (@SaShokouhi on Twitter and @sarashokouhii on Instagram) have been tweeting or partaking with posts which are supportive of ongoing protests in Iran. The bios additionally declare Shokouhi has a PhD in Center East politics.
What’s extra, the profile photographs in these accounts, per Secureworks, are stated to have been taken from an Instagram account belonging to a psychologist and tarot card reader primarily based in Russia.
It isn’t instantly clear if the hassle resulted in any profitable phishing assaults. The Twitter account, created in October 2022, stays lively thus far as is the Instagram account.
“Phishing and bulk knowledge assortment are core ways of Cobalt Phantasm,” Rafe Pilling, principal researcher and Iran thematic lead at Secureworks CTU, stated in an announcement.
“The group undertakes intelligence gathering, usually human targeted intelligence, like extracting the contents of mailboxes, contact lists, journey plans, relationships, bodily location, and so forth. This intel is probably going blended with different sources and used to tell navy and safety operations by Iran, overseas and home.”
