APT Group Cyber Attack to Hack Various Companies Web Servers Using Advanced Hacking Tools

A Well known APT group called Energetic Bear/Crouching Yeti attacked various companies servers with a strong focus on energy and industrial sectors around the World.

This cybercrime group attacking various companies webservers around the world using countless malware since 2010 and stolen a huge amount of sensitive data.

Mainly during 2016 and in early 2017, Energetic Bear group Compromising several webservers from the various organization.

The main task of these attack is to search and identify the vulnerabilities to gain the access to the various host and stealing the Authentication Data.

Cyber Criminals using phishing Emails with the malicious document to compromise the various servers and some of the compromised servers used for an auxiliary purpose that act as s host tools and logs.

Compromised server based on Russia, Ukraine, UK, Germany, Turkey, USA and other countries with the various role of Attack.

Water Whole Attack & Scanned Resources

An attacker using the Specific pattern to infect the water whole servers by injecting a link into a web page or JS file ( file://IP/filename.png.).

Particular injected link initially request for images but eventually, it makes user connected to the Command & control server over SMB to extract the following data from infected servers.

• user IP,
• username,
• domain name,
• NTLM hash of the user’s password.

Cyber Criminals using Various hacking Tools such as such as nmap, dirsearch, sqlmap, etc. to scan the vulnerable servers and compromised servers are used to conduct attacks on other resources.

Scanned resources are highly sensitive information such as medical data, cryptocurrency, confidential data including server activities and financial information.

Tools Used For Scanning by APT Group

According to Kaspersky Research, Most of the tools used found on compromised servers are open-source and publicly available on GitHub:

• Nmap – an open-source utility for analyzing the network and verifying its security.
• Dirsearch — a simple command-line tool for brute forcing (performing exhaustive searches of) directories and files on websites.
• Sqlmap — an open-source penetration testing tool, which automates the process of identifying and exploiting SQL injection vulnerabilities and taking over database servers.
• Sublist3r — a tool written in Python designed to enumerate website subdomains. The tool uses open-source intelligence (OSINT). Sublist3r supports many different search engines, such as Google, Yahoo, Bing, Baidu and Ask, as well as such services as Netcraft, Virustotal, ThreatCrowd, DNSdumpster and ReverseDNS. The tool helps penetration testers to collect information on the subdomains of the domain they are researching.
• Wpscan — a WordPress vulnerability scanner that uses the blackbox principle, i.e., works without access to the source code. It can be used to scan remote WordPress sites in search of security issues.
• Impacket — a toolset for working with various network protocols, which is required by SMBTrap.
• SMBTrap — a tool for logging data received over the SMB protocol (user IP address, user name, domain name, password NTLM hash).
• Commix — a vulnerability search and command injection and exploitation tool written in Python.
• Subbrute – a subdomain enumeration tool available for Python and Windows that uses an open name resolver as a proxy and does not send traffic to the target DNS server.
• PHPMailer – a mail sending tool.

After they find the vulnerable servers then attackers try to bypass and inject the exploit to gain more access and pull out logs file and other sensitives data From compromised Victims.