Medium
The government team for responding to computer emergencies in Ukraine CERT-UA found the RAR-archive “Про збереження відеоматеріалів з фіксацією злочинних дій армії російської федерації.rar”, which contains the EXE-file of the same name. Running the executable file will create a lure document “# 2163_02_33-2022.pdf” (applies to a letter from the National Police of Ukraine), as well as a DLL file with the MZ header “officecleaner.dat” and the BAT file “officecleaner” removed. .bat “, which will ensure the formation of the correct DLL-file, run it and write to the Windows registry to ensure consistency. – CERT-UA
The mentioned DLL-file is classified as a malicious program HeaderTip, the main purpose of which is to download and execute other DLL-files.
Activity is tracked by UAC-0026. Similar attacks were observed in September 2020.
After the release of the advisory by the Ukraine CERT, researchers have associated the Chinese Threat Actors “Scarab” with the attack. This is the first direct attack by a Chinese threat actor on Ukraine. Scarab is known to use a predecessor of HeaderTip called “Scieron”.