The Russian risk actor referred to as RomCom has been linked to a brand new wave of cyber assaults geared toward Ukrainian authorities businesses and unknown Polish entities since no less than late 2023.
The intrusions are characterised by means of a variant of the RomCom RAT dubbed SingleCamper (aka SnipBot or RomCom 5.0), mentioned Cisco Talos, which is monitoring the exercise cluster beneath the moniker UAT-5647.
“This model is loaded immediately from the registry into reminiscence and makes use of a loopback tackle to speak with its loader,” security researchers Dmytro Korzhevin, Asheer Malhotra, Vanja Svajcer, and Vitor Ventura famous.
RomCom, additionally tracked as Storm-0978, Tropical Scorpius, UAC-0180, UNC2596, and Void Rabisu, has engaged in multi-motivational operations akin to ransomware, extortion, and focused credential gathering since its emergence in 2022.
It has been assessed that the operational tempo of their assaults has elevated in current months with an purpose to arrange long-term persistence on compromised networks and exfiltrate information, suggesting a transparent espionage agenda.
To that finish, the risk actor is alleged to be “aggressively increasing their tooling and infrastructure to help all kinds of malware parts authored in numerous languages and platforms” akin to C++ (ShadyHammock), Rust (DustyHammock), Go (GLUEEGG), and Lua (DROPCLUE).
The assault chains begin with a spear-phishing message that delivers a downloader — both coded in C++ (MeltingClaw) or Rust (RustyClaw) — which serves to deploy the ShadyHammock and DustyHammock backdoors, respectively. In parallel, a decoy doc is exhibited to the recipient to take care of the ruse.
Whereas DustyHammock is engineered to contact a command-and-control (C2) server, run arbitrary instructions, and obtain information from the server, ShadyHammock acts as a launchpad for SingleCamper in addition to listening for incoming instructions.
Regardless of’s ShadyHammock extra options, it is believed that it is a predecessor to DustyHammock, given the truth that the latter was noticed in assaults as not too long ago as September 2024.
SingleCamper, the most recent model of RomCom RAT, is liable for a variety of post-compromise actions, which entail downloading the PuTTY’s Plink device to determine distant tunnels with adversary-controlled infrastructure, community reconnaissance, lateral motion, person and system discovery, and information exfiltration.
“This particular collection of assaults, focusing on excessive profile Ukrainian entities, is probably going meant to serve UAT-5647’s two-pronged technique in a staged method – set up long-term entry and exfiltrate information for so long as potential to help espionage motives, after which doubtlessly pivot to ransomware deployment to disrupt and sure financially acquire from the compromise,” the researchers mentioned.
“It’s also possible that Polish entities have been additionally focused, based mostly on the keyboard language checks carried out by the malware.”
