A hacktivist gang that has previously attacked an African country's stock exchange with malware and seized vast amounts of data is now focusing on the governments of several Middle Eastern countries.
ESET, a cybersecurity company, discovered Witchetty also known as LookingFrog for the first time in April 2022. It is thought to be closely associated with the state-sponsored Chinese threat actor APT10 formerly known as Cicada. The gang is also regarded as TA410 personnel, who have previously been connected to strikes against American energy suppliers.
A threat actor identified as Witchetty was seen by Broadcom's Symantec Threat Hunter Team utilizing steganography to conceal an unknown backdoor in a Windows logo.
The new malware uses steganography, a method for hiding a message in an openly available document, to extract dangerous code from a bitmap image of a previous version of the Microsoft Windows logo.
In the campaign that Symantec found, Witchetty is utilizing steganography to conceal backdoor software that is XOR-encrypted in an outdated Windows logo bitmap picture.
"By disguising the payload in this way, the attackers were able to host it on a reliable, cost-free service. Downloads from reputable servers like GitHub are much less likely to cause concern than downloads from a command-and-control (C&C) server that is under the control of an attacker" the researchers stated.
Backdoor employment
The employment of another backdoor known as Stegmap is highlighted in Symantec's most recent investigation of attacks between February and September 2022, when the organization attacked the governments of two Middle Eastern countries as well as the stock exchange of an African nation.
Like many backdoors, Stegmap includes a wide range of features that enable it to do file manipulation operations, download and run executables, stop processes, and alter the Windows Registry. The hackers updated their toolset for this effort to target the vulnerabilities, and they used steganography to shield their harmful payload from antivirus software.
By taking advantage of the Microsoft Exchange ProxyShell (CVE-2021-34473, CVE-2021-34523, and CVE-2021-31207) and ProxyLogon (CVE-2021-26855 and CVE-2021-27065) attack chains to drop web shells on susceptible servers, the threat actors acquire initial access to a network and launch the attack.
According to the chronology of an attack on a Middle Eastern government organization, Witchetty maintained remote access for as long as six months and carried out a variety of post-exploitation activities, such as network enumeration and the installation of custom malware, up to September 1, 2022.
Governments and state institutions around the world, including those in Asia and Africa, continue to face active threats from TA410 and Witchetty. The best defense against such attacks is to implement security upgrades as soon as they are available. In the campaign that Symantec has identified, the hackers depend on last year's flaws to infiltrate the target network and take advantage of the subpar management of publicly accessible servers.
