Rewterz Threat Alert – Bitter APT Group – Active IOCs

Severity

High

Analysis Summary

APT-17 group aka BITTER APT group has been recently active and targeting sectors in South Asia for information theft and espionage. This group has a history of targeting Energy, Engineering, Government in South Asia. Spear phishing emails have been the main strike force to target their victims and they’ve been doing it for years now. Many BITTER victims have been exploited through relatively popular Microsoft Office exploit, in order to download and execute a RAT binary from a website. Although the attack vector of this sample remains unknown of yet, this is an indication of their presence again in the South Asian region

As part of an ongoing effort that began in August 2021, this threat actor group known for targeting China, Pakistan, and Saudi Arabia has expanded to set its sights on Bangladeshi government agencies.
With a spear-phishing email, this campaign targets an elite unit of Bangladesh’s government. Emails may contain a malicious RTF document or a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet that is used to exploit known vulnerabilities. The Equation Editor application is automatically launched once the victim opens the maldoc to run the embedded objects containing the shellcode to exploit known vulnerabilities described by CVE-2017-11882, CVE-2018-0798, and CVE-2018-0802 in Microsoft Office, and then downloads and runs the trojan from the hosting server on the victim’s machine. The trojan runs itself in this campaign, but the actor has more RATs and downloaders in their arsenal. 

Impact

• Information Theft and Espionage

Indicators of Compromise

MD5

fd37560c80f934919f8f4592708045f3

SHA-256

b7a9407b47baf7442e0baf94a3b4cc8b7420cb01364fc8e6a3c622b7ae39301f

SHA-1

a9b06c04f62bae3e81b300c52e5d291cd7dcaf95

Domain Name

kryoblockbind.net

Remediation

• Search for IOCs in your environment.
• Block all threat indicators at your respective controls
• Along with network and system hardening, code hardening should be implemented within the organization so that their websites and software are secure. Use testing tools to detect any vulnerabilities in the deployed codes.
• Patch and upgrade any platforms and software timely and make it into a standard security policy. Prioritize patching known exploited vulnerabilities and zero-days.
• Enable antivirus and anti-malware software and update signature definitions in a timely manner. Using a multi-layered protection is necessary to secure vulnerable assets