A new hack-for-hire group has been employing custom malware in attacks that target disparate victims worldwide, with the largest concentration in South Asia, BlackBerry researchers report.
This group of advanced persistent threat (APT) mercenaries, dubbed "CostaRicto" by BlackBerry's Research and Intelligence Team, has targeted organizations in countries across Europe, the Americas, Africa, Australia, and Asia, particularly in India, Bangladesh, and Singapore. While CostaRicto has been on the team's radar since January 2020, it estimates it has been active since around late 2019.
The emergence of this group underscores a broader trend of mercenary APT groups appearing on the threat landscape. These attackers' tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs) resemble those seen in advanced nation-state attacks, but their victims' profiles and geographies are too diverse to be aligned with a single attacker's goals.
Consider CostaRicto, which uses a combination of bespoke malware and off-the-shelf tools to infiltrate target organizations. Tom Bonner, distinguished threat researcher with BlackBerry, says the most interesting aspects of its operations are SombRAT, a new custom backdoor that emerged in October 2019, and CostaBricks, a custom virtual machine-based payload loader.
"We've not seen [SombRAT] before; it doesn't relate to any other actors we've observed previously," says Bonner. It's a "fairly interesting" backdoor as well, he continues, noting it's written in C++, a trait that makes it "hideous to pull apart and go through."
Once group members gain access to a target environment, they are careful about deploying this malware, he explains. The backdoor will never reside on the file system unencrypted. Attackers go to great lengths to ensure the binaries they're using appear only in memory. Their cr ..
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