North Korean state-sponsored hackers from the Lazarus APT group launched a cyberespionage marketing campaign focusing on European corporations concerned in unmanned aerial car growth.
Beginning in late March 2025, attackers compromised three protection organizations throughout Central and Southeastern Europe, deploying superior malware to steal proprietary UAV expertise.
The marketing campaign, tracked as Operation DreamJob, employed social engineering utilizing fraudulent job affords to achieve preliminary entry.
The assaults centered on corporations manufacturing drone parts and growing UAV software program, aligning with North Korea’s efforts to develop its drone program.
Researchers found compromised methods contained malicious droppers with the inner DLL identify DroneEXEHijackingLoader.dll, offering proof of the marketing campaign’s deal with drone expertise theft.
Targets obtained pretend job descriptions with trojanized PDF readers that initiated multi-stage an infection processes.
Welivesecurity analysts recognized the primary payload as ScoringMathTea, a complicated distant entry trojan serving as Lazarus’s flagship malware since late 2022.
The RAT offers complete management over compromised machines by way of roughly 40 instructions, enabling file manipulation, course of management, and knowledge exfiltration.
ScoringMathTea maintains communication with command-and-control infrastructure by way of compromised servers hosted inside WordPress directories.
The malware’s C&C site visitors employs a number of encryption layers, using the IDEA algorithm adopted by base64 encoding.
Examples of 2025 Operation DreamJob execution chains delivering BinMergeLoader and ScoringMathTea (Supply – Welivesecurity)
Community evaluation revealed connections to compromised domains together with coralsunmarine[.]com, mnmathleague[.]org, and spaincaramoon[.]com.
Superior An infection Mechanism and Evasion Ways
The Lazarus group demonstrated technical sophistication by incorporating malicious loading routines into official open-source initiatives from GitHub.
Attackers trojanized software program together with TightVNC Viewer, MuPDF reader, and plugins for WinMerge and Notepad++.
This offers twin benefits: the malware inherits official look of trusted functions whereas executing malicious payloads.
The an infection chain employs DLL side-loading and proxying methods. Reliable executables similar to wksprt.exe and wkspbroker.exe side-load malicious libraries like webservices.dll and radcui.dll.
These compromised DLLs include two export units: capabilities for proxying to protect utility habits, and malicious code loading subsequent phases.
The malware employs sturdy encryption all through the an infection lifecycle. Early-stage droppers retrieve encrypted payloads from file system or registry, decrypt them utilizing AES-128 or ChaCha20 algorithms, then load them into reminiscence.
This leverages the MemoryModule library for reflective DLL injection, permitting code execution fully in-memory with out writing decrypted parts to disk.
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