Hacking

Cyber espionage campaign targets Samsung service centers in Italy

Security researchers from Italian security firm TG Soft have uncovered an ongoing malware campaigns targeting Samsung service centers in Italy.

“TG Soft’s Research Centre (C.R.A.M.) has analyzed the campaign of spear-phishing on 2 april 2018 targeting the service centers of Samsung Italy.” reads the analysis published by TG Soft.

“The campaign analyzed is targeting only the service centers of Samsung Italy, it’s an attack multi-stage and we have monitored it until July 2018″

The campaign has similarities with the attacks campaigns that targeted similar electronics service centers in Russia that was discovered by Fortinet in June. The attackers’ motivation is still unclear, experts explained that the malicious code is not particularly sophisticated.

The attackers used spear-phishing emails sent to Samsung Italy service center workers. The messages have attached weaponized Excel documents.

The documents trigger the CVE-2017-11882 Office Equation Editor vulnerability to infect users.

According to a technical report published by the experts, this attack and the one against Russian service centers offering maintenance and support for various electronic goods started in the same period, in March.

While Russian service centers were hit by the Imminent Monitor RAT, the attacks on Samsung Italy service centers also involved other RATs, such Netwire and njRAT.

The quality of the spear phishing messages was high in both campaigns, they appear to have been written by a native in Italian and Russian, respectively.

The attachment used in this campaign is an Excel document titled “QRS non autorizzati.xlsx,” while the phishing messages are signed with the name of the Samsung IT Service Manager, a real employee of Samsung Italia, and includes the email and phone numbers of the employee.

At the time, the experts were not able to attribute the attack to a specific threat actor. The electronics service centers appear not particularly interesting for attackers because the volume of data it manage is little.

Probably the attackers want to compromise remote management tools used by these services in order to gain control over the computers of the customers that request support to the electronics service centers.

“Command and control servers use services like noip.me or ddns.net, which in combination with a VPN, allow hiding the IP address of the server where the exfiltrated data is sent.” concludes the report.
“During the analysis in some cases, the C2 servers were not online and the RAT failed to contract them, and then returns active after a few tens of hours with a new IP address.
The actors behind this attack remain unknown …”

The Italian version of the report that includes also the IoCs is available here.

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Pierluigi Paganini

(Security Affairs – Samsung service centers, spear-phishing)

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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”.

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