A hacktivist group generally known as Head Mare has been linked to cyber assaults that solely goal organizations positioned in Russia and Belarus.
“Head Mare makes use of extra up-to-date strategies for acquiring preliminary entry,” Kaspersky stated in a Monday evaluation of the group’s techniques and instruments.
“As an illustration, the attackers took benefit of the comparatively latest CVE-2023-38831 vulnerability in WinRAR, which permits the attacker to execute arbitrary code on the system by way of a specifically ready archive. This strategy permits the group to ship and disguise the malicious payload extra successfully.”
Head Mare, lively since 2023, is likely one of the hacktivist teams attacking Russian organizations within the context of the Russo-Ukrainian battle that started a yr earlier than.
It additionally maintains a presence on X, the place it has leaked delicate info and inside documentation from victims. Targets of the group’s assaults embody governments, transportation, power, manufacturing, and surroundings sectors.
In contrast to different hacktivist personas that probably function with an goal to inflict “most injury” to corporations within the two nations, Head Mare additionally encrypts victims’ units utilizing LockBit for Home windows and Babuk for Linux (ESXi), and calls for a ransom for knowledge decryption.
Additionally a part of its toolkit are PhantomDL and PhantomCore, the previous of which is a Go-based backdoor that is able to delivering extra payloads and importing information of curiosity to a command-and-control (C2) server.
PhantomCore (aka PhantomRAT), a predecessor to PhantomDL, is a distant entry trojan with related options, permitting for downloading information from the C2 server, importing information from a compromised host to the C2 server, in addition to executing instructions within the cmd.exe command line interpreter.
“The attackers create scheduled duties and registry values named MicrosoftUpdateCore and MicrosoftUpdateCoree to disguise their exercise as duties associated to Microsoft software program,” Kaspersky stated.
“We additionally discovered that some LockBit samples utilized by the group had the next names: OneDrive.exe [and] VLC.exe. These samples have been positioned within the C:ProgramData listing, disguising themselves as official OneDrive and VLC purposes.”
Each the artifacts have been discovered to be distributed by way of phishing campaigns within the type of enterprise paperwork with double extensions (e.g., решение №201-5_10вэ_001-24 к пив экран-сои-2.pdf.exe or тз на разработку.pdf.exe).
One other essential part of its assault arsenal is Sliver, an open-source C2 framework, and a set of assorted publicly accessible instruments resembling rsockstun, ngrok, and Mimikatz that facilitate discovery, lateral motion, and credential harvesting.
The intrusions culminate within the deployment of both LockBit or Babuk relying on the goal surroundings, adopted by dropping a ransom be aware that calls for a fee in alternate for a decryptor to unlock the information.
“The techniques, strategies, procedures, and instruments utilized by the Head Mare group are usually much like these of different teams related to clusters focusing on organizations in Russia and Belarus inside the context of the Russo-Ukrainian battle,” the Russian cybersecurity vendor stated.
“Nevertheless, the group distinguishes itself through the use of custom-made malware resembling PhantomDL and PhantomCore, in addition to exploiting a comparatively new vulnerability, CVE-2023-38831, to infiltrate the infrastructure of their victims in phishing campaigns.”
