In August 2025, a complicated cyber assault focused an Asian subsidiary of a big European manufacturing group by a misleading job supply scheme.
The intrusion marketing campaign, recognized as Operation DreamJob, demonstrates how risk actors proceed to refine social engineering strategies to compromise high-value targets throughout the manufacturing sector.
This assault particularly exploited WhatsApp Net messaging to ship malicious payloads disguised as reputable employment alternatives.
The assault started when a venture engineer acquired a focused WhatsApp Net message containing what seemed to be a job-related doc.
The message inspired the recipient to obtain and extract a ZIP archive, which contained three elements: a malicious PDF file, a reputable open-source doc viewer referred to as SumatraPDF.exe, and a malicious DLL file named libmupdf.dll.
This mixture weaponized a trusted software by DLL sideloading, the place the reputable executable unknowingly loaded the malicious library.
Orange Cyberdefense safety analysts investigated the incident and attributed the assault with medium confidence to the North Korean UNC2970 risk cluster.
Their evaluation revealed that the intrusion leveraged refined malware variants, particularly BURNBOOK and MISTPEN, alongside compromised SharePoint and WordPress infrastructure for command and management operations.
The risk actors maintained persistent entry for no less than six consecutive hours, conducting hands-on keyboard actions all through the compromise.
When the sufferer opened the PDF doc, the SumatraPDF executable sideloaded the malicious libmupdf.dll file, which researchers confirmed as a latest BURNBOOK loader variant.
This backdoor enabled the attackers to ascertain preliminary entry and start reconnaissance actions throughout the community.
Superior Persistence and Lateral Motion Mechanisms
Following profitable infiltration, the risk actors deployed a number of strategies to develop their foothold throughout the manufacturing community.
Partial description of the an infection chain (Supply – Orange Cyberdefense)
The attackers carried out in depth LDAP queries in opposition to Energetic Listing to enumerate customers and computer systems throughout the area, gathering intelligence for lateral motion operations.
They subsequently compromised each backup and administrative accounts utilizing pass-the-hash strategies, which allowed authentication with out requiring plaintext passwords.
This technique concerned extracting NTLM password hashes and reusing them for community authentication. The attackers then deployed a further payload referred to as TSVIPsrv.dll, recognized as a MISTPEN backdoor variant.
This malware decrypted and executed wordpad.dll.mui instantly in reminiscence, establishing connections to compromised SharePoint servers for command and management communications.
The ultimate stage concerned deploying Release_PvPlugin_x64.dll, which functioned as an information-stealing module designed to exfiltrate delicate knowledge from contaminated techniques.
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