For a subset of compromised accounts, the attackers used AzureHound and ROADtools, two open-source frameworks that can be utilized to conduct reconnaissance in Microsoft Entra ID (previously Azure Lively Listing) environments by interacting with the Microsoft Graph and REST APIs with the aim of exfiltrating knowledge of curiosity from a sufferer’s cloud account.
“AzureHound and Roadtools have performance that’s utilized by defenders, purple groups, and adversaries,” Microsoft mentioned in its report. “The identical options that make these instruments helpful to authentic customers, like pre-built capabilities to discover and seamlessly dump knowledge in a single database, additionally make these instruments enticing choices for adversaries looking for details about or from a goal’s surroundings.”
To realize persistence, the attackers arrange new Azure subscriptions on victims’ tenants, which have been used to determine command-and-control communication with infrastructure operated by the group. Additionally they put in the Azure Arc consumer on gadgets in compromised environments and linked it to an Azure subscription they managed, giving them distant management capabilities over these gadgets. Azure Arc is a functionality that enables the distant administration of Home windows and Linux techniques in an Azure AD surroundings.
Different post-compromise instruments and strategies
After reaching persistence, the Peach Sandstorm attackers deployed a wide range of publicly accessible and customized instruments, together with AnyDesk, a business distant monitoring and administration (RMM) device, and EagleRelay, a customized visitors tunneling device that the attackers deployed on newly created digital machines in sufferer environments.
Different strategies employed by the group embody abuse of the distant desktop protocol (RDP), executing malicious code by performing DLL hijacking with a authentic VMWare executable and launching a Golden SAML assault.
“In a Golden SAML assault, an adversary steals personal keys from a goal’s on-premises Lively Listing Federated Providers (AD FS) server and makes use of the stolen keys to mint a SAML token trusted by a goal’s Microsoft 365 surroundings,” Microsoft mentioned. “If profitable, a risk actor may bypass AD FS authentication and entry federated companies as any consumer.”
