A just lately patched safety flaw in Google Chrome and different Chromium internet browsers was exploited as a zero-day by North Korean actors in a marketing campaign designed to ship the FudModule rootkit.
The event is indicative of the persistent efforts made by the nation-state adversary, which had made a behavior of incorporating rafts of Home windows zero-day exploits into its arsenal in latest months.
Microsoft, which detected the exercise on August 19, 2024, attributed it to a risk actor it tracks as Citrine Sleet (previously DEV-0139 and DEV-1222), which is also referred to as AppleJeus, Labyrinth Chollima, Nickel Academy, and UNC4736. It is assessed to be a sub-cluster throughout the Lazarus Group (aka Diamond Sleet and Hidden Cobra).
It is value mentioning that using the AppleJeus malware has been beforehand additionally attributed by Kaspersky to a different Lazarus subgroup referred to as BlueNoroff (aka APT38, Nickel Gladstone, and Stardust Chollima), indicative of the infrastructure and toolset sharing between these risk actors.
“Citrine Sleet relies in North Korea and primarily targets monetary establishments, notably organizations and people managing cryptocurrency, for monetary achieve,” the Microsoft Risk Intelligence group stated.
“As a part of its social engineering ways, Citrine Sleet has carried out intensive reconnaissance of the cryptocurrency business and people related to it.”
The assault chains sometimes contain organising pretend web sites masquerading as official cryptocurrency buying and selling platforms that search to trick customers into putting in weaponized cryptocurrency wallets or buying and selling purposes that facilitate the theft of digital property.
The noticed zero-day exploit assault by Citrine Sleet concerned the exploitation of CVE-2024-7971, a high-severity sort confusion vulnerability within the V8 JavaScript and WebAssembly engine that might permit risk actors to achieve distant code execution (RCE) within the sandboxed Chromium renderer course of. It was patched by Google as a part of updates launched final week.
As beforehand acknowledged by The Hacker Information, CVE-2024-7971 is the third actively exploited sort confusion bug in V8 that Google resolved this yr after CVE-2024-4947 and CVE-2024-5274.
It is at the moment not clear how widespread these assaults have been or who was focused, however the victims are stated to have been directed to a malicious web site named voyagorclub[.]house probably by means of social engineering methods, thereby triggering an exploit for CVE-2024-7971.
The RCE exploit, for its half, paves the best way for the retrieval of shellcode containing a Home windows sandbox escape exploit (CVE-2024-38106) and the FudModule rootkit, which is used to determine admin-to-kernel entry to Home windows-based techniques to permit learn/write primitive features and carry out [direct kernel object manipulation].”
CVE-2024-38106, a Home windows kernel privilege escalation bug, is among the six actively exploited safety flaws that Microsoft remediated as a part of its August 2024 Patch Tuesday replace. That stated, the Citrine Sleet-linked exploitation of the flaw has been discovered to have occurred after the repair was launched.
“This will recommend a ‘bug collision,’ the place the identical vulnerability is independently found by separate risk actors, or information of the vulnerability was shared by one vulnerability researcher to a number of actors,” Microsoft stated.
CVE-2024-7971 can be the third vulnerability that North Korean risk actors have leveraged this yr to drop the FudModule rootkit, following CVE-2024-21338 and CVE-2024-38193, each of that are privilege escalation flaws within the built-in Home windows drivers and have been fastened by Microsoft in February and August.
“The CVE-2024-7971 exploit chain depends on a number of elements to compromise a goal, and this assault chain fails if any of those elements are blocked, together with CVE-2024-38106,” the corporate stated.
“Zero-day exploits necessitate not solely holding techniques updated, but in addition safety options that present unified visibility throughout the cyberattack chain to detect and block post-compromise attacker instruments and malicious exercise following exploitation.”