The Russian state-sponsored APT generally known as Star Blizzard has been utilizing a brand new backdoor in assaults after its LostKeys malware was detailed in a public report in June, Google says.
Additionally tracked as Callisto, ColdRiver, Seaborgium, and UNC4057, Star Blizzard has been energetic since a minimum of 2019, and has been publicly linked to Russia’s Federal Safety Service (FSB) by the US in December 2023.
In a June report, Google detailed how the APT was utilizing the ClickFix approach to ship the LostKeys malware as a part of a multi-stage an infection chain that additionally concerned using a first-stage PowerShell script.
Inside days of the report, Star Blizzard began utilizing new malware households in assaults and by no means deployed LostKeys once more, Google now says. The APT additionally dropped the PowerShell an infection chain, opting as an alternative to depend on the sufferer’s execution of a malicious DLL by way of rundll32.
Initially analyzed by Zscaler in September, the latest Star Blizzard assaults proceed to depend on ClickFix for an infection: victims are lured to pages masquerading as data sources for members of civil society and suppose tanks in Russia and satisfied to execute malicious instructions within the Home windows Run field.
The instructions lead to a malicious DLL being downloaded on the sufferer’s system. Dubbed NoRobot by Google (and BaitSwitch by Zscaler), the DLL has been designed to retrieve the next-stage payload and obtain persistence.
Earlier variations of NoRobot, Google says, have been fetching a Python backdoor dubbed YesRobot, which had restricted performance and made typical backdoor performance cumbersome to implement.
Thus, the APT deserted YesRobot in favor of a brand new backdoor, MaybeRobot (tracked as SimpleFix by Zscaler), additionally deployed by way of NoRobot.Commercial. Scroll to proceed studying.
Deployed as a closely obfuscated PowerShell script, the malware has help for 3 instructions supplied by its operator. Based mostly on these, it may possibly execute recordsdata, instructions, and PowerShell blocks.
Probably constructed to exchange YesRobot, and providing elevated flexibility in performing actions on the contaminated methods, MaybeRobot has minimal built-in performance and nonetheless requires an operator for extra advanced operations.
Between Could and September 2025, Star Blizzard made a number of adjustments to NoRobot, primarily targeted on evading detection, and up to date its an infection chain because it transitioned to deploying MaybeRobot as the ultimate stage.
“Over the course of this time period, Coldriver simplified their malware an infection chain and carried out fundamental evasion strategies, akin to rotating infrastructure and file naming conventions, paths the place recordsdata have been retrieved from, how these paths have been constructed, altering the export title and altering the DLL title,” Google explains.
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