Molerats APT

By Ashwin Venugopal -

 





Overview

Molerats malware is also known as ALUMINUM SARATOGA, Extreme Jackal, G0021, Gaza Cybergang, Gaza Hackers Team, Moonlight, and Operation Molerats. This malware mainly targeted the Middle East government institutions and global government organizations associated with geopolitics in the region. 

It is a type of Advanced Persistent Threat (APT) that is mostly interested in Israel and Palestine, along with the other regions in the Middle East. The custom malware implant of the threat actor allows reconnaissance on the victim and exfiltrate data. It can also leverage multiple mechanisms to avoid automated threat analysis including geofencing based on IP addresses, only target computers with Arabic language packs installed, and password-protected archive files to distribute malware.

Main Features

  • Uses open-source and commercial packers for the backdoor. 
  • Targets Middle East region.
  • Uses Dropbox API for entire C2 communication. 
  • Use RAR files for backdoor delivery as well as later stages.
  • Use other legit cloud hosting services like Google Drive to host the payloads.

Analysis

This threat actor is using the malware LastConn,an updated version or new variant of SharpStage, in its recent campaigns that are email-based.  The malware especially targets the computers with Arabic language installed pack to ensure the desired targets. It is an actively developed and maintained malware, that uses Dropbox for all C2 capabilities and infrastructure. It also consists of multiple qualities that can prevent both automated and manual malware analysis.

Conclusion

Molerats is a highly effective and capable threat actor especially for those working with the government and other geopolitical entities in the Middle East. Evidently, it will continue to develop and modify customized malware implants to evade detection and automated analysis. Hence, to protect against such threat actor, it is advisable to carefully download and open any password protected archives, and open them from trusted sources only. 



































































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