Arabic Online Spying Gang Targeting in Middle East Countries; Kaspersky

Kaspersky Lab the security company has found one cyber espionage gang going by the name "Desert Falcons" which targeted many individuals and high-profile institutions located in the countries of Middle East.

The security company is certain that the gang is the first Arabic gang ever known comprising a cyber band of fighters that creates and executes exhaustive online spying operations.

These online spying operations understandably have been going on since 2-yrs or more when Desert Falcons started creating and expanding their campaign during 2011. Moreover, it was during 2013 that the chief operation along with infection had started, while peaking at early 2015, says Kaspersky.

The security company notes that the attackers have mainly utilized spear phishing electronic mails carrying malicious software together with socially engineered tactics via chat messages and social networking websites for contaminating victims.

Once a victim's machine was infected, attackers utilized either of 2 separate Backdoors viz. Desert Falcons' key Trojan alternatively their DHS Backdoor. Quite likely they developed both the backdoors from root while putting them through constant advancement, Kaspersky stated.

Kaspersky's researchers, on collecting evidence, compute that the Desert Falcons group contains 30 or more members. More clues obtained relate to their language properties which are configured to Arabic; their CnC administrators having Arabic names; their phishing e-mails' content also containing Arabic terms; as well as their DHS control section having Arabic interface.

The researchers blogged that a few of the cyber-crooks' identities became apparent whilst an inspection of a CnC structure's content was performed that contained 'public read' sanctions available for a brief time-period. In addition they wrote that they managed in tracing and recognizing a few attackers' websites, private blogs, and Twitter and Facebook A/Cs. Threatpost.com published this in news on February 17, 2015.

Strangely according to the researchers, the attackers posted onto twiiter.com certain details regarding their spyware's as well as CnC servers' developments.

Kaspersky anticipates that the Desert Falcons' campaign will keep creating more Trojans while employing increasingly sophisticated techniques. If money is sufficiently available they may even build or obtain exploits for making their attacks more effective, it concludes.

» SPAMfighter News - 2/24/2015