Delphi Used To Score Against Palestine

Executive Summary

This blog was authored by Paul Rascagneres and Warren Mercer with contributions from Emmanuel Tacheau, Vanja Svajcer and Martin Lee.
Talos continuously monitors malicious emails campaigns. We identified one specific spear phishing campaign launched against targets within Palestine, and specifically against Palestinian law enforcement agencies. This campaign started in April 2017, using a spear phishing campaign to deliver the MICROPSIA payload in order to remotely control infected systems. Although this technique is not new, it remains an effective technique for attackers.

The malware itself was developed in Delphi; in this article, we describe the features and the network communication to the command and control server used by the attackers. The threat actor has chosen to reference TV show characters and include German language words within the attack. Most significantly, the attacker has appeared to have used genuine documents stolen from Palestinian sources as well as a controversial music video as part of the attack.