Advanced Methods Used by State-Backed Hackers to Target Middle Eastern and African Governments

Rochberger describes the nature of the attack and its steps.

The infection chain is triggered by the exploitation of vulnerable on-premises Internet Information Services (IIS) and Microsoft Exchange servers to infiltrate target networks.

A successful breakin is followed by reconnaissance activity to map out the network and single out critical servers.

In the attack, the attacker usually replaces the sethc.exe binary with cmd.exe which provides an elevated command prompt shell to the attacker to run arbitrary commands and other tools.

This activity group’s level of sophistication, adaptiveness, and victimology suggest a highly capable APT threat actor, and it is suspected to be a nation-state threat actor, Rochberger said.

He suspects that this group originated from China

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