Rewterz Threat Alert – Bitter APT Threat Actors – Active IOCs

Severity

High

Analysis Summary

APT-17 group aka BITTER APT group has been recently active and targeting sectors in South Asia for information theft and espionage. This group has a history of targeting Energy, Engineering, and Government in South Asia. Spear phishing emails have been the main strike force to target their victims and they’ve been doing it for years now. Many BITTER victims have been exploited through relatively popular Microsoft Office exploits, in order to download and execute a RAT binary from a website. Although the attack vector of this sample remains unknown of yet, this is an indication of their presence again in the South Asian region

As part of an ongoing effort that began in August 2021, this threat actor group known for targeting China, Pakistan, and Saudi Arabia has expanded to set its sights on Bangladeshi government agencies.

With a spear-phishing email, this campaign targets an elite unit of Bangladesh’s government. Emails may contain a malicious RTF document or a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet that is used to exploit known vulnerabilities. The Equation Editor application is automatically launched once the victim opens the maldoc to run the embedded objects containing the shellcode to exploit known vulnerabilities described by CVE-2017-11882, CVE-2018-0798, and CVE-2018-0802 in Microsoft Office, and then downloads and runs the trojan from the hosting server on the victim’s machine. The trojan runs itself in this campaign, but the actor has more RATs and downloaders in their arsenal. 

Impact

• Password & identity theft
• Data Exfiltration
• Information Theft

Indicators of Compromise

MD5

• ec19a61b8e8311dc5de96481a74f2afd

SHA-256

• 95990cac90d19e6fe48bff85a72148c35facbb2e61b1f326d85e82603240a741

SHA-1

• a5432b3f410d37b8426c5da3c0f5326a2ea1f1c3

URL

http://bensnewfashionstyles.com/ryder/ring.php?ref=%25computername%25*%25username%25

Remediation

• Block all threat indicators at your respective controls.
• Search for Indicators of compromise (IOCs) in your environment utilizing your respective security controls