Charming Kitten, an Iranian threat actor, has been identified as the culprit behind a series of recent cyberattacks targeting organizations in Brazil, Israel, and the U.A.E.
Furthermore, the attacks involve a previously undocumented backdoor named ‘Sponsor,’ and they are being monitored by Slovak cybersecurity firm ESET under the name ‘Ballistic Bobcat.’ The victims of these attacks appear to be education, government, healthcare organizations, as well as human rights activists and journalists. The attacks date back to at least September 2021, with at least 34 victims detected so far.
Charming Kitten’s ‘Sponsor’ backdoor is notable for its use of configuration files stored on disk, deployed discreetly by batch files. This tactic is designed to make the malware appear innocuous and evade detection by scanning engines.
The attack campaign, named ‘Sponsoring Access,’ exploits known vulnerabilities in internet-exposed Microsoft Exchange servers to gain initial access. This method aligns with an advisory issued by several countries in November 2021.
One specific incident highlighted by ESET involves an Israeli company operating an insurance marketplace that was infiltrated in August 2021. The attackers delivered additional malicious payloads, including PowerLess, Plink, and an open-source post-exploitation toolkit called Merlin.
Charming Kitten’s ‘Sponsor’ backdoor, written in C++, gathers host information and executes instructions received from a remote server. It can perform tasks such as command and file execution, file downloads, and updating the list of attacker-controlled servers.
The threat group, Ballistic Bobcat, continues to employ a scan-and-exploit approach, seeking unpatched vulnerabilities in internet-exposed Microsoft Exchange servers. To defend against these attacks, organizations should prioritize patching known vulnerabilities and enhancing their cybersecurity measures.
