Spearphishing Attacks hit the Oil and Gas Industry Sector

guest · Apr 21, 2020

Spearphishing attacks hit the oil and gas industry sector
April 21, 2020
https://securityaffairs.co/wordpress/101967/cyber-crime/spearphishing-energy-oil-gas-industry.html

Crooks are targeting organizations in the oil and gas industry sector with targeted spearphishing campaigns impersonating shipment companies and engineering contractors. The attacks aim at infecting victims with the infamous Agent Tesla info-stealer malware.

This info-stealer is also able to kill processes associated with malware analysis related processes and antivirus solutions.
Experts pointed out that this is the first time that Agent Tesla has been employed in attacks targeting the oil and gas vertical.

“However, a disruptive dispute over oil production between Russia and Saudi Arabia ended with an agreement at the recent meeting between the OPEC+ alliance and the Group of 20 nations, aiming to slash oil production output and balance prices.” reads the analysis published by Bitdefender.
This circumstance suggests that attackers could be interested in gathering information on how targeted countries will address the deal.
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Experts believe that the attackers have a deep understanding of the victim’s profile and used well-crafted messages to trick them into opening the malicious attachments.

In all the attacks hackers used weaponized attachments to deliver the Agent Tesla info-stealer to compromise victims’ systems.

“However, these campaigns seem to deliver the Agent Tesla spyware Trojan instead, and beyond just the oil & gas sector, they also target other energy verticals that have been tagged as critical during this Coronavirus pandemic.” continues the analysis.
According to Bitdefender, hackers also targeted organizations in oil & gas, charcoal processing, hydraulic plants, manufacturers of raw materials, and transporters of large merchandise.
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Bitdefender: Oil & Gas Spearphishing Campaigns Drop Agent Tesla Spyware in Advance of Historic OPEC+ Deal

ybercriminals are often opportunistic and leverage popular media topics in spearphishing campaigns that usually target large numbers of victims.
However, we recently found a campaign that seems to specifically target the oil & gas sector, based on a telemetry spike on March 31st. Interestingly, the payload is a spyware Trojan that packs keylogging capabilities, and has not been associated with oil & gas spearphishing campaigns in the past.

The second campaign that impersonated a shipping company seems to have started on April 12 and targeted only a handful of shipping companies based in the Philippines over the course of two days.
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Spearphishing Attacks hit the Oil and Gas Industry Sector

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