SecureWorld News

US-CERT Alert About Ongoing Russian Cyber Attack Strategy

Written by SecureWorld News Team | Fri | Mar 16, 2018 | 4:40 PM Z

Contact DHS or law enforcement immediately to report an intrusion and to request incident response resources or technical assistance.

https://www.us-cert.gov/ncas/alerts/TA18-074A

Description

Since at least March 2016, Russian government cyber actors—hereafter referred to as “threat actors”—targeted government entities and multiple U.S. critical infrastructure sectors, including the energy, nuclear, commercial facilities, water, aviation, and critical manufacturing sectors.

Analysis by DHS and FBI resulted in the identification of distinct indicators and behaviors related to this activity. Of note, the report Dragonfly: Western energy sector targeted by sophisticated attack group, released by Symantec on September 6, 2017, provides additional information about this ongoing campaign. [1]

This campaign comprises two distinct categories of victims: staging and intended targets. The initial victims are peripheral organizations such as trusted third-party suppliers with less secure networks, referred to as “staging targets” throughout this alert. The threat actors used the staging targets’ networks as pivot points and malware repositories when targeting their final intended victims. NCCIC and FBI judge the ultimate objective of the actors is to compromise organizational networks, also referred to as the “intended target.”

Technical details

The threat actors in this campaign employed a variety of TTPs, including:

  • spear-phishing emails (from compromised legitimate account)
  • watering-hole domains
  • credential gathering
  • open-source and network reconnaissance
  • host-based exploitation
  • targeting industrial control system (ICS) infrastructure