The financially motivated GOLD MELODY menace group has been lively at the very least since 2017, attacking organizations by making the most of flaws in unpatched internet-facing servers.
A menace group serves as an preliminary entry dealer (IAB) by promoting entry to organizations which were compromised to different cybercriminals for his or her acquire.
“The victimology suggests opportunistic assaults for monetary acquire fairly than a focused marketing campaign carried out by a state-sponsored menace group for espionage, destruction, or disruption,” mentioned SecureWorks Counter Risk Unit (CTU).
Instruments Used By The Group
As soon as inside a compromised surroundings, GOLD MELODY makes use of proprietary distant entry trojans (RATs), net shells, built-in working system utilities, and tunneling instruments. The instruments noticed are:
Burp Suite Collabfiltrator, IHS Again-Join backdoor, Wget, Mimikatz, TxPortMap, WinExe, GOTROJ, PAExec, AUDITUNNEL, PuTTY and 7-Zip, Responder.
The habits seen in 5 Secureworks IR engagements between July 2020 and July 2022 was linked by researchers to GOLD MELODY.
The assaults noticed concerned making the most of quite a lot of points, together with these affecting Flexera FlexNet (CVE-2021-4104), Oracle E-Enterprise Suite (CVE-2016-0545), Apache Struts (CVE-2017-5638), Sitecore XP (CVE-2021-42237), and Oracle E-Enterprise Suite (CVE-2016-0545).
Notably, after breaking right into a community by making the most of flaws in servers which are accessible over the web, GOLD MELODY tries to construct persistence inside the contaminated community. For persistence, GOLD MELODY deployed JSP net shells.
The menace actors have been capable of entry the server through this net shell and are available again ceaselessly to challenge instructions for reconnaissance. To decode the Base64-encoded net shell in July 2022, the menace actors created a PowerShell script using the Burp Suite Collaborfiltrator extension.
Mitigation
Protection evasion efforts by GOLD MELODY have been unsuccessful. Within the 5 intrusions that researchers appeared into, early discovery of the malicious actions appears to have stopped the prison group from carrying out its objectives.
The big variety of organizations that GOLD MELODY has focused implies that the group poses a severe menace. Its dependence on exploiting flaws in unpatched servers which are accessible by the web highlights the importance of efficient patch administration.
Monitoring the perimeter and endpoints is a dependable and environment friendly technique for stopping dangerous actions when a gaggle enters the community.
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