It seems that not even the long-lasting Home windows emblem is protected from malware (opens in new tab) anymore, as some cybercriminals managed to efficiently conceal malicious code inside it. 

Cybersecurity consultants at Symantec declare to have noticed one such marketing campaign utilizing a means of hiding malicious code in in any other case innocent pictures, in any other case generally known as steganography. 

It’s often performed to keep away from detection by antivirus packages, as such options not often detect pictures as malicious.

Going after governments

On this specific case, the group engaged in steganography assaults known as Witchetty, a recognized threat-actor allegedly strongly tied to the Chinese language state-sponsored actor Cicada (AKA APT10), and likewise thought of a part of the TA410 group that has focused US vitality suppliers previously.

The group kicked off its newest marketing campaign in February 2022, concentrating on a minimum of two governments within the Center East. 

What’s extra, an assault in opposition to a inventory change in Africa is allegedly nonetheless energetic. Witchetty used steganography assaults to cover an XOR-encrypted backdoor, which was hosted on a cloud service, minimizing its probabilities of detection. To drop webshells on weak endpoints (opens in new tab), the attackers exploited recognized Microsoft Alternate ProxyShell vulnerabilities for preliminary entry: CVE-2021-34473, CVE-2021-34523, CVE-2021-31207, CVE-2021-26855, and CVE-2021-27065.

“Disguising the payload on this style allowed the attackers to host it on a free, trusted service,” Symantec stated. “Downloads from trusted hosts corresponding to GitHub are far much less more likely to increase crimson flags than downloads from an attacker-controlled command-and-control (C&C) server.”

The XOR-encrypted backdoor permits risk actors to do numerous issues, together with tampering with recordsdata and folders, operating and terminating processes, tweaking the Home windows Registry, downloading further malware, stealing paperwork, in addition to turning the compromised endpoint right into a C2 server.

Final time we heard of Cicada was in April 2022, when researchers reported the group had abused the favored VLC media participant to distribute malware and spy on authorities companies and adjoining organizations situated within the US, Canada, Hong Kong, Turkey, Israel, India, Montenegro, and Italy.

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By way of: BleepingComputer (opens in new tab)