Understanding the Phobos affiliate structure and activity
Cisco Talos identified the most prolific Phobos variants, TTPs and affiliate structure, based on their activity and analysis of over 1,000 samples from VirusTotal dating back to 2019. We assess with moderate confidence Eking, Eight, Elbie, Devos and Faust are the most common variants
Lazarus Group exploits ManageEngine vulnerability to deploy QuiteRAT
This is the third documented campaign attributed to this actor in less than a year, with the actor reusing the same infrastructure throughout these operations.
Mercenary mayhem: A technical analysis of Intellexa's PREDATOR spyware
We would like to thank The Citizen Lab for their cooperation, support and inputs into this research. * Commercial spyware use is on the rise, with actors leveraging these sophisticated tools to conduct surveillance operations against a growing number of targets. Cisco Talos has new details of a commercial spyware product sold by the spyware firm Intellexa (formerly known as Cytrox). * Our research specifically looks at two components of this mobile spyware suite known as “ALIEN” and “PREDATOR,” which compose the backbone of the spyware implant. Our findings include an in-depth walkthrough of the infection chain, including the implants’ various information-stealing capabilities. * A deep dive into both spyware components indicates that ALIEN is more than just a loader for PREDATOR and actively sets up the low-level capabilities needed for PREDATOR to spy on its victims. * We assess with high confidence that the spyware has two additional components — tcore (main component) and kmem (privilege escalation mechanic) — but we were unable to obtain and analyze these modules. * If readers suspect their system(s) may have been compromised by commercial spyware, please consider notifying Talos’ research team at talos-mercenary-spyware-help@external.cisco.com to assist in furthering the community’s knowledge of these threats.
New phishing-as-a-service tool “Greatness” already seen in the wild
A previously unreported phishing-as-a-service (PaaS) offering named “Greatness” has been used in several phishing campaigns since at least mid-2022. Greatness incorporates features seen in some of the most advanced PaaS offerings, such as multi-factor authentication (MFA) bypass, IP filtering and integration with Telegram bots. * Greatness, for now, is only focused on Microsoft 365 phishing pages, providing its affiliates with an attachment and link builder that creates highly convincing decoy and login pages. It contains features such as having the victim’s email address pre-filled and displaying their appropriate company logo and background image, extracted from the target organization’s real Microsoft 365 login page. This makes Greatness particularly well-suited for phishing business users. * An analysis of the domains targeted in several ongoing and past campaigns revealed the victims were almost exclusively companies in the U.S., U.K., Australia, South Africa, and Canada, and the most commonly targeted sectors were manufacturing, health care and technology. The exact distribution of victims in each country and sector varies slightly between campaigns. * To use Greatness, affiliates must deploy and configure a provided phishing kit with an API key that allows even unskilled threat actors to easily take advantage of the service’s more advanced features. The phishing kit and API work as a proxy to the Microsoft 365 authentication system, performing a “man-in-the-middle” attack and stealing the victim’s authentication credentials or cookies.
While tracking some prevalent commodity malware threat actors, Talos observed the popularization of malicious LNK files as their initial access method to download and execute payloads. A closer look at the LNK files illustrates how their metadata could be used to identify and track new campaigns.
Threat Spotlight: XLLing in Excel - threat actors using malicious add-ins
As more and more users adopt new versions of Microsoft Office, it is likely that threat actors will turn away from VBA-based malicious documents to other formats such as XLLs or rely on exploiting newly discovered vulnerabilities to launch malicious code.
While tracking some prevalent commodity malware threat actors, Talos observed the popularization of malicious LNK files as their initial access method to download and execute payloads. A closer look at the LNK files illustrates how their metadata could be used to identify and track new campaigns.
Threat Spotlight: XLLing in Excel - threat actors using malicious add-ins
As more and more users adopt new versions of Microsoft Office, it is likely that threat actors will turn away from VBA-based malicious documents to other formats such as XLLs or rely on exploiting newly discovered vulnerabilities to launch malicious code.
