The Russian risk actor generally known as RomCom has been linked to a brand new wave of cyber assaults aimed toward Ukrainian authorities companies and unknown Polish entities since no less than late 2023.
The intrusions are characterised by way of a variant of the RomCom RAT dubbed SingleCamper (aka SnipBot or RomCom 5.0), stated Cisco Talos, which is monitoring the exercise cluster below the moniker UAT-5647.
“This model is loaded instantly from the registry into reminiscence and makes use of a loopback deal with to speak with its loader,” safety researchers Dmytro Korzhevin, Asheer Malhotra, Vanja Svajcer, and Vitor Ventura famous.
RomCom, additionally tracked as Storm-0978, Tropical Scorpius, UAC-0180, UNC2596, and Void Rabisu, has engaged in multi-motivational operations resembling ransomware, extortion, and focused credential gathering since its emergence in 2022.
It has been assessed that the operational tempo of their assaults has elevated in current months with an goal to arrange long-term persistence on compromised networks and exfiltrate information, suggesting a transparent espionage agenda.
To that finish, the risk actor is alleged to be “aggressively increasing their tooling and infrastructure to assist all kinds of malware parts authored in numerous languages and platforms” resembling C++ (ShadyHammock), Rust (DustyHammock), Go (GLUEEGG), and Lua (DROPCLUE).
The assault chains begin with a spear-phishing message that delivers a downloader — both coded in C++ (MeltingClaw) or Rust (RustyClaw) — which serves to deploy the ShadyHammock and DustyHammock backdoors, respectively. In parallel, a decoy doc is exhibited to the recipient to keep up the ruse.
Whereas DustyHammock is engineered to contact a command-and-control (C2) server, run arbitrary instructions, and obtain information from the server, ShadyHammock acts as a launchpad for SingleCamper in addition to listening for incoming instructions.
Regardless of’s ShadyHammock further options, it is believed that it is a predecessor to DustyHammock, given the truth that the latter was noticed in assaults as just lately as September 2024.
SingleCamper, the newest model of RomCom RAT, is liable for a variety of post-compromise actions, which entail downloading the PuTTY’s Plink software to determine distant tunnels with adversary-controlled infrastructure, community reconnaissance, lateral motion, person and system discovery, and information exfiltration.
“This particular sequence of assaults, concentrating on excessive profile Ukrainian entities, is probably going meant to serve UAT-5647’s two-pronged technique in a staged method – set up long-term entry and exfiltrate information for so long as doable to assist espionage motives, after which doubtlessly pivot to ransomware deployment to disrupt and certain financially acquire from the compromise,” the researchers stated.
“Additionally it is seemingly that Polish entities had been additionally focused, based mostly on the keyboard language checks carried out by the malware.”
