CyberSecurity Alert in South Korea and the United States as Data Stealing Malware Attacks the Infrastructure
FormBook is the new malware from attackers targeting manufacturing, defense, and aerospace firms in the South Korea and the United States.
According to the expert FireEye researchers, Formbook was identified in numerous distribution campaigns attacking the U.S. with emails containing unauthentic XLS, DOC, or PDF files. Even similar attacks from FormBook have been identified in South Korea through emails containing malicious files in ZIP, ACE, ISOS, and RAR formats.
With functional payloads, Formbook creates grabber to steal the data, the same being advertised in various hacking forums since 2016. Keylogging, tracking HTTP/SPDY/HTTPS/HTTP2 forms, network requests, stealing passwords from the browsers, email clients, clipboard monitoring, and taking screenshots are some of the prominent capabilities of FormBook.
There have been wide assortments of distribution mechanisms leveraged by the attackers of such email campaigns to distribute the information from FormBook malware, as posted on 9th October 2017 on the australiandefence.com.
As confirmed by the FireEye experts, an important and exclusive feature of this malware is that is can read 'Windows ntdl.dll module' to memory from the disk. This is the exported function of the FormBook making ineffective the API monitoring and user-mode hooking mechanisms.
There is a self-extracting RAR file that delivers the payload execution to the FormBook. During the instigation of launch,an AutoIt loadersrun and compile the script. This script decrypts the files from FormBook payload into a memory and then carry the execution process, confirm the researchers.
But overtime the researchers have identified that FormBook can also download NanoCore, which is a remote access Trojan or RAT that was first witnessed in 2013 and readily sold on the web. Taylor Huddleston, the author of the same was arrested for this in March 2017.
Besides the United States and South Korea, the malware has targeted other countries, such as United Kingdom, France, Poland, Ukraine, Hungry, Russia, Australia, Germany, and Netherlands.Even the archive campaign has hit the prominent countries of the world like United States, Belgium, Japan, Saudi Arabia, France, Sweden, Germany, and India.
The FormBook holds the potential to hit Windows devices, and hence it has become an urgent need for the high-end institutions to look to a more secure solution and upgrade their Windows operating system. As for now, it is announced strictly to not open any suspicious emails or click on unidentified links or download any unknown attachments from any unrecognized email address.
ยป SPAMfighter News - 10/16/2017
