Volexity works with many individuals and organizations often subjected to sophisticated and highly targeted spear-phishing campaigns from a variety of nation-state-level threat actors. In the last few years, Volexity has observed threat actors dramatically increase the level of effort they put into compromising credentials or systems of individual targets. Spear-phishing campaigns now often involve individual, tailored messages that engage in dialogue with each target, sometimes over a period of several days, before a malicious link or file attachment is ever sent. One threat actor Volexity frequently sees employing these techniques is Charming Kitten, who is believed to be operating out of Iran. Charming Kitten appears to be primarily concerned with collecting intelligence by compromising account credentials and, subsequently, the email of individuals they successfully spear phish. The group will often extract any other credentials or access they can, and then attempt to pivot to other systems, such as those accessible […]
spear phishing
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Charming Kitten Updates POWERSTAR with an InterPlanetary Twist
June 28, 2023
by Ankur Saini, Charlie Gardner
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Operation EmailThief: Active Exploitation of Zero-day XSS Vulnerability in Zimbra
February 3, 2022
by Steven Adair, Tom Lancaster
[UPDATE] On February 4, 2022, Zimbra provided an update regarding this zero-day exploit vulnerability and reported that a hotfix for 8.8.15 P30 would be available on February 5, 2022. This vulnerability was later assigned CVE-2022-24682 and was fixed in version 8.8.15P30 Update 2 of Zimbra Collaboration Suite. In December 2021, through its Network Security Monitoring service, Volexity identified a series of targeted spear-phishing campaigns against one of its customers from a threat actor it tracks as TEMP_Heretic. Analysis of the emails from these spear phishing campaigns led to a discovery: the attacker was attempting to exploit a zero-day cross-site scripting (XSS) vulnerability in the Zimbra email platform. Zimbra is an open source email platform often used by organizations as an alternative to Microsoft Exchange. The campaigns came in multiple waves across two attack phases. The initial phase was aimed at reconnaissance and involved emails designed to simply track if a target […]
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Suspected APT29 Operation Launches Election Fraud Themed Phishing Campaigns
May 27, 2021
by Damien Cash, Josh Grunzweig, Matthew Meltzer, Sean Koessel, Steven Adair, Tom Lancaster
On May 25, 2021, Volexity identified a phishing campaign targeting multiple organizations based in the United States and Europe. The following industries have been observed being targeted thus far: NGOs Research Institutions Government Agencies International Agencies The campaign’s phishing e-mails purported to originate from the USAID government agency and contained a malicious link that resulted in an ISO file being delivered. This file contained a malicious LNK file, a malicious DLL file, and a legitimate lure referencing foreign threats to the 2020 US Federal Elections. This blog post provides details on the observed activity and outlines possible justification that this campaign could be related to APT29. Phishing Email Campaign The original e-mails looked like the following: Figure 1. Phishing e-mails sent to numerous organizations Volexity also observed a smaller campaign from the same sender with largely the same content several hours earlier, but with the subject line “USAID Special Alert!”. […]
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PowerDuke: Widespread Post-Election Spear Phishing Campaigns Targeting Think Tanks and NGOs
November 9, 2016
by Steven Adair
In the wake of the 2016 United States Presidential Election, not even six hours after Donald Trump became the nation’s President-Elect, an advanced persistent threat (APT) group launched a series of coordinated and well-planned spear phishing campaigns. Volexity observed five different attack waves with a heavy focus on U.S.-based think tanks and non-governmental organizations (NGOs). These e-mails came from a mix of attacker created Google Gmail accounts and what appears to be compromised e-mail accounts at Harvard’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS). These e-mails were sent in large quantities to different individuals across many organizations and individuals focusing in national security, defense, international affairs, public policy, and European and Asian studies. Two of the attacks purported to be messages forwarded on from the Clinton Foundation giving insight and perhaps a postmortem analysis into the elections. Two of the other attacks purported to be eFax links or documents pertaining to […]