USB worm unleashed by Russian state hackers spreads worldwide
USB worm unleashed by Russian state hackers spreads worldwide
LitterDrifter's means of self-propagation are simple. So why is it spreading so widely?
"the malware is written in the Visual Basic Scripting language." is where I stopped 😹 lol at least we know the Russians are suffering.
This is like when I assumed my high school IT department was so good that I'd never be able to get past their content restrictions, but then renaming Halo CE to "explorer.exe" let me play all the games I wanted.
I had FF3 broken up into a few files and renamed and disbursed through the school network so I’d just pull them all into a local file at the computer I was working at in the lab and play during class. I thought I was the shit.
norton family:
Renaming it to "winword.exe" was my go-to.
As a non programmer, isn't visual basic for Excell scripts?
No you can run any .vbs script standalone
I’m not following. VBScript seems like the right tool. Why would they use something else? They’re generally light years beyond US defense capabilities so there’s a real dearth of suffering on their side.
Now if the joke is that they’re suffering because they have to use VBScript, I can get behind that
if you're cold, they're cold
put them in the computer at your work
Meanwhile if you load Baofeng software from a few years ago antivirus software today will ping out. It never used to ping out, such is the nature of zero days.
Meanwhile Israel has been selling weapons grade hacking technology for decades, they've been directly linked to the assassination of Jamal Khashoggi as well as the Mexican cartels.
Meanwhile Argentina happens to be the hub for zero day exploits, with a bunch of hackers inventing their own shit and selling directly to state actors or whoever will pay.
The only way you can remain secure is to regularly install a fresh OS. Change my mind.
The only way to be truly secure is to throw your computer into the sea and return, naked and fearless, into the forest from whence we came.
Change my mind.
Sure. Even regularly installing a new OS doesn't necessarily keep you secure if someone wanted to discreetly install malware on your device. In addition to firmware-level rootkits that re-install themselves on fresh OSs (even platform-agnostic ones), it's possible that someone might interdict whatever hardware is bought and implant it with additional small hardware that compromises it in some way.
They don't even need to work that hard, just compromise the ME/PSP and do whatever.
Change my mind.
In the end, if you are not of interest to a nation state hacker (or a member of a drug cartel) you have nothing to fear from the things you listed.
But that won;t change your mind.
Your incorrect assumption is that only cartels and nation states are using said software. Weaponized versions of this stuff are making their way to consumer levels where you just need to piss off the wrong person online. I don’t worry about the US government targeting me beyond normal levels; I worry about employers deploying spyware.
Unless you’re rotating accounts and not posting anything on the internet ever, going so far as to use an in-memory OS like Tails won’t protect you.
(...) computer worm designed to spread from computer to computer through USB drives.
It absolutely works. My company spends a ton of time and resources in an attempt to prevent folks from plugging in random USB drives. Classes to user restrictions. Amazing how some folk are.
Also, would this be the same group that hacked the Socchi Winter Olympics, soon after Russia was banned? The one that the US indicted and labelled as a "petulant child"?
No. Attribution wasn’t clear for Olympic Destroyer; it’s doubtful we’ll we ever know the specific APT responsible. Signals intelligence was used to guess at Russian attribution so we at least have a pretty good idea which country launched it.
https://americanmilitarynews.com/2020/10/2447380/
Maybe the attribution isn't 100% (as would be expected with how the attacker masked themselves using techniques from every major nation state hacker) but Russian hackers were indeed indicted for it.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
A group of Russian-state hackers known for almost exclusively targeting Ukranian entities has branched out in recent months either accidentally or purposely by allowing USB-based espionage malware to infect a variety of organizations in other countries.
“Gamaredon continues to focus on [a] wide variety [of] Ukrainian targets, but due to the nature of the USB worm, we see indications of possible infection in various countries like USA, Vietnam, Chile, Poland and Germany,” Check Point researchers reported recently.
The image above, tracking submissions of LitterDrifter to the Alphabet-owned VirusTotal service, indicates that the Gamaredon malware may be infecting targets well outside the borders of Ukraine.
The data suggests that the number of infections in the US, Vietnam, Chile, Poland, and Germany combined may be roughly half of those hitting organizations inside Ukraine.
The core essence of the Spreader module lies in recursively accessing subfolders in each drive and creating LNK decoy shortcuts, alongside a hidden copy of the “trash.dll” file.
“Comprised of two primary components—-a spreading module and a C2 module—it’s clear that LitterDrifter was designed to support a large-scale collection operation,” Check Point researchers wrote.
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