In an evaluation printed lately by specialists at Verify Level Analysis, a brand new spy marketing campaign was found, dubbed “Twisted Panda”. This spy operation primarily focused two Russian protection institutes and a analysis facility in Belarus.
In the midst of an ongoing espionage marketing campaign that has been happening for a number of months, this marketing campaign types half of a bigger, Chinese language state-sponsored operation.
Quite a lot of malicious levels and payloads have been deployed by the menace actors on this marketing campaign. Furthermore, there are additionally phishing emails containing sanctions-related info that has been despatched to Russian entities inside the Rostec Company, a Russian protection conglomerate.
The invasion of Ukraine was exploited by one other Chinese language APT group, Mustang Panda, to focus on Russian organizations on the identical time.
It’s potential that Twisted Panda is part of the identical spy ring as Mustang Panda or Stone Panda, aka APT10, one other Beijing-sponsored spy group.
An infection chain
As lately on March 23, a number of Russian analysis institutes affiliated with the protection business acquired malicious emails.
A malicious doc was hooked up to the emails with the topic “Record of individuals beneath US sanctions for invading Ukraine”, which might be accessed by a hyperlink to a pretend Russian Well being Ministry web site minzdravros[.]com.
An e mail with the topic “US Unfold of Lethal Pathogens in Belarus” was despatched to an unknown entity in Minsk, Belarus on the identical day.
Whereas all the paperwork hooked up to this e mail are crafted to seem like official paperwork, bearing the official emblems and titles of the Russian Ministry of Well being.
A template is downloaded from the URLs for every doc in an analogous format that may be simply exported. A number of API features are imported into this exterior template from kernel32, by a macro code.
When the exported operate R1 is executed, the malicious information are finalized after initialization by the exported program.
New Spinner backdoor
Because the payload, the Spinner a newly added backdoor is the principle element, which is obfuscated through the use of two strategies of obfuscation.
It has been seen that earlier samples attributed to Stone Panda and Mustang Panda attested to the mix of those two obfuscation strategies.
There are two main issues, and right here they’re:-
- Management-flow flattening: Which makes the code move not linear.
- Opaque predicates: Which causes unneeded calculations to be carried out within the binary.
On this case, Spinner is the backdoor utilized by a command-and-control server for the aim of operating extra payloads.
China’s five-year plan additionally identifies Twisted Panda as a part of its effort to enhance its scientific and technological capabilities.
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