Cybersecurity researchers have make clear a menace actor often known as Blind Eagle that has persistently focused entities and people in Colombia, Ecuador, Chile, Panama, and different Latin American nations.
Targets of those assaults span a number of sectors, together with governmental establishments, monetary firms, power and oil and gasoline firms.
“Blind Eagle has demonstrated adaptability in shaping the targets of its cyberattacks and the flexibility to change between purely financially motivated assaults and espionage operations,” Kaspersky stated in a Monday report.
Additionally known as APT-C-36, Blind Eagle is believed to be lively since not less than 2018. The suspected Spanish-speaking group is understood for utilizing spear-phishing lures to distribute varied publicly accessible distant entry trojans akin to AsyncRAT, BitRAT, Lime RAT, NjRAT, Quasar RAT, and Remcos RAT.
Earlier this March, eSentire detailed the adversary’s use of a malware loader referred to as Ande Loader to propagate Remcos RAT and NjRAT.
The place to begin is a phishing electronic mail impersonating reliable governmental establishments and monetary and banking entities that deceptively warns recipients to take pressing motion by clicking on a hyperlink that purports to cause them to the official web site of the entity being mimicked.
The e-mail messages additionally embody a PDF or Microsoft Phrase attachment that accommodates the identical URL, and, in some circumstances, a number of further particulars designed to impart a heightened signal of urgency and lend it a veneer of legitimacy.
The primary set of URLs directs the customers to actor-controlled websites that host an preliminary dropper, however solely after figuring out if the sufferer belongs to a rustic that’s among the many group’s targets. Else, they’re led to the positioning of the group the attackers are impersonating.
“This geographical redirection prevents new malicious websites from being flagged, and thwarts searching and evaluation of those assaults,” the Russian cybersecurity vendor stated.
The preliminary dropper comes within the type of a compressed ZIP archive, which, in flip, embeds a Visible Fundamental Script (VBS) accountable for retrieving the next-stage payload from a hard-coded distant server. These servers can vary from picture internet hosting websites to Pastebin to reliable providers like Discord and GitHub.
The second-stage malware, usually obfuscated utilizing steganographic strategies, is a DLL or a .NET injector that subsequently contacts yet one more malicious server to retrieve the ultimate stage trojan.
“The group usually makes use of course of injection methods to execute the RAT within the reminiscence of a reliable course of, thereby evading process-based defenses,” Kaspersky stated.
“The group’s most popular method is course of hollowing. This system consists in making a reliable course of in a suspended state, then unmapping its reminiscence, changing it with a malicious payload, and at last resuming the method to begin execution.”
Using modified variations of open-source RATs offers Blind Eagle the pliability to switch their campaigns at will, utilizing them for cyber espionage or capturing credentials for Colombian monetary providers from the sufferer’s browser when the window titles are matched towards a predefined record of strings within the malware.
However, altered variations of NjRAT have been noticed fitted with keylogging and screenshot-capturing capabilities to reap delicate data. Moreover, the up to date model helps putting in further plugins despatched from a server to enhance its performance.
The modifications additionally lengthen to the assault chains. As not too long ago as June 2024, AsyncRAT has been distributed by way of a malware loader dubbed Hijack Loader, suggesting a excessive stage of adaptability on the a part of the menace actors. It additionally serves to spotlight the addition of recent methods to maintain their operations.
“So simple as BlindEagle’s methods and procedures could seem, their effectiveness permits the group to maintain a excessive stage of exercise,” Kaspersky concluded. “By persistently executing cyber espionage and monetary credential theft campaigns, Blind Eagle stays a big menace within the area.