A newly discovered attack sheds some light on how cyber espionage isn't just for nation-state interests but can also be used for possibly competitive or other spying purposes.
Researchers at Moscow-based Kaspersky have discovered and analyzed a cyberattack campaign they dubbed MontysThree that pitted what they believe is a Russian-speaking actor targeting the industrial sector within the country, stealing documents and files from specific targets. "For us, it looks like some kind of local story," says Denis Legezo, senior security researcher with Kaspersky's Global Research and Analysis Team. "I don't think they have some political agenda. It looks more like industrial espionage."
The global industrial sector has experienced its share of malware infections, both targeted and untargeted for several years. Attacks on operational technology networks have increased, and according to a new survey by industrial security firm Claroty, some 56% of industrial sector organizations worldwide have experienced more cyber threats during the COVID-19 pandemic.
MontysThree, which appears to have no connection to any threat groups Kaspersky currently tracks, uses some relatively unusual techniques in its attack campaign including steganography, a sophisticated method of masking malware behind images, as well as a relatively clunky method of remote access communications, running HTTP over the Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP). The group also planted a false flag in the code of some of its email files to appear as a Chinese-speaking actor, but Legezo says he was able to pull Cyrillic characters from the code that indicates that the author is actually a native Russian-speaker.
Legezo says the attackers posed as a local medical lab in a spear-phishing attack to get them to ..
Support the originator by clicking the read the rest link below.
