New Variant of UpdateAgent Malware Infects Mac Computers with Adware

 Microsoft on Wednesday shed light on a previously undocumented Mac trojan that it said has undergone several iterations since its first appearance in September 2020, effectively granting it an "increasing progression of sophisticated capabilities."

The company's Microsoft 365 Defender Threat Intelligence Team dubbed the new malware family "UpdateAgent," charting its evolution from a barebones information stealer to a second-stage payload distributor as part of multiple attack waves observed in 2021.

"The latest campaign saw the malware installing the evasive and persistent Adload adware, but UpdateAgent's ability to gain access to a device can theoretically be further leveraged to fetch other, potentially more dangerous payloads," the researchers said.

The actively in-development malware is said to be propagated via drive-by downloads or advertisement pop-ups that masquerade as legitimate software like video applications and support agents, even as the authors have made steady improvements that have transformed UpdateAgent into a progressively persistent piece of malware.

Chief among the advancements include the capability to abuse existing user permissions to surreptitiously perform malicious activities and circumvent macOS Gatekeeper controls, a security feature that ensures only trusted applications from identified developers can be installed on a system.

In addition, UpdateAgent has been found to take advantage of public cloud infrastructure, namely Amazon S3 and CloudFront services, to host its second-stage payloads, including adware, in the form of .DMG or .ZIP files.

Once installed, the Adload malware makes use of ad injection software and man-in-the-middle (MitM) techniques to intercept and reroute users' internet traffic through the attacker's servers to insert rogue ads into web pages and search engine results to increase the chances of multiple infections on the devices.

"UpdateAgent is uniquely characterized by its gradual upgrading of persistence techniques, a key feature that indicates this trojan will likely continue to use more sophisticated techniques in future campaigns," the researchers cautioned.

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New Wave of Cyber Attacks Target Palestine with Political Bait and Malware

 

Cybersecurity researchers have turned the spotlight on a new wave of offensive cyberattacks targeting Palestinian activists and entities starting around October 2021 using politically-themed phishing emails and decoy documents.

The intrusions are part of what Cisco Talos calls a longstanding espionage and information theft campaign undertaken by the Arid Viper hacking group using a Delphi-based implant called Micropsia dating all the way back to June 2017.

The threat actor's activities, also tracked under the monikers Desert Falcon and the APT-C-23, were first documented in February 2015 by Kasperksy and subsequently in 2017, when Qihoo 360 disclosed details of cross-platform backdoors developed by the group to strike Palestinian institutions.

The Russian cybersecurity company-branded Arid Viper the "first exclusively Arabic APT group."

Then in April 2021, Meta (formerly Facebook), which pointed out the group's affiliations to the cyber arm of Hamas, said it took steps to boot the adversary off its platform for distributing mobile malware against individuals associated with pro-Fatah groups, the Palestinian government organizations, military and security personnel, and student groups within Palestine.

                                    Decoy document containing text on Palestinian reunification

The raft of new activity relies on the same tactics and document lures used by the group in 2017 and 2019, suggesting a "certain level of success" despite a lack of change in their tooling. More recent decoy files reference themes of Palestinian reunification and sustainable development in the territory that, when opened, lead to the installation of Micropsia on compromised machines.

The backdoor is designed to give the operators an unusual range of control over the infected devices, including the ability to harvest sensitive information and execute commands transmitted from a remote server, such as capturing screenshots, recording the current activity log, and downloading additional payloads.

"Arid Viper is a prime example of groups that aren't very advanced technologically, however, with specific motivations, are becoming more dangerous as they evolve over time and test their tools and procedures on their targets," researchers Asheer Malhotra and Vitor Ventura said.

"These [remote access trojans] can be used to establish long-term access into victim environments and additionally deploy more malware purposed for espionage and stealing information and credentials."

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ChopChop - ChopChop Is A CLI To Help Developers Scanning Endpoints And Identifying Exposition Of Sensitive Services/Files/Folders

ChopChop is a command-line tool for dynamic application security testing on web applications, initially written by the Michelin CERT.

Its goal is to scan several endpoints and identify exposition of services/files/folders through the webroot. Checks/Signatures are declared in a config file (by default: chopchop.yml), fully configurable, and especially by developers.

"Chop chop" is a phrase rooted in Cantonese. "Chop chop" means "hurry" and suggests that something should be done now and without delay.

Building

We tried to make the build process painless and hopefully, it should be as easy as:

$ go mod download
$ go build .

There should be a resulting gochopchop binary in the folder.

Using Docker

Thanks to Github Container Registry, we are able to provide you some freshly-build Docker images!

docker run ghcr.io/michelin/gochopchop scan https://foobar.com -v debug

But if you prefer, you can also build it locally, see below:

Build locally

docker build -t gochopchop .

Usage

We are continuously trying to make goChopChop as easy as possible. Scanning a host with this utility is as simple as :

$ ./gochopchop scan https://foobar.com

Using Docker

docker run gochopchop scan https://foobar.com

Custom configuration file

docker run -v ./:/app chopchop scan -c /app/chopchop.yml https://foobar.com

What's next

The Golang rewrite took place a couple of months ago but there's so much to do, still. Here are some features we are planning to integrate : [x] Threading for better performance [x] Ability to specify the number of concurrent threads [x] Colors and better formatting [x] Ability to filter checks/signatures to search for [x] Mock and unit tests [x] Github CI And much more!

Testing

To quickly end-to-end test chopchop, we provided a web-server in tests/server.go. To try it, please run go run tests/server.go then run chopchop with the following command ./gochopchop scan http://localhost:8000 --verbosity Debug. ChopChop should print "no vulnerabilities found".

There are also unit test that you can launch with go test -v ./.... These tests are integrated in the github CI workflow.

Available flags

You can find the available flags available for the scan command :

Flag	Full flag	Description
-h	--help	Help wizard
-v	--verbosity	Verbose level of logging
-c	--signature	Path of custom signature file
-k	--insecure	Disable SSL Verification
-u	--url-file	Path to a specified file containing urls to test
-b	--max-severity	Block the CI pipeline if severity is over or equal specified flag
-e	--export	Export type of the output (csv and/or json)
	--export-filename	Specify the filename for the export file(s)
-t	--timeout	Timeout for the HTTP requests
	--severity-filter	Filter Plugins by severity
	--plugin-filter	Filter Plugins by name of plugin
	--threads	Number of concurrent threads

Advanced usage

Here is a list of advanced usage that you might be interested in. Note: Redirectors like > for post processing can be used.

• Ability to scan and disable SSL verification

$ ./gochopchop scan https://foobar.com --insecure

• Ability to scan with a custom configuration file (including custom plugins)

$ ./gochopchop scan https://foobar.com --insecure --signature test_config.yml

• Ability to list all the plugins or by severity : plugins or plugins --severity High

$ ./gochopchop plugins --severity High

• Ability to specify number of concurrent threads : --threads 4 for 4 workers

$ ./gochopchop plugins --threads 4

• Ability to block the CI pipeline by severity level (equal or over specified severity) : --max-severity Medium

$ ./gochopchop scan https://foobar.com --max-severity Medium

• Ability to specify specific signatures to be checked

./gochopchop scan https://foobar.com --timeout 1 --verbosity --export=csv,json --export-filename boo --plugin-filters=Git,Zimbra,Jenkins

• Ability to list all the plugins

$ ./gochopchop plugins

• List High severity plugins

$ ./gochopchop plugins --severity High

• Set a list or URLs located in a file

$ ./gochopchop scan --url-file url_file.txt

• Export GoChopChop results in CSV and JSON format

$ ./gochopchop scan https://foobar.com  --export=csv,json --export-filename results

Creating a new check

Writing a new check is as simple as :

  - endpoint: "/.git/config"
    checks:
      - name: Git exposed
        match:
          - "[branch"
        remediation: Do not deploy .git folder on production servers
        description: Verifies that the GIT repository is accessible from the site
        severity: "High"

An endpoint (eg. /.git/config) is mapped to multiple checks which avoids sending X requests for X checks. Multiple checks can be done through a single HTTP request. Each check needs those fields:

Attribute	Type	Description	Optional ?	Example
name	string	Name of the check	No	Git exposed
description	string	A small description for the check	No	Ensure .git repository is not accessible from the webroot
remediation	string	Give a remediation for this specific "issue"	No	Do not deploy .git folder on production servers
severity	Enum("High", "Medium", "Low", "Informational")	Rate the criticity if it triggers in your environment	No	High
status_code	integer	The HTTP status code that should be returned	Yes	200
headers	List of string	List of headers there should be in the HTTP response	Yes	N/A
no_headers	List of string	List of headers there should NOT be in the HTTP response	Yes	N/A
match	List of string	List the strings there should be in the HTTP response	Yes	"[branch"
no_match	List of string	List the strings there should NOT be in the HTTP response	Yes	N/A
query_string	GET parameters that have to be passed to the endpoint	String	Yes	query_string: "id=FOO-chopchoptest"

External Libraries

Library Name	Link	License
Viper	https://github.com/spf13/viper	MIT License
Go-pretty	https://github.com/jedib0t/go-pretty	MIT License
Cobra	https://github.com/spf13/cobra	Apache License 2.0
strfmt	https://github.com/go-openapi/strfmt	Apache License 2.0
Go-homedir	https://github.com/mitchellh/go-homedir	MIT License
pkg-errors	https://github.com/pkg/errors	BSD 2 (Simplified License)
Go-runewidth	https://github.com/mattn/go-runewidth	MIT License

Please, refer to the third-party.txt file for further information.

Talks

• PyCon FR 2019 (The tool was initially developed in Python) - https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1uVXGUpt7tC7zQ1HWegoBbEg2LHamABIqfDfiD9MWsD8/edit
• DEFCON AppSec Village 2020 "Turning offsec mindset to developer's toolset" - https://drive.google.com/file/d/15P8eSarIohwCVW-tR3FN78KJPGbpAtR1/view

License

ChopChop has been released under Apache License 2.0. Please, refer to the LICENSE file for further information.

Authors

• Paul A.
• David R. (For the Python version)
• Stanislas M. (For the Golang version)

Download ChopChop

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New Malware Used by SolarWinds Attackers Went Undetected for Years

 

The threat actor behind the supply chain compromise of SolarWinds has continued to expand its malware arsenal with new tools and techniques that were deployed in attacks as early as 2019, once indicative of the elusive nature of the campaigns and the adversary's ability to maintain persistent access for years.

According to cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike, which detailed the novel tactics adopted by the Nobelium hacking group last week, two sophisticated malware families were placed on victim systems — a Linux variant of GoldMax and a new implant dubbed TrailBlazer — long before the scale of the attacks came to light.

Nobelium, the Microsoft-assigned moniker for the SolarWinds intrusion in December 2020, is also tracked by the wider cybersecurity community under the names UNC2452 (FireEye), SolarStorm (Unit 42), StellarParticle (CrowdStrike), Dark Halo (Volexity), and Iron Ritual (Secureworks).

The malicious activities have since been attributed to a Russian state-sponsored actor called APT29 (also known as The Dukes and Cozy Bear), a cyber espionage operation associated with the country's Foreign Intelligence Service that's known to be active since at least 2008.

GoldMax (aka SUNSHUTTLE), which was discovered by Microsoft and FireEye (now Mandiant) in March 2021, is a Golang-based malware that acts as a command-and-control backdoor, establishing a secure connection with a remote server to execute arbitrary commands on the compromised machine.

Mandiant also pointed out that Dark Halo actors had used the malware in attacks going back to at least August 2020, or four months before SolarWinds discovered its Orion updates had been tampered with malware designed to drop post-compromise implants against thousands of its customers.

In September 2021, Kaspersky revealed details of a second variant of the GoldMax backdoor called Tomiris that was deployed against several government organizations in an unnamed CIS member state in December 2020 and January 2021.

The latest iteration is a previously undocumented but functionally identical Linux implementation of the second-stage malware that was installed in victim environments in mid-2019, predating all other identified samples built for the Windows platform to date.

Also delivered around the same timeframe was TrailBlazer, a modular backdoor that offers attackers a path to cyber espionage, while sharing commonalities with GoldMax in the way it masquerades its command-and-control (C2) traffic as legitimate Google Notifications HTTP requests.

Other uncommon channels used by the actor to facilitate the attacks include —

• Credential hopping for obscuring lateral movement
• Office 365 (O365) Service Principal and Application hijacking, impersonation, and manipulation, and
• Theft of browser cookies for bypassing multi-factor authentication

Additionally, the operators carried out multiple instances of domain credential theft months apart, each time leveraging a different technique, one among them being the use of Mimikatz password stealer in-memory, from an already compromised host to ensure access for extended periods of time.

"The StellarParticle campaign, associated with the Cozy Bear adversary group, demonstrates this threat actor's extensive knowledge of Windows and Linux operating systems, Microsoft Azure, O365, and Active Directory, and their patience and covert skill set to stay undetected for months — and in some cases, years," the researchers said.

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Cynet's Keys to Extend Threat Visibility

 

We hear about the need for better visibility in the cybersecurity space – detecting threats earlier and more accurately. We often hear about the dwell time and the time to identify and contain a data breach. Many of us are familiar with IBM's Cost of a Data Breach Report that has been tracking this statistic for years. In the 2021 report, IBM found that, on average, it takes an average of 212 days to identify a breach and then another 75 days to contain the breach, for a total of 287 days.

A new solution overview document provides insights on how XDR provider Cynet tackles the difficult problem of greatly improving threat visibility. Cynet takes a modern approach that includes a greater level of native technology integration and advanced automation purposely designed for organizations with smaller security teams than Fortune 500 organizations. A live webinar will discuss the same topic (Register here)

Cynet's Keys for Threat Visibility

Einstein said that the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over while expecting a different outcome. The old approach to threat visibility involving multiple protection technologies and trying to sift through a sea of alerts and information is obviously not working well. Cynet's different – and seemingly saner – approach to prevent, detect, and respond to modern-day threats involves several integrated capabilities.

According to the new Cynet solution overview, the following key technologies are used to provide extended threat visibility along with enhanced response capabilities.

Include Multiple Threat Detection Technologies

Cynet includes multiple prevention and detection technologies, all natively orchestrated in the platform:

• NGAV – Fundamental endpoint protection based on known bad signatures and behaviors.
• EDR – To detect and prevent more complex endpoint threats that bypass NGAV solutions.
• NTA – To detect threats that have made their way into the network and so-called lateral movement.
• UBA – To detect unusual activity that could signal stolen credentials, a rogue insider, or bots.
• Deception – To uncover intrusions that have bypassed other detection technologies
• CLM – To mine the extensive log data generated by IT systems.
• SSPM – To find and correct configuration errors in SaaS applications.

Coordinate All Signals

Making sense out of multiple detection technologies by integrating, coordinating, and prioritizing information was supposed to be the realm of Security Incident and Event Management (SIEM) technologies. Unfortunately, SIEM doesn't do well with real-time data and requires significant care and feeding.

XDR solutions, like Cynet's, are purpose-built to integrate real-time signals from multiple points of telemetry on a single platform. Cynet even includes an Incident Engine that automatically investigates threats to determine the attack's full scope and root cause.

Automate All Response Actions

Quickly and accurately identifying threats is a game-changer. The ability to automatically and fully eradicate identified threats is, well, a game-changer changer. This means security teams won't have to be burdened with lengthy investigations, which many don't have the time or skills to undertake. Cynet provides an extensive set of remediation actions across files, hosts, networks and users as well as remediation playbooks that can be configured to be invoked manually or automatically.

Provide Full MDR Oversight

Beyond the technology platform, Cynet offers all clients a full, 24x7 MDR service at no additional cost. This team continuously monitors client environments to ensure nothing dangerous is overlooked or mishandled. Having an expert team watching out for issues should put smaller organizations with smaller security teams at ease, knowing an expert team of cybersecurity experts has their backs.

In With the New

With the time required to identify and contain data breaches steadily increasing, we need to rethink the traditional cybersecurity approach. It seems companies keep throwing more money, more technology, and more bodies at the problem, yet achieving the same (or worse) results. Cynet is one company that seems to be approaching the problem differently by combining multiple prevention, detection, response, and automation capabilities on a single, unified breach protection platform. Rather than buying all this stuff separately and munging it all together, the Cynet platform seems to expand and improve threat visibility out of the box.

Download the solution brief here

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Hacker Group 'Moses Staff' Using New StrifeWater RAT in Ransomware Attacks

 

A politically motivated hacker group tied to a series of espionage and sabotage attacks on Israeli entities in 2021 incorporated a previously undocumented remote access trojan (RAT) that masquerades as the Windows Calculator app as part of a conscious effort to stay under the radar.

Cybersecurity company Cybereason, which has been tracking the operations of the Iranian actor known as Moses Staff, dubbed the malware "StrifeWater."

"The StrifeWater RAT appears to be used in the initial stage of the attack and this stealthy RAT has the ability to remove itself from the system to cover the Iranian group's tracks," Tom Fakterman, Cybereason security analyst, said in a report. "The RAT possesses other capabilities, such as command execution and screen capturing, as well as the ability to download additional extensions."

Moses Staff came to light towards the end of last year when Check Point Research unmasked a series of attacks aimed at Israeli organizations since September 2021 with the objective of disrupting the targets' business operations by encrypting their networks, with no option to regain access or negotiate a ransom.

The intrusions were notable for the fact that they relied on the open-source library DiskCryptor to perform volume encryption, in addition to infecting the systems with a bootloader that prevents them from starting without the correct encryption key.

To date, victims have been reported beyond Israel, including Italy, India, Germany, Chile, Turkey, the U.A.E., and the U.S.

The new piece of the attack puzzle discovered by Cybereason comes in the form of a RAT that's deployed under the name "calc.exe" (the Windows Calculator binary) and is used during the early stages of the infection chain, only to be removed prior to the deployment of the file-encrypting malware.

The removal and the subsequent replacement of the malicious calculator executable with the legitimate binary, the researchers suspect, is an attempt on the part of the threat actor to cover up tracks and erase evidence of the trojan, not to mention enable them to evade detection until the final phase of the attack when the ransomware payload is executed.

StrifeWater, for its part, is no different from its counterparts and comes with numerous features, chief among them being the ability to list system files, execute system commands, take screen captures, create persistence, and download updates and auxiliary modules.

"The end goal for Moses Staff appears to be more politically motivated rather than financial," Fakterman concluded. "Moses Staff employs ransomware post-exfiltration not for financial gain, but to disrupt operations, obfuscate espionage activity, and to inflict damage to systems to advance Iran's geopolitical goals."

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Critical Bug Found in WordPress Plugin for Elementor with Over a Million Installations

 

A WordPress plugin with over one million installs has been found to contain a critical vulnerability that could result in the execution of arbitrary code on compromised websites.

The plugin in question is Essential Addons for Elementor, which provides WordPress site owners with a library of over 80 elements and extensions to help design and customize pages and posts.

"This vulnerability allows any user, regardless of their authentication or authorization status, to perform a local file inclusion attack," Patchstack said in a report. "This attack can be used to include local files on the filesystem of the website, such as /etc/passwd. This can also be used to perform RCE by including a file with malicious PHP code that normally cannot be executed."

That said, the vulnerability only exists if widgets like dynamic gallery and product gallery are used, which utilize the vulnerable function, resulting in local file inclusion – an attack technique in which a web application is tricked into exposing or running arbitrary files on the webserver.

The flaw impacts all versions of the addon from 5.0.4 and below, and credited with discovering the vulnerability is researcher Wai Yan Myo Thet. Following responsible disclosure, the security hole was finally plugged in version 5.0.5 released on January 28 "after several insufficient patches."

The development comes weeks after it emerged that unidentified actors tampered with dozens of WordPress themes and plugins hosted on a developer's website to inject a backdoor with the goal of infecting further sites.

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SolarMarker Malware Uses Novel Techniques to Persist on Hacked Systems

 In a sign that threat actors continuously shift tactics and update their defensive measures, the operators of the SolarMarker information stealer and backdoor have been found leveraging stealthy Windows Registry tricks to establish long-term persistence on compromised systems.

Cybersecurity firm Sophos, which spotted the new behavior, said that the remote access implants are still being detected on targeted networks despite the campaign witnessing a decline in November 2021.

Boasting of information harvesting and backdoor capabilities, the .NET-based malware has been linked to at least three different attack waves in 2021. The first set, reported in April, took advantage of search engine poisoning techniques to trick business professionals into visiting sketchy Google sites that installed SolarMarker on the victim's machines.

Then in August, the malware was observed targeting healthcare and education sectors with the goal of gathering credentials and sensitive information. Subsequent infection chains documented by Morphisec in September 2021 highlighted the use of MSI installers to ensure the delivery of the malware.

The SolarMarker modus operandi commences with redirecting victims to decoy sites that drop the MSI installer payloads, which, while executing seemingly legitimate install programs such as Adobe Acrobat Pro DC, Wondershare PDFelement, or Nitro Pro, also launches a PowerShell script to deploy the malware.

"These SEO efforts, which leveraged a combination of Google Groups discussions and deceptive web pages and PDF documents hosted on compromised (usually WordPress) websites, were so effective that the SolarMarker lures were usually at or near the top of search results for phrases the SolarMarker actors targeted," Sophos researchers Gabor Szappanos and Sean Gallagher said in a report shared with The Hacker News.

The PowerShell installer is designed to alter the Windows Registry and drop a .LNK file into Windows' startup directory to establish persistence. This unauthorized change results in the malware getting loaded from an encrypted payload hidden amongst what the researchers called a "smokescreen" of 100 to 300 junk files created specifically for this purpose.

"Normally, one would expect this linked file to be an executable or script file," the researchers detailed. "But for these SolarMarker campaigns the linked file is one of the random junk files, and cannot be executed itself."

What's more, the unique and random file extension used for the linked junk file is utilized to create a custom file type key, which is ultimately employed to execute the malware during system startup by running a PowerShell command from the Registry.

The backdoor, for its part, is ever-evolving, featuring an array of functionalities that allow it to steal information from web browsers, facilitate cryptocurrency theft, and execute arbitrary commands and binaries, the results of which are exfiltrated back to a remote server.

"Another important takeaway […], which was also seen in the ProxyLogon vulnerabilities targeting Exchange servers, is that defenders should always check whether attackers have left something behind in the network that they can return to later," Gallagher said. "For ProxyLogon this was web shells, for SolarMarker this is a stealthy and persistent backdoor that according to Sophos telematics is still active months after the campaign ended."

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Iranian Hackers Using New PowerShell Backdoor in Cyber Espionage Attacks

 

An advanced persistent threat group with links to Iran has updated its malware toolset to include a novel PowerShell-based implant called PowerLess Backdoor, according to new research published by Cybereason.

The Boston-headquartered cybersecurity company attributed the malware to a hacking group known as Charming Kitten (aka Phosphorous, APT35, or TA453), while also calling out the backdoor's evasive PowerShell execution.

"The PowerShell code runs in the context of a .NET application, thus not launching 'powershell.exe' which enables it to evade security products," Daniel Frank, senior malware researcher at Cybereason, said. "The toolset analyzed includes extremely modular, multi-staged malware that decrypts and deploys additional payloads in several stages for the sake of both stealth and efficacy."

The threat actor, which is active since at least 2017, has been behind a series of campaigns in recent years, including those wherein the adversary posed as journalists and scholars to deceive targets into installing malware and stealing classified information.

Earlier this month, Check Point Research disclosed details of an espionage operation that involved the hacking group exploiting the Log4Shell vulnerabilities to deploy a modular backdoor dubbed CharmPower for follow-on attacks.

The latest refinements to its arsenal, as spotted by Cybereason, constitutes an entirely new toolset that encompasses the PowerLess Backdoor, which is capable of downloading and executing additional modules such as a browser info-stealer and a keylogger.

Also potentially linked to the same developer of the backdoor are a number of other malware artifacts, counting an audio recorder, an earlier variant of the information stealer, and what the researchers suspect to be an unfinished ransomware variant coded in .NET.

Furthermore, infrastructure overlaps have been identified between the Phosphorus group and a new ransomware strain called Memento, which first emerged in November 2021 and took the unusual step of locking files within password-protected archives, followed by encrypting the password and deleting the original files, after their attempts to encrypt the files directly were blocked by endpoint protection.

"The activity of Phosphorus with regard to ProxyShell took place in about the same time frame as Memento," Frank said. "Iranian threat actors were also reported to be turning to ransomware during that period, which strengthens the hypothesis that Memento is operated by an Iranian threat actor."

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