APT28 Targets Ukrainian Government Entities with Fake "Windows Update" Emails
May 01, 2023
Threat Analysis / Cyber Attack
The Computer Emergency Response Team of Ukraine (CERT-UA) has warned of cyber attacks perpetrated by Russian nation-state hackers targeting various government bodies in the country. The agency attributed the phishing campaign to APT28, which is also known by the names Fancy Bear, Forest Blizzard, FROZENLAKE, Iron Twilight, Sednit, and Sofacy. The email messages come with the subject line "Windows Update" and purportedly contain instructions in the Ukrainian language to run a PowerShell command under the pretext of security updates. Running the script loads and executes a next-stage PowerShell script that's designed to collect basic system information through commands like tasklist and systeminfo , and exfiltrate the details via an HTTP request to a Mocky API . To trick the targets into running the command, the emails impersonate system administrators of the targeted government entities using fake Microsoft Outlook email accounts created with the...