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ESET Research: Lazarus attacks aerospace and defense contractors worldwide while misusing LinkedIn and WhatsApp

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During the annual ESET World conference, ESET researchers have been presenting about a new investigation into the infamous Lazarus APT group. Director of ESET Threat Research Jean-Ian Boutin went over various new campaigns perpetrated by the Lazarus group against defense contractors around the world between late 2021 and March 2022.

Jean-Ian Boutin (@jiboutin) / Twitter
Jean-Ian Boutin, Director of Threat Research at ESET

In the relevant 2021-2022 attacks and according to ESET telemetry, Lazarus has been targeting companies in Europe (France, Italy, Germany, the Netherlands, Poland, and Ukraine) and Latin America (Brazil).

Despite the primary aim of this Lazarus operation being cyber-espionage, the group has also worked to exfiltrate money (unsuccessfully). “The Lazarus threat group showed ingenuity by deploying an interesting toolset, including for example a user mode component able to exploit a vulnerable Dell driver in order to write to kernel memory. This advanced trick was used in an attempt to bypass security solutions monitoring.,” says Jean-Ian Boutin.

As early as 2020, ESET researchers had already documented a campaign pursued by a sub-group of Lazarus against European aerospace and Défense contractors ESET called Operation In(ter)ception. This campaign was noteworthy as it used social media, especially LinkedIn, to build trust between the attacker and an unsuspecting employee before sending them malicious components masquerading as job descriptions or applications. At that time, companies in Brazil, Czech Republic, Qatar, Turkey and Ukraine had already been targeted.

ESET researchers believed that the action was mostly geared towards attacking European companies, but through tracking a number of Lazarus sub-groups performing similar campaigns against defense contractors, they soon realized that the campaign extended much wider. While the malware used in the various campaigns were different, the initial modus operandi (M.O.) always remained the same: a fake recruiter contacted an employee through LinkedIn and eventually sent malicious components.

In this regard, they’ve continued with the same M.O. as in the past. However, ESET researchers have also documented the re-use of legitimate hiring campaign elements to add legitimacy to their fake recruiters’ campaigns.

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