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Ukraine’s governmental Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT UA) issued a warning earlier this week of an obvious Cuba ransomware marketing campaign that’s spoofing the press workplace of the Common Workers of the Armed Forces of Ukraine in its phishing lures.
The malicious emails comprise hyperlinks to a third-party internet useful resource to obtain a file, which ends up in an internet web page that incorporates a message advising the sufferer to replace their PDF reader. If the obtain button is clicked, an executable is downloaded to the system.
Finally, the assault chain results in the deployment of a remote access trojan (RAT) often called Romcom, which is a comparatively new malware recognized for use by the operator of the Cuba ransomware, tracked by CERT-UA as UAC-0132, by Palo Alto Networks’ Unit 42 as Tropical Scorpius, and by Mandiant as UNC2596.
Pixel Privacy’s Chris Hauk commented: “We are able to anticipate to see assaults like this to be on the rise so long as the conflict continues between Ukraine and Russia. Whereas I’d usually stress the significance of teaching customers as to the dangers of clicking hyperlinks and opening attachments in unsolicited emails, I do know that attempting to outlive in a war-torn nation doesn’t depart a lot time for instructional actions.
“Sadly, for-profit hacking teams are becoming a member of in on the cyber assaults in opposition to targets in Ukraine, growing customers’ cyber dangers.”
Paul Bischoff, client privateness advocate at Comparitech, added: “Ukraine has been below a deluge of cyber assaults because the begin of Russia’s invasion, and that’s not going to cease any time quickly. This case is a reasonably typical phishing message designed to trick the sufferer into downloading malware.
“It may be prevented by following a couple of easy greatest practices for operational safety. By no means click on on hyperlinks or messages in unsolicited emails, and all the time test the area of the sender’s e-mail deal with. Sadly, this marketing campaign possible focused a whole lot or hundreds of individuals, and solely a fraction of them must fall sufferer for the assault to achieve success.”
According to Unit 42, Cuba first surfaced in late 2019 and has named and shamed over 60 victims on its leak website since then – its complete variety of victims is probably going greater. It has possible netted at least $43.9m in ransom payments. It has focused predominantly organisations within the US, but in addition in Australia, Austria, Canada, Colombia, India, Italy, Kuwait, Italy, Taiwan and the UAE.
Earlier this 12 months, alongside plenty of different new techniques, strategies and procedures (TTPs), the Cuba operation began to deploy Romcom, a customized RAT/backdoor that incorporates a novel command and management (C2) protocol and appears to be below lively growth.
“The group’s exercise makes it clear that an method to tradecraft utilizing a hybrid of extra nuanced instruments specializing in low-level Home windows internals for defence evasion and native privilege escalation may be extremely efficient throughout an intrusion,” the Unit 42 analysis crew wrote. “Coupled with a splash of well-adopted and profitable crimeware strategies, this presents distinctive challenges to defenders.
“Unit 42 recommends that defenders have superior logging capabilities deployed and configured correctly similar to Sysmon, Home windows Command Line logging and PowerShell logging – ideally forwarding to a safety data and occasion administration instrument [SIEM] to create queries and detection alternatives. Preserve pc methods patched and updated wherever doable to cut back assault floor associated to exploitation strategies.”
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