Severity

High

Analysis Summary

Kimsuky is a North Korean nation-state actor that has been active since 2012. It primarily targets South Korean government agencies and conducts espionage activities against targets in the United States and Japan. Kimsuky has dropped a custom backdoor which they are calling Gold Dragon. Kimsuky deploys Gold Dragon, a second-stage backdoor, after a file-less PowerShell-deploying first-stage attack is dropped. 

This group has the ability to put up phishing infrastructure that can effectively imitate well-known websites and fool users into entering their passwords. Kimsuky APT is also known by the names Thallium, Black Banshee, and Velvet Chollima. KISA (Korean Internet & Security Agency) published a full investigation of Kimsuky’s phishing infrastructure and TTPs used to attack South Korea in December 2020. To get Initial Access to victim networks, Kimsuky’s threat actors use a variety of spear phishing and social engineering techniques. This group is responsible for the 2014 Korea Hydro & Nuclear Power Co. compromise, and other major campaigns like Operation Kabar Cobra(2019).

In its recent campaign, a sample was used with the filename: 남북의 창_질의서.doc 

Impact

• Information theft and espionage
• Exposure of sensitive data

Indicators of Compromise

MD5

• 734b2d5832aab48287256115853ea84b

SHA-256

• a0fddbb638fc4f3ba4cefc0707226e8c01eefd98f78d6a9b4fbca1ba74b21adf

SHA-1

• cafcd26c7c9fb209319e479437bc90eb1cd601e9

Remediation

• Always be suspicious about emails sent by unknown senders.
• Never click on links/attachments sent by unknown senders.
• Block all threat indicators at your respective controls.
• Search for IOCs in your environment.