Hackers ChamelGang attacks energy complex and aviation industry
Additional attacks targeted institutions in 9 other
countries, including the United States, India, Nepal, Taiwan, and Japan. In
some cases, researchers discovered compromised government servers. The group has
started exploiting ProxyShell vulnerabilities in attacks to infect Microsoft
Exchange. It’s possible that vulnerable servers in the UK could be affected in
the future as well.
ChamelGang is focusing on stealing data from compromised
networks, and its first trusted relationship attacks 1 were registered in March
2021.
Attackers can penetrate the corporate network of an
industrial enterprise more than 90 percent of the time, and almost every such
invasion leads to complete loss of control over the IT infrastructure. More
than half of these attacks lead to the theft of data on company partners and
employees, mail correspondence, and internal documentation.
The PT ESC incident response team discovered the existence
of ChamelGang while investigating security vulnerabilities in the Russian
fuel/energy and aviation production sectors.
ChamelGang had compromised a subsidiary organization using a
vulnerable version of a web application on the open source JBoss Application
Server platform. By exploiting vulnerability CVE-2017-12149 (which had been
fixed by RedHat more than four years ago), the criminals were able to remotely
execute commands on the node.
Two weeks later, the hacking group compromised the parent
company as well. The attackers obtained the dictionary password of the local
administrator on one of the servers in an isolated segment, and penetrated the
network via the Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP).
The attackers remained unnoticed in the corporate network
for three months; after examining it, they gained control over most of it,
including critical servers and nodes in different segments. The APT group was
specifically pursuing data, and succeeded in stealing it.
The attackers exploited a chain of related vulnerabilities
in Microsoft Exchange (CVE-2021-34473, CVE-2021-34523, CVE-2021-31207) called
ProxyShell. This became public last month, and ever since it has been actively
exploited by other APT groups.
The attackers gained access to the company’s mail servers
using a backdoor that had not been detected by most antivirus tools at the time
of the attack. The attackers were inside the target organization’s
infrastructure for only eight days, and didn’t have the time to cause much
harm.
One distinctive feature of ChamelGang’s attacks is the use
of new malware: ProxyT, BeaconLoader, and the DoorMe backdoor. The latter is a
passive backdoor, which significantly complicates its detection. The group also
uses better-known variants such as FRP, Cobalt Strike Beacon, and Tiny shell.
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