The Russian risk actor often called RomCom has been linked to a brand new wave of cyber assaults geared toward Ukrainian authorities companies and unknown Polish entities since no less than late 2023.
The intrusions are characterised by way of a variant of the RomCom RAT dubbed SingleCamper (aka SnipBot or RomCom 5.0), stated Cisco Talos, which is monitoring the exercise cluster beneath the moniker UAT-5647.
“This model is loaded straight from the registry into reminiscence and makes use of a loopback tackle to speak with its loader,” safety researchers Dmytro Korzhevin, Asheer Malhotra, Vanja Svajcer, and Vitor Ventura famous.
RomCom, additionally tracked as Storm-0978, Tropical Scorpius, UAC-0180, UNC2596, and Void Rabisu, has engaged in multi-motivational operations similar to ransomware, extortion, and focused credential gathering since its emergence in 2022.
It has been assessed that the operational tempo of their assaults has elevated in current months with an intention to arrange long-term persistence on compromised networks and exfiltrate knowledge, suggesting a transparent espionage agenda.
To that finish, the risk actor is claimed to be “aggressively increasing their tooling and infrastructure to assist all kinds of malware parts authored in various languages and platforms” similar to C++ (ShadyHammock), Rust (DustyHammock), Go (GLUEEGG), and Lua (DROPCLUE).
The assault chains begin with a spear-phishing message that delivers a downloader — both coded in C++ (MeltingClaw) or Rust (RustyClaw) — which serves to deploy the ShadyHammock and DustyHammock backdoors, respectively. In parallel, a decoy doc is exhibited to the recipient to keep up the ruse.
Whereas DustyHammock is engineered to contact a command-and-control (C2) server, run arbitrary instructions, and obtain information from the server, ShadyHammock acts as a launchpad for SingleCamper in addition to listening for incoming instructions.
Regardless of’s ShadyHammock extra options, it is believed that it is a predecessor to DustyHammock, given the truth that the latter was noticed in assaults as lately as September 2024.
SingleCamper, the newest model of RomCom RAT, is chargeable for a variety of post-compromise actions, which entail downloading the PuTTY’s Plink software to ascertain distant tunnels with adversary-controlled infrastructure, community reconnaissance, lateral motion, person and system discovery, and knowledge exfiltration.
“This particular collection of assaults, concentrating on excessive profile Ukrainian entities, is probably going meant to serve UAT-5647’s two-pronged technique in a staged method – set up long-term entry and exfiltrate knowledge for so long as doable to assist espionage motives, after which probably pivot to ransomware deployment to disrupt and sure financially achieve from the compromise,” the researchers stated.
“It’s also possible that Polish entities had been additionally focused, based mostly on the keyboard language checks carried out by the malware.”
