North Korea-Backed Spy Group Poses as Reporters in Spearphishing

silversurfer

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The North Korean advanced persistent threat (APT) group known as Kimsuky is actively attacking commercial-sector businesses, often by posing as South Korean reporters, according to an alert from the U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA).

Kimsuky (a.k.a. Hidden Cobra) has been operating as a cyberespionage group since 2012 under the auspices of the regime in Pyongyang. Its mission is global intelligence gathering, CISA noted, which usually starts with spearphishing emails, watering-hole attacks, torrent shares and malicious browser extensions, in order to gain an initial foothold in target networks.

Primary targets include think-tanks, and diplomatic and high-level organizations in Japan, South Korea and the United States, with a focus on foreign policy and national-security issues related to the Korean peninsula, nuclear policy and sanctions, CISA added. It also targets the cryptocurrency industry.

In recent campaigns seen over the summer, the group ultimately sent malicious attachments embedded in spearphishing emails to gain initial access to victim organizations, according to an analysis, published on Tuesday. But the malicious content was deployed only after several initial exchanges with the target meant to build trust.

“Posing as South Korean reporters, Kimsuky exchanged several benign interview-themed emails with their intended target to ostensibly arrange an interview date and possibly build rapport,” according to CISA. “The emails contained the subject line, ‘Skype Interview requests of [redacted TV show] in Seoul,’ and began with a request to have the recipient appear as a guest on the show. The APT group invited the targets to a Skype interview on the topic of inter-Korean issues and denuclearization negotiations on the Korean Peninsula.”

After a recipient agreed to an interview, Kimsuky sent a subsequent email with a malicious document. And when the date of the interview got closer, the purported “reporter” sent an email canceling the interview. After obtaining initial access, the APT group ultimately deployed the BabyShark malware and PowerShell or the Windows Command Shell for execution.
 

silversurfer

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CONCLUSION
In this report we uncovered a new toolset infrastructure that is used by the Kimsuky group, a notorious activity group that has been operating on behalf of the North Korean regime since 2012. A close examination of the new infrastructure combined with pattern-analysis led Cybereason’s Nocturnus team to the discovery of the “KGH Spyware Suite”, a modular malware likely involved in recent espionage operations, and the “CSPY Downloader” - both were previously undocumented.

In addition, our report shows certain interesting overlaps between older Kimsuky malware and servers and the newly discovered malware and infrastructure. Moreover, the report highlights several behavior-based and code similarities between the new malware samples and older known Kimsuky malware and TTPs.

Throughout the report it is noticeable that the threat actors invested efforts in order to remain under the radar, by employing various anti-forensics and anti-analysis techniques which included backdating the creation/compilation time of the malware samples to 2016, code obfuscation, anti-VM and anti-debugging techniques. At the time of writing this report, some of the samples mentioned in the report are still not detected by any AV vendor.

While the identity of the victims of this campaign remains unclear, there are clues that can suggest that the infrastructure targeted organizations dealing with human rights violations. At the time of writing this report, there is not enough information available to Cybereason to determine this with a high certainty, and in any case, there could be a wide range of industries, organizations and individuals that were targeted by Kimsuky using this infrastructure.
 

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