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A minimum of six organizations in South Korea have been focused by the prolific North Korea-linked Lazarus Group as a part of a marketing campaign dubbed Operation SyncHole.
The exercise focused South Korea’s software program, IT, monetary, semiconductor manufacturing, and telecommunications industries, in accordance with a report from Kaspersky printed immediately. The earliest proof of compromise was first detected in November 2024.
The marketing campaign concerned a “refined mixture of a watering gap technique and vulnerability exploitation inside South Korean software program,” safety researchers Sojun Ryu and Vasily Berdnikov mentioned. “A one-day vulnerability in Innorix Agent was additionally used for lateral motion.”
The assaults have been noticed paving the way in which for variants of recognized Lazarus instruments reminiscent of ThreatNeedle, AGAMEMNON, wAgent, SIGNBT, and COPPERHEDGE.
What makes these intrusions significantly efficient is the probably exploitation of a safety vulnerability in Cross EX, a legit software program prevalent in South Korea to allow the usage of safety software program in on-line banking and authorities web sites to assist anti-keylogging and certificate-based digital signatures.
“The Lazarus group exhibits a powerful grasp of those specifics and is utilizing a South Korea-targeted technique that mixes vulnerabilities in such software program with watering gap assaults,” the Russian cybersecurity vendor mentioned.
The exploitation of a safety flaw in Innorix Agent for lateral motion is notable for the truth that the same method has additionally been adopted by the Andariel sub-cluster of the Lazarus Group up to now to ship malware reminiscent of Volgmer and Andardoor.
The place to begin of the most recent wave of assaults is a watering gap assault, which activated the deployment of ThreatNeedle after targets visited numerous South Korean on-line media websites. Guests who land on the websites are filtered utilizing a server-side script previous to redirecting them to an adversary-controlled area to serve the malware.
“We assess with medium confidence that the redirected website could have executed a malicious script, focusing on a possible flaw in Cross EX put in on the goal PC, and launching malware,” the researchers mentioned. “The script then finally executed the legit SyncHost.exe and injected a shellcode that loaded a variant of ThreatNeedle into that course of.”
The an infection sequence has been noticed adopting two phases, utilizing ThreatNeedle and wAgent within the early levels after which SIGNBT and COPPERHEDGE for establishing persistence, conducting reconnaissance, and delivering credential dumping instruments on the compromised hosts.
Additionally deployed are malware households reminiscent of LPEClient for sufferer profiling and payload supply, and a downloader dubbed Agamemnon for downloading and executing further payloads acquired from the command-and-control (C2) server, whereas concurrently incorporating the Hell’s Gate approach to bypass safety options throughout execution.
One payload downloaded by Agamemnon is a software designed to hold out lateral motion by exploiting a safety flaw within the Innorix Agent file switch software. Kaspersky mentioned its investigation unearthed a further arbitrary file obtain zero-day vulnerability in Innorix Agent that has since been patched by the builders.
“The Lazarus group’s specialised assaults focusing on provide chains in South Korea are anticipated to proceed sooner or later,” Kaspersky mentioned.
“The attackers are additionally making efforts to reduce detection by creating new malware or enhancing present malware. Particularly, they introduce enhancements to the communication with the C2, command construction, and the way in which they ship and obtain information.”
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