As many as 25 web sites linked to the Kurdish minority have been compromised as a part of a watering gap assault designed to reap delicate data for over a 12 months and a half.
French cybersecurity agency Sekoia, which disclosed particulars of the marketing campaign dubbed SilentSelfie, described the intrusion set as long-running, with first indicators of an infection detected way back to December 2022.
The strategic net compromises are designed to ship 4 completely different variants of an information-stealing framework, it added.
“These ranged from the only, which merely stole the person’s location, to extra complicated ones that recorded photos from the selfie digital camera and led chosen customers to put in a malicious APK, i.e an software used on Android,” security researchers Felix Aimé and Maxime A mentioned in a Wednesday report.
Focused web sites embrace Kurdish press and media, Rojava administration and its armed forces, these associated to revolutionary far-left political events and organizations in Türkiye and Kurdish areas. Sekoia instructed The Hacker Information that the precise methodology by which these web sites have been breached within the first place stays unsure.
The assaults haven’t been attributed to any recognized menace actor or entity, indicating the emergence of a brand new menace cluster concentrating on the Kurdish neighborhood, which has been beforehand singled out by teams like StrongPity and BladeHawk.
Earlier this 12 months, Dutch security agency Hunt & Hackett additionally revealed that Kurdish web sites within the Netherlands have been singled out by a Türkiye-nexus menace actor referred to as Sea Turtle.
The watering gap assaults are characterised by the deployment of a malicious JavaScript that is accountable for gathering varied sorts of knowledge from web site guests, together with their location, gadget knowledge (e.g., variety of CPUs, battery standing, browser language, and so on.), and public IP deal with, amongst others.
One variant of the reconnaissance script discovered on three web sites (rojnews[.]information, hawarnews[.]com, and targetplatform[.]internet.) has additionally been noticed redirecting customers to rogue Android APK information, whereas some others embrace the flexibility for person monitoring through a cookie named “sessionIdVal.”
The Android app, per Sekoia’s evaluation, embeds the web site itself as a WebView, whereas additionally clandestinely hoovering system data, contact lists, location, and information current within the exterior storage based mostly on the permissions granted to it.
“It’s value noting that this malicious code does not have any persistence mechanism however is simply executed when the person opens the RojNews software,” the researchers identified.
“As soon as the person opens the applying, and after 10 seconds, the LocationHelper service begins beaconning the background to the URL rojnews[.]information/wp-includes/sitemaps/ through HTTP POST requests, sharing the present location of the person and ready for instructions to execute.”
Not a lot is understood about who’s behind SilentSelfie, however Sekoia has assessed that it may very well be the handiwork of the Kurdistan Regional Authorities of Iraq based mostly on the arrest of RojNews journalist Silêman Ehmed by KDP forces in October 2023. He was sentenced to a few years in jail in July 2024.
“Though this watering gap marketing campaign is of low sophistication, it’s notable for the variety of kurdish web sites affected and its length,” the researchers mentioned. “The marketing campaign’s low stage of sophistication suggests it is likely to be the work of an uncovered menace actor with restricted capabilities and comparatively new to the sector.”
