Two recognized menace exercise clusters codenamed Head Mare and Twelve have probably joined forces to focus on Russian entities, new findings from Kaspersky reveal.
“Head Mare relied closely on instruments beforehand related to Twelve. Moreover, Head Mare assaults utilized command-and-control (C2) servers completely linked to Twelve prior to those incidents,” the corporate mentioned. “This implies potential collaboration and joint campaigns between the 2 teams.”
Each Head Mare and Twelve had been beforehand documented by Kaspersky in September 2024, with the previous leveraging a now-patched vulnerability in WinRAR (CVE-2023-38831) to acquire preliminary entry and ship malware and in some circumstances, even deploy ransomware households like LockBit for Home windows and Babuk for Linux (ESXi) in change for a ransom.
Twelve, alternatively, has been noticed staging damaging assaults, benefiting from numerous publicly out there instruments to encrypt victims’ information and irrevocably destroy their infrastructure with a wiper to stop restoration efforts.
Kaspersky’s newest evaluation exhibits Head Mare’s use of two new instruments, together with CobInt, a backdoor utilized by ExCobalt and Crypt Ghouls in assaults geared toward Russian companies up to now, in addition to a bespoke implant named PhantomJitter that is put in on servers for distant command execution.
The deployment of CobInt has additionally been noticed in assaults mounted by Twelve, with overlaps uncovered between the hacking crew and Crypt Ghouls, indicating some form of tactical connection between completely different teams presently concentrating on Russia.
Different preliminary entry pathways exploited by Head Mare embody the abuse of different recognized safety flaws in Microsoft Alternate Server (e.g., CVE-2021-26855 aka ProxyLogon), in addition to by way of phishing emails bearing rogue attachments and compromising contractors’ networks to infiltrate sufferer infrastructure, a method often known as the trusted relationship assault.
“The attackers used ProxyLogon to execute a command to obtain and launch CobInt on the server,” Kaspersky mentioned, highlighting using an up to date persistence mechanism that eschews scheduled duties in favor of making new privileged native customers on a enterprise automation platform server. These accounts are then used to connect with the server by way of RDP to switch and execute instruments interactively.
Moreover assigning the malicious payloads names that mimic benign working system information (e.g., calc.exe or winuac.exe), the menace actors have been discovered to take away traces of their exercise by clearing occasion logs and use proxy and tunneling instruments like Gost and Cloudflared to hide community site visitors.
Among the different utilities used are
- quser.exe, tasklist.exe, and netstat.exe for system reconnaissance
- fscan and SoftPerfect Community Scanner for native community reconnaissance
- ADRecon for gathering data from Energetic Listing
- Mimikatz, secretsdump, and ProcDump for credential harvesting
- RDP for lateral motion
- mRemoteNG, smbexec, wmiexec, PAExec, and PsExec for distant host communication
- Rclone for information switch
The assaults culminate with the deployment of LockBit 3.0 and Babuk ransomware on compromised hosts, adopted by dropping a notice that urges victims to contact them on Telegram for decrypting their information.
“Head Mare is actively increasing its set of strategies and instruments,” Kaspersky mentioned. “In current assaults, they gained preliminary entry to the goal infrastructure by not solely utilizing phishing emails with exploits but additionally by compromising contractors. Head Mare is working with Twelve to launch assaults on state- and privately-controlled corporations in Russia.”
The event comes as BI.ZONE linked the North Korea-linked menace actor often known as ScarCruft (aka APT37, Reaper, Ricochet Chollima, and Squid Werewolf) to a phishing marketing campaign in December 2024 that delivered a malware loader liable for deploying an unknown payload from a distant server.
The exercise, the Russian firm mentioned, intently resembles one other marketing campaign dubbed SHROUDED#SLEEP that Securonix documented in October 2024 as resulting in the deployment of a backdoor known as VeilShell in intrusions concentrating on Cambodia and sure different Southeast Asian international locations.
Final month, BI.ZONE additionally detailed continued cyber assaults staged by Bloody Wolf to ship NetSupport RAT as a part of a marketing campaign that has compromised greater than 400 programs in Kazakhstan and Russia, marking a shift from STRRAT.
