The notorious cybercrime syndicate generally known as FIN7 has been linked to a spear-phishing marketing campaign focusing on the U.S. automotive business to ship a identified backdoor known as Carbanak (aka Anunak).
“FIN7 identified employees at the company who worked in the IT department and had higher levels of administrative rights,” the BlackBerry analysis and intelligence staff stated in a brand new write-up.
“They used the lure of a free IP scanning tool to run their well-known Anunak backdoor and gain an initial foothold utilizing living off the land binaries, scripts, and libraries (LOLBAS).”
FIN7, also referred to as Carbon Spider, Elbrus, Gold Niagara, ITG14, Sangria Tempest, is a well known financially motivated e-crime group that has a monitor file of placing a variety of business verticals to ship malware able to stealing info from point-of-sale (PoS) methods since 2012.
Lately, the risk actor has transitioned to conducting ransomware operations, delivering varied strains like Black Basta, Cl0p, DarkSide, and REvil. Two Ukrainian members of the group, Fedir Hladyr and Andrii Kolpakov, have been sentenced to jail within the U.S. up to now.
The most recent marketing campaign found by BlackBerry in late 2023 begins with a spear-phishing electronic mail that embeds a booby-trapped hyperlink pointing to a bogus website (“advanced-ip-sccanner[.]com”) that masquerades as Superior IP Scanner.
“This fake site redirected to ‘myipscanner[.]com,’ which in turn redirected to an attacker-owned Dropbox that downloaded the malicious executable WsTaskLoad.exe onto the victim’s machine,” the Canadian cybersecurity firm stated.
The binary, for its half, initiates a multi-stage course of that finally results in the execution of Carbanak. It is also designed to ship further payloads comparable to POWERTRASH and set up persistence by putting in OpenSSH for distant entry.
It is at the moment not identified if the risk actors have been planning on deploying ransomware, because the contaminated system was detected early on and faraway from the community earlier than it may attain the lateral motion stage.
Whereas the goal of the assault was a “large multinational automotive manufacturer” primarily based within the U.S., BlackBerry stated it discovered a number of comparable malicious domains on the identical supplier, indicating that it might be a part of a wider marketing campaign by FIN7.
To mitigate the dangers posed by such threats, it is advisable that organizations be looking out for phishing makes an attempt, allow multi-factor authentication (MFA), maintain all software program and methods up-to-date, and monitor for uncommon login makes an attempt.
