APT trends report Q2 2019 (DPRK-related paragraph 3)

Kaspersky Securelist

The US Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has reported Trojan variants, identified as HOPLIGHT, being used by the North Korean government. The report includes an analysis of nine malicious executable files. Seven of them are proxy applications that mask traffic between the malware and the remote operators. The proxies have the ability to generate fake TLS handshake sessions using valid public SSL certificates, disguising network connections with remote malicious actors. One file contains a public SSL certificate and the payload of the file appears to be encoded with a password or key. The remaining file does not contain any of the public SSL certificates, but attempts outbound connections and drops four files: the dropped files primarily contain IP addresses and SSL certificates.