A hacktivist group often called Twelve has been noticed utilizing an arsenal of publicly out there instruments to conduct damaging cyber assaults towards Russian targets.
“Moderately than demand a ransom for decrypting knowledge, Twelve prefers to encrypt victims’ knowledge after which destroy their infrastructure with a wiper to stop restoration,” Kaspersky mentioned in a Friday evaluation.
“The strategy is indicative of a want to trigger most harm to focus on organizations with out deriving direct monetary profit.”
The hacking group, believed to have been shaped in April 2023 following the onset of the Russo-Ukrainian warfare, has a observe file of mounting cyber assaults that intention to cripple sufferer networks and disrupt enterprise operations.
It has additionally been noticed conducting hack-and-leak operations that exfiltrate delicate info, which is then shared on its Telegram channel.
Kaspersky mentioned Twelve shares infrastructural and tactical overlaps with a ransomware group known as DARKSTAR (aka COMET or Shadow), elevating the chance that the 2 intrusion units are probably associated to at least one one other or a part of the identical exercise cluster.
“On the similar time, whereas Twelve’s actions are clearly hacktivist in nature, DARKSTAR sticks to the traditional double extortion sample,” the Russian cybersecurity vendor mentioned. “This variation of targets throughout the syndicate underscores the complexity and variety of contemporary cyberthreats.”
The assault chains begin with gaining preliminary entry by abusing legitimate native or area accounts, after which the Distant Desktop Protocol (RDP) is used to facilitate lateral motion. A few of these assaults are additionally carried out through the sufferer’s contractors.
“To do that, they gained entry to the contractor’s infrastructure after which used its certificates to connect with its buyer’s VPN,” Kaspersky famous. “Having obtained entry to that, the adversary can connect with the shopper’s techniques through the Distant Desktop Protocol (RDP) after which penetrate the shopper’s infrastructure.”
Outstanding among the many different instruments utilized by Twelve are Cobalt Strike, Mimikatz, Chisel, BloodHound, PowerView, adPEAS, CrackMapExec, Superior IP Scanner, and PsExec for credential theft, discovery, community mapping, and privilege escalation. The malicious RDP connections to the system are tunneled by ngrok.
Additionally deployed are PHP internet shells with capabilities to execute arbitrary instructions, transfer recordsdata, or ship emails. These packages, such because the WSO internet shell, are available on GitHub.
In a single incident investigated by Kaspersky, the menace actors are mentioned to have exploited identified safety vulnerabilities (e.g., CVE-2021-21972 and CVE-2021-22005) in VMware vCenter to ship a internet shell that then was used to drop a backdoor dubbed FaceFish.
“To realize a foothold within the area infrastructure, the adversary used PowerShell so as to add area customers and teams, and to change ACLs (Entry Management Lists) for Energetic Listing objects,” it mentioned. “To keep away from detection, the attackers disguised their malware and duties beneath the names of present services or products.”
A number of the names used embody “Replace Microsoft,” “Yandex,” “YandexUpdate,” and “intel.exe.”
The assaults are additionally characterised by way of a PowerShell script (“Sophos_kill_local.ps1”) to terminate processes associated to Sophos safety software program on the compromised host.
The concluding phases entail utilizing the Home windows Activity Scheduler to launch ransomware and wiper payloads, however not earlier than gathering and exfiltrating delicate details about their victims through a file-sharing service known as DropMeFiles within the type of ZIP archives.
“The attackers used a model of the favored LockBit 3.0 ransomware, compiled from publicly out there supply code, to encrypt the information,” Kaspersky researchers mentioned. “Earlier than beginning work, the ransomware terminates processes which will intrude with the encryption of particular person recordsdata.”
The wiper, equivalent to the Shamoon malware, rewrites the grasp boot file (MBR) on related drives and overwrites all file contents with randomly generated bytes, successfully stopping system restoration.
“The group sticks to a publicly out there and acquainted arsenal of malware instruments, which suggests it makes none of its personal,” Kaspersky famous. “This makes it doable to detect and forestall Twelve’s assaults in due time.”