Callisto: Cyber Attack Group Against Ukraine

By Ashwin Venugopal -

 





Introduction

Callisto or Calisto is Russian cyber espionage group targeting multiple entities supporting Ukraine in the war. They attacks many government and private companies of the company including the US and Europe. This APT (Advanced Persistent Threat) is active since 2017, and nicknamed as Blue Callisto, Coldriver, Seaborgium, and Callisto Group. 

It has increased its attacks against Ukraine after the Russian invasion of the country. It has targeted at least ten entities supporting Ukraine, including six private companies of the U.S.A. and Eastern Europe and four NGOs. Mostly, these private companies were related to military equipment, military logistics or humanitarian support for Ukraine.

When & How?

The Callisto group has been active since many years and have targeted many victims. Hence, knowing about their pattern of attacks, helps a lot in understanding them. So, when and how they have attacked is as follows:
  • This APT is mainly interested in gathering intelligence related to the foreign and security policy of the Eastern Europe and South Caucasus region.

  • In October 2015, they targeted some individuals via phishing emails to obtain their webmail credentials. 

  • In early 2016, they sent highly targeted spear phishing emails attached with the malicious "scout" malware tool, as their final payload, from the HackingTeam RCS Galileo platform.

  • The spear phishing mails were very convincing. They successfully posed as being sent from a legitimate email accounts, that were previously compromised by the Callisto Group through credential phishing.

  • They still continues to set up new phishing infrastructure every week.

Detection & Mitigation

Some of the prevention and mitigation techniques are as follows:
  • Network and host hardening to reduce exposure to threats.
  • Vulnerability management to reduce the security weakness in the exposed services. 
  • Using strong data encryption will reduce its usefulness even if it is stolen.
  • Make use of Data Loss Prevention (DLP) and Endpoint Security to protect the sensitive data from leaking via the network or end-user devices. 
  • Use network and application-level firewalls to stop unwanted traffic from entering.

Conclusion

Nowadays, Callisto is mainly targeting organizations supporting the war-stricken Ukraine. It extensively uses phishing and spear-phishing mails to lure their victims and compromise their network. Hence, a strong prevention strategy should be applied to prevent these attacks from compromising a network. 









































































Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Query, Visualize, & Monitor Data in Azure Sentinel

By Ashwin Venugopal -
Image
  Azure Sentinel Workbooks Several ready for use templates are provided by the Azure Sentinel that can be used to create your own workbook and then modify them as needed for Contoso. Most of the data connectors it uses to ingest data come with their own workbooks, but better insight can be obtained by simply looking into the data that is being ingested by using tables and visualizations, including bar and pie charts. You can also make your own workbook easily by using this data from the beginning instead of using the predefined templates. Workbook Page You can easily access the workbook page from the Azure Sentinel from the navigation pane which consists of the: Workbook header- You can add a new workbook and review the saved workbooks as well as templates that are available on the workbook page. Templates section- You can access existing workbook templates on the Templates tab. You can save some of the workbooks for quick access and they will appear on the My Workbooks tab.  From the
Read more

Planning for Implementing SAP Solutions on Azure (Part 2 of 5)

By Ashwin Venugopal -
Image
  To read part 1 please click  here To read part 3 please click  here To read part 4 please click  here To read part 5 please click  here Load Balancing The load balancer uses probe ports to determine as well as route the traffic to an active DBMS node, but of there's any failover then the most common SAP application architecture can automatically reconnect against the private virtual IP address without the need for the SAP application to reconfigure it, while the load balancer redirect the traffic against the private virtual IP address without any need for the SAP application to reconfigure. The loaf balancer also offers an option of DirectServerReturn which if configured, can help in directing the traffic from the DBMS VM to the SAP application layer directly to the application layer without routing through the load balancer. But, if it isn't configured, then the return traffic to the SAP application layer is routed through the load balancer. You can also use Azure Load Balan
Read more

Work with String Data Using KQL Statements

By Ashwin Venugopal -
Image
  Extract Data from Unstructured String Fields Unstructured string fields often contains the Security log data and requires parsing to extract data. There are multiple ways of pulling information from string fields in KQL and the two primary operators used are extract and parse.  Extract It gets a match for a regular expression from a text string. You can convert the extracted substring to the indicated type.  Arguments regex- A regular expression. captureGroup- A positive int constant indicating the capture group to extract. 0 stands for the entire match, 1 for the value matched by the first '('parenthesis')' in the regular expression, 2 or more for subsequent parenthesis.  text- A string to search. typeLiteral- An optional type literal. If provided, the extracted substring is converted to this type.  Returns If regex finds a match in text- the substring matched against the indicated capture group captureGroup, optionally converted to typeLiteral. If there's no mat
Read more