The Russian state-sponsored group APT28 has been exploiting XSS vulnerabilities in mail servers in a widespread marketing campaign focusing on authorities and protection entities, ESET stories.
Additionally tracked as Fancy Bear, Forest Blizzard, Sednit, and Sofacy, and linked to the Russian Basic Employees Foremost Intelligence Directorate (GRU), APT28 has been energetic since at the least 2004, focusing on vitality, authorities, army, and media entities within the US and Europe.
Two weeks in the past, France accused APT28 of compromising a dozen authorities organizations and different French entities. One of many assaults, focusing on the TV5Monde broadcasting station, occurred a decade in the past.
On Thursday, ESET shared particulars on a wave of APT28 assaults geared toward organizations in Europe, Africa, and South America that concerned the exploitation of weak Roundcube, Horde, MDaemon, and Zimbra mail servers since September 2023.
As a part of the marketing campaign, dubbed Operation RoundPress, the Russian hackers injected the victims’ webmail pages with malicious JavaScript code designed to steal credentials and exfiltrate contacts and messages.
In September 2023, the APT focused an XSS vulnerability in Roundcube, tracked as CVE-2020-35730, to load arbitrary JavaScript code on the webmail web page. The flaw was added to CISA’s Identified Exploited Vulnerabilities (KEV) catalog in June 2023.
In 2024, Operation RoundPress expanded to Horde, MDaemon, and Zimbra servers, and added one other Roudcube flaw to the arsenal, specifically CVE-2023-43770, which was added to the KEV catalog in February 2024. The MDaemon bug, now patched and tracked as CVE-2024-11182, was exploited as a zero-day.
The hacking group was noticed sending XSS exploits by way of e-mail to execute JavaScript code within the sufferer’s browser, within the context of the webmail webpage, that means that it may solely entry information from the sufferer’s account.Commercial. Scroll to proceed studying.
“Be aware that, to ensure that the exploit to work, the goal should be satisfied to open the e-mail message within the weak webmail portal. Which means that the e-mail must bypass any spam filtering and the topic line must be convincing sufficient to entice the goal into studying the e-mail message,” ESET explains.
The noticed payloads, tailor-made for every mail server however collectively tracked as ‘SpyPress’, would create guidelines to ship copies of emails to the attackers, steal webmail credentials (auto-filled in a hidden kind or entered by the sufferer on a faux login web page), accumulate messages and make contact with data, and bypass two-factor authentication.
In 2024, the assaults primarily focused entities related to the battle in Ukraine, reminiscent of governmental organizations in Ukraine and protection corporations in Bulgaria and Romania. Nevertheless, African, European, and South American governments had been additionally hit.
“Over the previous two years, webmail servers reminiscent of Roundcube and Zimbra have been a significant goal for a number of espionage teams reminiscent of Sednit, GreenCube, and Winter Vivern. As a result of many organizations don’t hold their webmail servers updated and since the vulnerabilities will be triggered remotely by sending an e-mail message, it is extremely handy for attackers to focus on such servers for e-mail theft,” ESET notes.
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