Ukraine’s CERT-UA warns of espionage activity conducted by UAC-0063

The Computer Emergency Response Team of Ukraine (CERT-UA) warns of a cyberespionage campaign targeting state bodies in the country.

The Computer Emergency Response Team of Ukraine (CERT-UA) has warned of cyber attacks targeting state bodies in the country as part of an espionage campaign conducted by a threat actor tracked as UAC-0063.

The nation-state actor on April 18, 2023 and April 20, 2023, sent spear-phishing emails to the department’s e-mail address, supposedly from the official mailbox of the Embassy of Tajikistan in Ukraine.

The CERT-UA believes that the mailbox of the Embassy of Tajikistan may have been compromised in a previous attack. The email used in the attacks contained respectively a weaponized document and a reference to the same document.

“If the document is downloaded and the macro is activated on the PC, a DOCX file “SvcRestartTaskLogon” will be created and opened, which also contains a macro, which will create another file with the “WsSwapAssessmentTask” macro.” reads the report published by CERT-UA. “The purpose of the latter is to create a “SoftwareProtectionPlatform” file classified as HATVIBE and a scheduled task to run it. HATVIBE is presented as an encoded VBScript (VBE) file, which functionally provides the ability to load and run other files.”

Upon enabling the macro in the Microsoft Word document, an encoded VBScript called HATVIBE is launched. The script then is used used to drop additional malicious payloads, including a keylogger (LOGPIE) and the CHERRYSPY backdoor. Both Python-based malware are protected using the PyArmor utility.

The threat actors also used the STILLARCH malware to search and exfiltrate files, including the results of the LOGPIE keylogger operation (file extension: “.~tmp”)

Threat actors also employed the sophisticated malware strain DownEx, which was recently involved in attacks aimed at Government organizations in Central Asia.

Ukrainian government experts reported that the analysis of the attack infrastructure lead them into believing that the attack was aimed at organizations from Mongolia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Israel, and India.

CERT-UA recommends that user accounts should be restricted from running “mshta.exe”, running Windows Script Host (“wscript.exe”, “cscript.exe”) and the Python interpreter.

Ukraine’s CERT also shared Indicators of Compromise (IoCs).

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Pierluigi Paganini

(SecurityAffairs – hacking, APT)

Pierluigi Paganini

Pierluigi Paganini is member of the ENISA (European Union Agency for Network and Information Security) Threat Landscape Stakeholder Group and Cyber G7 Group, he is also a Security Evangelist, Security Analyst and Freelance Writer. Editor-in-Chief at "Cyber Defense Magazine", Pierluigi is a cyber security expert with over 20 years experience in the field, he is Certified Ethical Hacker at EC Council in London. The passion for writing and a strong belief that security is founded on sharing and awareness led Pierluigi to find the security blog "Security Affairs" recently named a Top National Security Resource for US. Pierluigi is a member of the "The Hacker News" team and he is a writer for some major publications in the field such as Cyber War Zone, ICTTF, Infosec Island, Infosec Institute, The Hacker News Magazine and for many other Security magazines. Author of the Books "The Deep Dark Web" and “Digital Virtual Currency and Bitcoin”.