The MuddyWater cyber-espionage campaign was observed using spear-phishing emails to target entities in more countries, Kaspersky Lab reports.
The MuddyWater threat actor was first
detailed last year, focusing mainly on governmental targets in Iraq and Saudi Arabia.
Attribution appears difficult and numerous new attacks were
linked to the group this year.
Recently, the group was observed targeting government bodies, military entities, telcos and educational institutions in Jordan, Turkey, Azerbaijan and Pakistan. Other victims were detected in Mali, Austria, Russia, Iran, and Bahrain, and the initially discovered attacks on Iraq and Saudi Arabia continued as well.
The attacks
used new spear-phishing documents and relied on social engineering to trick users into enable malicious macros. Password-protected to hinder analysis, the macros in the malicious documents execute obfuscated VBA code when enabled.
Base64-encoded, the macro payload drops three files in the “ProgramData” folder and also adds a registry entry in the current user’s RUN key (HKCU) to ensure execution when the user next logs in. Sometimes, the macro spawns the malicious payload/process instantly and doesn’t wait for the next user login. The attacks leverage legitimate executables from Microsoft, all of which are whitelisted, thus ensuring the payload’s execution. The macro drops either INF, SCT, and text files or VBS and text files.
