“Cyber Conflict” Decoy Document Used In Real Cyber Conflict

This post was authored by Warren Mercer, Paul Rascagneres and Vitor Ventura

INTRODUCTION

Cisco Talos discovered a new malicious campaign from the well known actor Group 74 (aka Tsar Team, Sofacy, APT28, Fancy Bear…). Ironically the decoy document is a flyer concerning the Cyber Conflict U.S. conference organized by the NATO Cooperative Cyber Defence Centre of Excellence on 7-8 November 2017 at Washington, D.C. Due to the nature of this document, we assume that this campaign targets people with an interest in cyber security. Unlike previous campaigns from this actor, the flyer does not contain an Office exploit or a 0-day, it simply contains a malicious Visual Basic for Applications (VBA) macro.

The VBA drops and executes a new variant of Seduploader. This reconnaissance malware has been used by Group 74 for years and it is composed of 2 files: a dropper and a payload. The dropper and the payload are quite similar to the previous versions but the author modified some public information such as MUTEX name, obfuscation keys… We assume that these modifications were performed to avoid detection based on public IOCs.

The article describes the malicious document and the Seduploader reconnaissance malware, especially the difference with the previous versions.

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