The North Korea-linked menace actor often known as the Lazarus Group has been attributed to a social engineering marketing campaign that distributes three totally different items of cross-platform malware referred to as PondRAT, ThemeForestRAT, and RemotePE.
The assault, noticed by NCC Group’s Fox-IT in 2024, focused a company within the decentralized finance (DeFi) sector, in the end resulting in the compromise of an worker’s system.
“From there, the actor carried out discovery from contained in the community utilizing totally different RATs together with different instruments, for instance, to reap credentials or proxy connections,” Yun Zheng Hu and Mick Koomen mentioned. “Afterwards, the actor moved to a stealthier RAT, seemingly signifying a subsequent stage within the assault.”
The assault chain begins with the menace actor impersonating an present worker of a buying and selling firm on Telegram and utilizing pretend web sites masquerading as Calendly and Picktime to schedule a gathering with the sufferer.
Though the precise preliminary entry vector is at present not identified, the foothold is leveraged to deploy a loader referred to as PerfhLoader, which then drops PondRAT, a identified malware assessed to be a stripped-down variant of POOLRAT (aka SIMPLESEA). The cybersecurity firm mentioned there’s some proof to counsel {that a} then-zero-day exploit within the Chrome browser was used within the assault.
Additionally delivered together with PondRAT are numerous different instruments, together with a screenshotter, keylogger, Chrome credential and cookie stealer, Mimikatz, FRPC, and proxy applications like MidProxy and Proxy Mini.
“PondRAT is an easy RAT that permits an operator to learn and write recordsdata, begin processes, and run shellcode,” Fox-IT mentioned, including it dates again to no less than 2021. “The actor used PondRAT together with ThemeForestRAT for roughly three months, to afterwards clear up and set up the extra refined RAT referred to as RemotePE.”
The PondRAT malware is designed to speak over HTTP(S) with a hard-coded command-and-control (C2) server to obtain additional directions, with ThemeForestRAT launched immediately in reminiscence both by way of PondRAT or a devoted loader.
ThemeForestRAT, like PondRAT, displays for brand spanking new Distant Desktop (RDP) classes and contacts a C2 server over HTTP(S) to retrieve as many as twenty instructions to enumerate recordsdata/directories, carry out file operations, execute instructions, check TCP connection, timestomp file based mostly on one other file on disk, get course of itemizing, obtain a recordsdata, inject shellcode, spawn processes, and hibernate for a selected period of time.
Fox-IT mentioned ThemeForestRAT shares similarities with a malware codenamed RomeoGolf that was put to make use of by the Lazarus Group within the November 2014 harmful wiper assault in opposition to Sony Footage Leisure (SPE). It was documented by Novetta as a part of a collaborative effort often known as Operation Blockbuster.
RemotePE, however, is retrieved from a C2 server by RemotePELoader, which, in flip, is loaded by DPAPILoader. Written in C++, RemotePE is a extra superior RAT that is seemingly reserved for high-value targets.
“PondRAT is a primitive RAT that gives little flexibility, nonetheless, as an preliminary payload it achieves its function,” Fox-IT mentioned. “For extra advanced duties, the actor makes use of ThemeForestRAT, which has extra performance and stays beneath the radar as it’s loaded into reminiscence solely.”
