Cisco Talos discovered Gamaredon APT activity targeting users in Ukraine with malicious LNK files distributed in RAR archives. The campaign, part of an ongoing espionage operation observed as recently as August 2022, aims to deliver information-stealing malware to Ukrainian victim machines and makes heavy use of multiple modular PowerShell and VBScript (VBS) scripts as part of the infection chain.
The infostealer is a dual-purpose malware that includes capabilities for exfiltrating specific file types and deploying additional binary and script-based payloads on an infected endpoint.
The adversary uses phishing emails to deliver Microsoft Office documents containing remote templates with malicious VBScript macros. These macros download and open RAR archives containing LNK files that subsequently download and activate the next-stage payload on the infected endpoint.
We observed considerable overlap between the tactics, techniques and procedures (TTPs), malware artifacts and infrastructure used in this campaign and those used in a series of attacks the Ukraine Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT-UA) recently attributed to Gamaredon.
