The nefarious state-sponsored russia-aligned Gamaredon (aka Hive0051, UAC-0010, or Armageddon APT) has been launching a series of cyber-espionage campaigns against Ukraine since 2014, with cyber attacks intensifying since russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine on February 24, 2022.
ESET recently published an in-depth technical analysis, providing insights into Gamaredon’s cyber-espionage operations against Ukraine throughout 2022 and 2023. Despite the escalating conflict since 2022, Gamaredon’s activity has remained steady, with the group consistently deploying its malicious tools and remaining the most active hacking collective in the Ukrainian cyber threat landscape.
Detect Gamaredon APT Attacks
Notorious russia-affiliated hacking groups continue to present significant challenges to cybersecurity defenders, constantly evolving their tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs) to improve detection evasion. Since the onset of the full-fledged war in Ukraine, these APT groups have intensified their activities, using the conflict as a testing ground for innovative malicious strategies. These newly refined methods are then deployed against high-priority global targets aligned with Moscow’s strategic interests, amplifying the cyber threat on a worldwide scale. This relentless activity forces security professionals to seek reliable detection content and advanced threat detection and hunting tools to stay ahead of evolving adversaries.
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Gamaredon APT Attack Analysis: Based on the Latest ESET Research
The russia-backed cyber-espionage group tracked as Gamaredon, also known as Armageddon APT (Hive0051 or UAC-0010), has been actively launching high-profile attacks against Ukraine since the outbreak of the global cyber war. In 2022, Gamaredon was behind a series of phishing campaigns against Ukraine, using various GammaLoad versions, including GammaLoad.PS1, which was delivered through malicious VBScript and an updated version identified as GammaLoad.PS1_v2.
In the latest ESET research and a more detailed white paper, defenders explore Gamaredon’s evolving obfuscation techniques and methods for evading domain-based blocking, which complicate tracking and detection efforts, along with the most common adversary tools applied by the hacking collective to target Ukraine.
The Security Service of Ukraine (SSU) has linked Gamaredon to russia’s Federal Security Service, based in occupied Crimea. According to ESET, the russia-backed APT group has ties with another hacking collective tracked as InvisiMole.
ESET telemetry, CERT-UA, and other Ukrainian authorities show that most of Gamaredon’s attacks target Ukrainian government agencies. However, the group also shifted its focus beyond Ukraine. For instance, in late September 2022, threat actors made attempts to breach a major petroleum refining company in a NATO member country, escalating tensions on the cyber front.
Gamaredon uses spearphishing campaigns to infect new victims, leveraging its custom malware to weaponize Word documents and USB drives accessible to the initial victim, which are likely to be shared with others. Unlike most APT groups, Gamaredon doesn’t prioritize stealth during its cyber-espionage operations. Adversaries operate recklessly, however, they put significant effort into evading security products and maintaining access to compromised systems.
To retain access, Gamaredon often deploys multiple simple downloaders or backdoors at once. Despite their tools’ lack of sophistication, frequent updates and regularly changing obfuscation help them stay under the radar.
Gamaredon’s offensive toolset has evolved significantly. In 2022, the group shifted from using SFX archives to relying on VBScript and PowerShell. By 2023, they had enhanced their cybere-spionage capabilities, developing new PowerShell tools designed to steal sensitive data from web applications, email clients, and messaging apps like Signal and Telegram.
In late summer 2023, ESET researchers uncovered PteroBleed, an infostealer targeting a Ukrainian military system and a webmail service used by a Ukrainian state body. Gamaredon’s tools, categorized into downloaders, droppers, weaponizers, stealers, backdoors, and specialized utilities, are used to deliver payloads, modify files, exfiltrate data, and maintain remote access.
Gamaredon commonly employs fast flux DNS to frequently change its C2 servers’ IP addresses and to bypass IP-based blocking. The group also regularly registers and updates numerous new C2 domains, primarily using the .ru TLD, to evade domain-based blocking.
Adversaries further bypass network-based detections by utilizing third-party services like Telegram, Cloudflare, and ngrok. Despite their tools’ relative simplicity, the group’s aggressive tactics and persistence pose a significant threat to potential victims, which requires ultra-responsiveness from defenders. Leverage SOC Prime’s complete product suite for AI-powered detection engineering, automated threat hunting, and advanced threat detection to preempt cyber attacks of any sophistication and future-proof the organization’s security posture.
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