Lazarus targets defense industry with ThreatNeedle (PDF)
We named Lazarus the most active group of 2020. We’ve observed numerous activities by this notorious APT group targeting various industries. The group has changed target depending on the primary objective. Google TAG has recently published a post about a campaign by Lazarus targeting security researchers. After taking a closer look, we identified the malware used in those attacks as belonging to a family that we call ThreatNeedle. We have seen Lazarus attack various industries using this malware cluster before. In mid-2020, we realized that Lazarus was launching attacks on the defense industry using the ThreatNeedle cluster, an advanced malware cluster of Manuscrypt (a.k.a. NukeSped). While investigating this activity, we were able to observe the complete life cycle of an attack, uncovering more technical details and links to the group’s other campaigns.
The group made use of COVID-19 themes in its spear-phishing emails, embellishing them with personal information gathered using publicly available sources. After gaining an initial foothold, the attackers gathered credentials and moved laterally, seeking crucial assets in the victim environment. We observed how they overcame network segmentation by gaining access to an internal router machine and configuring it as a proxy server, allowing them to exfiltrate stolen data from the intranet network to their remote server. So far organizations in more than a dozen countries have been affected.
During this investigation we had a chance to look into the command-and-control infrastructure. The attackers configured multiple C2 servers for various stages, reusing several scripts we’ve seen in previous attacks by the group. Moreover, based on the insights so far ..
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