RSA CONFERENCE 2020 - San Francisco - A recently spotted targeted attack employed a rootkit to sneak malicious traffic through the victim organization's AWS firewall and drop a remote access Trojan onto its cloud-based servers.
Researchers at Sophos discovered the attack while inspecting infected Linux and Windows EC2-based cloud infrastructure servers running in Amazon Web Services (AWS). The attack, which Sophos says is likely the handiwork of a nation-state, uses a rootkit that not only gave the attackers remote control of the servers but also provided a conduit for the malware to communicate with their command-and-control servers. According to Sophos, the rootkit also could allow the C2 servers to remotely control servers physically located in the organization as well.
"The firewall policy was not negligent, but it could have been better," said Chet Wisniewski, principal research scientist at Sophos. The attackers masked their activity by hiding it in HTTP and HTTPS traffic. "The malware was sophisticated enough that it would be hard to detect even with a tight security policy" in the AWS firewall, he said. "It was a wolf in sheep's clothing ... blending in with existing traffic."
Sophos declined to reveal the victim organization, but said the attack appears to be a campaign to reach ultimate targets via the supply chain - with this as just one of the victims. Just who is behind the attack is unclear, but the RAT is based on source code of the Gh0st RAT, a tool associated with Chinese nation-state attackers. Sophos also found some debug messages in Chinese.
The attackers appear to reuse the same RAT for both the Linux and Windows servers. "We only observed the ..
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