Charming Kitten, an Iranian nation-state hacking group, has been found to be actively targeting multiple victims across the US, Europe, the Middle East, and India with its latest custom malware called BellaCiao.
According to a report by cybersecurity firm Bitdefender Labs, BellaCiao is a “personalized dropper” that can download other malware payloads onto a victim’s device based on commands from an actor-controlled server. The malware is capable of resolving a subdomain to an IP address and subsequently extracting the commands to be executed on the compromised system.
The attack chain leads to the deployment of a web shell or a Plink tool, both of which allow Charming Kitten to establish a reverse proxy connection to a remote server and implement similar backdoor features.
Charming Kitten, also known as APT35, Cobalt Illusion, Educated Manticore, ITG18, Mint Sandstorm, TA453, and Yellow Garuda, is an Iranian state-sponsored APT group associated with the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. The group has been deploying backdoors in systems across various industry verticals.
It was recently attributed by Microsoft to retaliatory attacks aimed at critical infrastructure entities in the US using bespoke malware such as harmPower, Drokbk, and Soldier.
Check Point also recently disclosed Mint Sandstorm’s use of an updated version of the PowerLess implant to strike organizations located in Israel using Iraq-themed phishing lures.
Bitdefender researcher Martin Zugec noted that custom-developed malware, also known as “tailored” malware, is generally harder to detect because it is specifically crafted to evade detection and contains unique code. The exact modus operandi used to achieve initial intrusion is currently undetermined, but it is suspected to entail the exploitation of known vulnerabilities in internet-exposed applications like Microsoft Exchange Server or Zoho ManageEngine.
The attacks are assessed to be in the second stage after opportunistic attacks, wherein BellaCiao is customized and deployed against carefully selected victims of interest following indiscriminate exploitation of vulnerable systems.
Bitdefender has advised implementing a defense-in-depth architecture as the best protection against modern attacks.
The first step in this process is to reduce the attack surface, which involves limiting the number of entry points that attackers can use to gain access to systems and promptly patching newly discovered vulnerabilities.
