Kaspersky Securelist
APT review: what the world’s threat actors got up to in 2019 (DPRK-related paragraph 4) · 2019-12-04
In October, we reported a campaign that began when we stumbled upon a sample that uses interesting decoy documents and images containing a contact list of North Korean overseas residents. Almost all of the decoys contain content regarding the national holiday of the Korean Peninsula and the national day of North Korea. The lure content was also related to diplomatic issues or business relationships. Alongside the additional data from our telemetry, we believe that this campaign is aimed at targets with a relationship with North Korea, such as business people, diplomatic entities and human rights organizations. The actor behind this campaign used high-profile spear phishing and multi-stage infection in order to implant tailored Ghost RAT malware that can fully control the victim. We believe that the threat actor behind this campaign, which has been ongoing for more than three years, speaks Korean; and we believe that the DarkHotel APT group is behind it.