ESET Analysis

ESET researchers reveal a rising sophistication in threats affecting the LATAM area by using evasion strategies and high-value concentrating on

17 Oct 2023
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3 min. learn

Very similar to the life and mysterious demise of Pharaoh Tutankhamun, also called King Tut, the menace panorama in Latin America (LATAM) stays shrouded in thriller. That is primarily because of the restricted world consideration on the evolving malicious campaigns throughout the area. Whereas notable occasions like ATM assaults, the banking trojans born in Brazil, and the Machete cyberespionage operations have garnered media protection, we’re conscious that there’s extra to the story.

In a parallel to how archaeological excavations of King Tut’s tomb make clear historical Egyptian life, we launched into a journey to delve into less-publicized cyberthreats affecting Latin American nations. Our initiative, named Operation King TUT (The Universe of Threats), sought to discover this important menace panorama. On October fifth, we introduced the outcomes of our comparative evaluation on the Virus Bulletin 2023 convention: the total convention paper will be learn right here.

Within the evaluation, we selected to look again at varied publicly documented campaigns concentrating on the LATAM area between 2019 and 2023, as will be seen within the timeline under. All of those cybercriminal actions are detected completely in Latin America and are usually not related to world crimeware. Since every of those operations has its personal distinctive traits and doesn’t seem linked to any identified menace actor, it’s extremely doubtless that a number of actors are at play.

Our analysis revealed a notable shift from simplistic, opportunistic crimeware to extra complicated threats. Notably, we’ve got noticed a transition in concentrating on, transferring from a concentrate on most people to high-profile customers, together with companies and governmental entities. These menace actors frequently replace their instruments, introducing totally different evasion strategies to extend the success of their campaigns. Moreover, they’ve expanded their crimeware enterprise past Latin America, mirroring the sample seen in banking trojans born in Brazil.

Our comparability additionally exhibits that almost all of malicious campaigns seen within the area are directed at enterprise customers, together with authorities sectors, by using primarily spearphishing emails to achieve potential victims, usually masquerading as acknowledged organizations inside particular nations within the area, significantly authorities or tax entities.

The precision and specificity noticed in these assaults level to a excessive stage of concentrating on, indicating that the menace actors have detailed data about their supposed victims. In these campaigns, attackers make the most of malicious parts like downloaders and droppers, largely created in PowerShell and VBS.

Relating to the instruments utilized in these malicious operations in Latin America, our observations point out a choice for RATs, significantly from the njRAT and AsyncRAT households. Moreover, in campaigns primarily concentrating on authorities entities, we’ve got recognized using different malware households like Bandook and Remcos, albeit to a lesser extent.

Based mostly on the conclusions ensuing from our comparability, we imagine that there’s greater than only one group behind the proliferation of these kinds of campaigns and that these teams are actively trying into totally different strategies and methods for his or her campaigns to be as profitable as doable. Moreover, we suspect that socioeconomic disparities prevalent in Latin America might affect the modus operandi of attackers on this area, though this specific side falls past the scope of our analysis. The complete VB2023 convention paper about Operation King TUT is obtainable right here.

Aggregated indicators of compromise (IoCs) can be found on our GitHub repository.

For any inquiries about our analysis printed on WeLiveSecurity, please contact us at [email protected].

ESET Analysis gives personal APT intelligence experiences and information feeds. For any inquiries about this service, go to the ESET Risk Intelligence web page.