Storm-1133: A Gaza-based Threat Actor

By Ashwin Venugopal -

 






Introduction

Recently, Microsoft has unveiled a Gaza-based threat actor, primarily targeting the private-sector organizations of Israel. There main focus is on energy, defense, and telecommunications companies. This group works in the interests of Hamas, a Sunni militant organization, and attacks the organizations deemed hostile towards Hamas. They have also targeted Fatah, a Palestinian political party, located in the West Bank.

Characteristics

The attack strategy of Storm-1133 includes social engineering and the creation of fake profiles on LinkedIn. These fake profiles pose as the human resource managers, project coordinators, and software developers from Israel. They initiate communication with Israeli employees of various organizations by sending phishing messages, conducting reconnaissance, and then deliver malware. They also try to intrude third-party organizations with the help of links known to the employees of Israel. Through this intrusion, they try to create the backdoors and configure the command-and-control (C2) infrastructure hosted on Google Drive. This allows them to dynamically update their infrastructure.

Since Israeli-Palestinian conflicts, their attacks have shifted from destructive and disruptive operations to the long-term cyber espionage programs. 

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, Storm-1133 is mainly targeting organizations that are considered as hostile towards Hamas. They have extensively used phishing messages to lure their victims and compromise their network. Hence, a strong prevention strategy should be applied to prevent these attacks from compromising a network. 















































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