A hacking group — suspected to be the Russia-linked Turla Group — reregistered no less than three outdated domains related to the decade-old Andromeda malware, permitting the group to distribute its personal reconnaissance and surveillance instruments to Ukrainian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 Group APT, additionally recognized 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 techniques. The endgame was to distribute a reconnaissance utility often called Kopiluwak and a backdoor often called QuietCanary.
Andromeda, an off-the-shelf industrial malware program, dates again to no less than 2013 and compromises techniques via contaminated USB drives. Submit-compromise, it connects to a listing of domains, most of which have been taken offline.
There isn’t a relationship between the Turla Group and the group behind Andromeda, making the co-opting of earlier contaminated techniques 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 gaggle ship malware to victims of one other.”
The sluggish unfold of Andromeda permits attackers to wrest management of contaminated techniques totally free.
“As older Andromeda malware continues to unfold from compromised USB units, these re-registered domains pose a threat 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 wide selection of entities.”
Whereas the hijacking of one other group’s contaminated property is rare, it has occurred previously, with hackers preventing over compromised machines, stealing one another’s techniques, 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 techniques however left the compromised computer systems open to additional assault, resulting in a scramble between hackers trying to enhance their secure of exploited techniques.
In the present day, cybercriminals usually tend to compromise techniques after which promote these contaminated machines, or credentials to entry these techniques, 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, but it surely has focused all kinds of organizations in some 45 nations over almost twenty years, in response to the MITRE ATT&CK web page.
Whereas there isn’t a relationship between Turla and Andromeda, utilizing the Andromeda malware to contaminate different techniques has helped hold the Turla operation beneath the radar, says Tyler McLellan, senior principal analyst at Mandiant.
“Regardless of Andromeda being outdated and not going operational at the moment, we nonetheless see plenty of victims,” he says. “As a consumer inserts a clear USB into an already contaminated system, that new USB can develop into contaminated and proceed the unfold.”
Fastidiously Chosen Targets: A Very Particular Menace
The attackers tried to stay as stealthy as attainable by profiling techniques to find out essentially the most attention-grabbing targets after which solely attacking a handful of these techniques. Mandiant solely noticed the Turla-controlled servers lively for brief intervals of time, normally a couple of days, with weeks of downtime, the corporate acknowledged.
“Mandiant recognized a number of totally different hosts with beaconing Andromeda stager samples,” the corporate acknowledged within the advisory. “Nevertheless, we solely noticed one case through which Turla-related malware was dropped in further phases, suggesting a excessive degree of specificity in selecting which victims obtained a follow-on payload.”
The Turla Group operation underscores the significance of eliminating vectors of assault and responding to incidents, even when they seem like low precedence, McLellan says.
“Corporations ought to take note of what USB’s are of their atmosphere and discourage staff from utilizing them the place attainable,” he says. “This incident also needs to elevate issues of what longer-term malware infections are in your atmosphere, and will a risk actor co-opt that C2 infrastructure to realize entry.”
