Posts tagged with: Middle East

In August of 2018, DarkMatter released a report entitled “In the Trails of WINDSHIFT APT”, which unveiled a threat actor with TTPs very similar to those of Bahamut. Subsequently, two additional articles (here and here) were released by Objective-See which provide an analysis of some validated WINDSHIFT samples targeting OSX systems. Unit 42 was able to identify and correlate additional attacker activity and can now provide specific details on a targeted WINDSHIFT attack as it unfolded at a Middle Eastern government agency.

The DarkHydrus group has begun using a new version of the RogueRobin backdoor. This version is written in C# and in addition to using DNS Tunneling for command and control, can also use Google Drive.

The OilRig group maintains their persistent attacks against government entities in the Middle East region using previously identified tools and tactics. As observed in previous attack campaigns, the tools used are not an exact duplicate of the previous attack and instead is an iterative variant. In this instance a spear phishing email was used containing

Unit 42’s continued look into OilRig reveals the use of an Internet Information Services backdoor deployed on government webservers in the Middle East.

This post explores how the attackers attempt to gain a foothold into target networks before briefly describing the malware families used.

Unit 42 has observed a new version of Hworm (or Houdini) being used within multiple attacks. This blog outlines technical details of this new Hworm version and documents an attack campaign making use of the backdoor. Of the samples used in this attack, the first we observed were June 2016, while as-of publication we were