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, and 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 exploits, 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

URL

• http://wcnsappword.com/wmis/wave.php?xas=

MD5

• 26c59bd3fd3d6680c1c1e86dc34716fd

SHA-256

• 5b90d4c397e575965ed49082981fd34272b5e1da010057f6ebcdd4f53a409ad0

SHA-1

• 8365aaa97bae7a9d44680b7c45fac317878223b7

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