APT trends report Q3 2019 (DPRK-related paragraph 2)

Kaspersky Securelist

The Andariel APT group, considered to be a sub-group of Lazarus, was initially described by the South Korean Financial Security Institute (FSI) in 2017. This threat actor has traditionally focused on geopolitical espionage and financial intelligence in South Korea. We have released several private intelligence reports on the group. We recently observed new efforts by this actor to build a new C2 infrastructure targeting vulnerable Weblogic servers, in this case exploiting CVE-2017-10271. Following a successful breach, the attackers implanted malware signed with a legitimate signature belonging to a South Korean security software vendor. Thanks to the quick response of the South Korean CERT, this signature was soon revoked. The malware is a brand new type of backdoor, called ApolloZeus, started by a shellcode wrapper with complex configuration data. This backdoor uses a relatively large shellcode in order to make analysis difficult. In addition, it implements a set of features to execute the final payload discreetly. The discovery of this malware allowed us to find several related samples, as well as documents used by the attackers to distribute it, providing us with a better understanding of the campaign. Indeed, we believe this attack is an early preparation stage for a new campaign, which also points to the attacker’s intentions to replace their malware framework with the newly discovered artifacts.