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- Aug 17, 2014
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The APT group Transparent Tribe is mounting an ongoing cyberespionage campaign, researchers said, which is aimed at military and diplomatic targets around the world. The effort features a worm that can propagate from machine to machine while stealing files from USB removable drives.
Transparent Tribe (a.k.a. ProjectM and Mythic Leopard), is a prolific group that has been active [PDF] since at least 2013, specializing in widespread spy-craft. In the latest campaign, Kaspersky has observed spearphishing emails going out with malicious Microsoft Office documents containing a custom remote-access trojan (RAT) called Crimson. So far, researchers have found 1,093 targets across 27 countries, with the most-affected being Afghanistan, Germany, India, Iran and Pakistan.
Crimson is executed by way of embedded macros, according to Kaspersky research released on Thursday. It’s a .NET RAT that has a slew of malicious capabilities, including managing remote file systems, capturing screenshots, keylogging, conducting audio surveillance using built-in microphones, recording video streams from webcams, stealing passwords and stealing files.
Transparent Tribe has updated Crimson RAT for this campaign, the firm said, adding a server-side component used to manage infected client machines as well as a new USBWorm component developed for stealing files from removable drives, spreading across systems by infecting removable media, and downloading and executing a thin-client version of Crimson from a remote server. [...]