[BreachExchange] Microsoft Obtains Court Order to Take Down Domains Used to Target Ukraine

[Matthew Wheeler]

https://thehackernews.com/2022/04/microsoft-obtains-court-order-to-take.html

Microsoft Obtains Court Order to Take Down Domains Used to Target Ukraine

April 08, 2022Ravie Lakshmanan

Ukraine

Microsoft on Thursday disclosed that it obtained a court order to take
control of seven domains used by APT28, a state-sponsored group operated by
Russia's military intelligence service, with the goal of neutralizing its
attacks on Ukraine.

"We have since re-directed these domains to a sinkhole controlled by
Microsoft, enabling us to mitigate Strontium's current use of these domains
and enable victim notifications," Tom Burt, Microsoft's corporate vice
president of customer security and trust, said.

APT28, also known by the names Sofacy, Sednit, Pawn Storm, Fancy Bear, Iron
Twilight, and Strontium, is a cyber espionage group and an advanced
persistent threat that's known to be active since 2009, striking media,
governments, military, and international non-governmental organizations
(NGOs) that often have a security focus.

The tech giant noted that the sinkhole infrastructure was used by the
threat actor to target Ukrainian institutions as well as governments and
think tanks in the U.S. and the European Union so as to maintain long term
persistent access and exfiltrate sensitive information.

Meta takes action against Ghostwriter and Phosphorus

The disclosure from Microsoft comes as Meta, the company formerly known as
Facebook, disclosed that it took action against covert adversarial networks
originating from Azerbaijan and Iran on its platform, by taking down the
accounts and blocking their domains from being shared.

The Azerbaijanian operation is believed to have singled out democracy
activists, opposition groups, and journalists from the country and
government critics abroad for carrying out credential phishing and
espionage activities.

Another involved UNC788 (aka Charming Kitten, TA453, or Phosphorus), a
government-linked hacking crew that has a history of conducting
surveillance operations in support of Iranian strategic priorities.

"This group used a combination of low-sophistication fake accounts and more
elaborate fictitious personas, which they likely used to build trust with
potential targets and trick them into clicking on phishing links or
downloading malicious applications," Meta outlined in its first quarterly
Adversarial Threat Report.

The malicious Android applications, dubbed HilalRAT, impersonated seemingly
harmless Quran apps to extract sensitive information, such as contacts
list, text messages, files, location information, as well as activate
camera and microphone.

Meta also said it blocked the malicious activities associated with an
unreported Iranian hacking group that leveraged tactics similar to that of
Tortoiseshell to target or spoof companies in the energy, IT, maritime
logistics, semiconductor, and telecom industries.

This campaign featured an elaborate set of bogus profiles on Instagram,
LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter, with the actors posing as recruiters of
real and front companies to trick users into clicking on phishing links to
deliver information stealing malware that were disguised as VPN,
calculator, audiobook, and messaging apps.

"They developed malware on the VMWare ThinApp virtualization platform,
which allowed them to run it on many different systems and hold malicious
payload back until the last minute, making malware detection more
challenging," Meta explained.

Lastly, also disrupted by Meta were takeover attempts made by the
Belarus-aligned Ghostwriter group to break into the Facebook accounts of
dozens of Ukrainian military personnel.

The attacks, which were successful in a "handful of cases," abused the
access to victims' social media accounts and posted disinformation "calling
on the Army to surrender as if these posts were coming from the legitimate
account owners."
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