July 30, 2024 at 04:36AM
SideWinder, a nation-state threat actor associated with India, is conducting a cyber espionage campaign targeting ports and maritime facilities in the Indian Ocean and Mediterranean Sea. Using spear-phishing, document exploitation, and DLL side-loading techniques, their latest attacks leverage emotional lures and exploit security vulnerabilities to deliver malicious payloads for potential intelligence gathering.
From the meeting notes:
– SideWinder, a nation-state threat actor affiliated with India, has been attributed to a new cyber espionage campaign targeting ports and maritime facilities in the Indian Ocean and Mediterranean Sea.
– The campaign uses spear-phishing as a vector to deliver malicious payloads to targets in countries like Pakistan, Egypt, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, Myanmar, Nepal, and the Maldives.
– SideWinder employs email spear-phishing, document exploitation, and DLL side-loading techniques to avoid detection and deliver targeted implants.
– The latest attacks employ lures related to emotional topics like sexual harassment, employee termination, and salary cuts to trick recipients into opening booby-trapped Microsoft Word documents.
– Once opened, the decoy file leverages a known security flaw (CVE-2017-0199) to establish contact with a malicious domain masquerading as Pakistan’s Directorate General Ports and Shipping, and then proceeds to exploit another security vulnerability (CVE-2017-11882) in Microsoft Office Equation Editor to execute shellcode responsible for launching JavaScript code.
The note concludes that the threat actor, SideWinder, is continuously evolving its infrastructure and delivery payloads, indicating its intention to continue attacks in the future.
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