APT28, Turla Nation-State Groups Deployed Multiple 0Days in Recent Attacks

itman · May 14, 2017

Attack campaigns by APT28, Turla, and an unidentified group showcase easy availability of zero-days.

Threat actors rarely ever need zero-day flaws to breach enterprise networks. But there appears to be a plentiful supply of such vulnerabilities for those who do.

A flurry of recent exploit activity targeting government, military, and banking entities mostly in Europe and the Middle East is one example.

Security vendors ESET and FireEye this week issued separate advisories on cyberattacks involving the use of three Microsoft zero-day flaws. Two of them involved the Encapsulated PostScript (EPS) function in Microsoft Office, while the third was a privilege escalation flaw in Windows.

Microsoft addressed all three issues in its monthly security update for May this week.

In its advisory, FireEye said it had seen the three flaws being exploited in attacks by an unidentified group and also by APT28 and Turla, two previously known Russian cyber espionage groups. The unknown group appeared to be motivated by financial gain and was focused mainly on regional and global banks operating in the Middle East. The APT28 and Turla attacks were likely targeted at extracting geopolitical intelligence from targets in Europe.

The attacks by Turla and the unknown group involved the use of CVE-2017-0261, a remote code execution flaw that allowed attackers to gain administrative access on vulnerable systems. The EPS vulnerability, according to Microsoft, could be exploited by getting users to open an Office file with a malformed image or by getting them to insert a malformed image into an Office file.

The APT28 group's attacks meanwhile exploited two zero-day flaws; CVE-2017-0262, a remote code execution vulnerability in EPS handling that was nearly identical to the other EPS zero-day; and CVE-2017-0263, an escalation of privilege flaw in Windows.

APT28's objective in using the two zero-day flaws was to drop Seduploader, a reconnaissance tool that the group is well known for using to steal confidential information from targets, ESET said in its blog.
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http://www.darkreading.com/threat-i...tiple-0days-in-recent-attacks/d/d-id/1328854?

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APT28, Turla Nation-State Groups Deployed Multiple 0Days in Recent Attacks

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APT28, Turla Nation-State Groups Deployed Multiple 0Days in Recent Attacks

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