https://bit.ly/3qXad6I - 🌐 Cybersecurity firm Bitdefender has conducted an extensive investigation into a targeted cyber attack against East-Asian infrastructure, uncovering the workings of a sophisticated, presumably custom malware dubbed as Logutil backdoor. This operation reportedly ran for over a year, aiming to compromise credentials and exfiltrate data. #Cybersecurity #Bitdefender #LogutilBackdoor 🕵️♀️The operation, traced back to early 2022, leveraged multiple tools to achieve its nefarious ends, Logutil being the primary one. Notably, AsyncRat was used during the initial stages of infection. The investigation suggests that CobaltStrike was part of the attackers' arsenal too. The victim of this operation was a company operating in the Technology/IT Services industry in East Asia. #CyberAttack #AsyncRat #CobaltStrike 💾 Modern cybercrime syndicates are increasingly leveraging legitimate components to perpetrate their attacks. For instance, DLL hijacking and misuse of legitimate scheduled tasks and services are commonly employed tactics. Notably, state-affiliated actors such as the APT29 group have used this strategy effectively, substituting a binary responsible for updating Adobe Reader with a malicious component, thus achieving persistence. #CybercrimeTactics #APT29 #AdobeReader 📍 These stealthy tactics were evident in the recent incident as well. The perpetrators deployed malware in locations less likely to be suspected of hosting such threats and more likely to be excluded from the security systems' scrutiny. #MalwareDeployment #CybersecurityChallenge 🔐 In this attack, the actors demonstrated capabilities of collecting credentials from various applications including MobaXterm, mRemoteNG, KeePass, and even Chrome passwords and history. They also attempted data exfiltration from mysql servers by accessing server process memory, and made attempts to dump LSASS memory. #DataExfiltration #CredentialTheft 🔁 The investigation also found that the attackers could infect other systems if an RDP session was established with the infected system, by placing malicious components in \tsclient\c\ subfolders if tsclient share was enabled. This highlights the extent of the attack's complexity and potential for propagation.