The North Korea-linked risk actor often called Kimsuky has been linked to the usage of a brand new malicious Google Chrome extension that is designed to steal delicate info as a part of an ongoing intelligence assortment effort.
Zscaler ThreatLabz, which noticed the exercise in early March 2024, has codenamed the extension TRANSLATEXT, highlighting its capability to collect electronic mail addresses, usernames, passwords, cookies, and browser screenshots.
The focused marketing campaign is claimed to have been directed towards South Korean academia, particularly these centered on North Korean political affairs.
Kimsuky is a infamous hacking crew from North Korea that is identified to be lively since a minimum of 2012, orchestrating cyber espionage and financially motivated assaults focusing on South Korean entities.
A sister group of the Lazarus cluster and a part of the Reconnaissance Common Bureau (RGB), it is also tracked underneath the names APT43, ARCHIPELAGO, Black Banshee, Emerald Sleet, Springtail, and Velvet Chollima.
In current weeks, the group has weaponized a identified safety flaw in Microsoft Workplace (CVE-2017-11882) to distribute a keylogger and has used job-themed lures in assaults geared toward aerospace and protection sectors with an goal to drop an espionage software with information gathering and secondary payload execution functionalities.
“The backdoor, which doesn’t seem to have been publicly documented earlier than, permits the attacker to carry out fundamental reconnaissance and drop further payloads to take over or remotely management the machine,” cybersecurity firm CyberArmor stated. It has given the marketing campaign the identify Niki.
The precise mode of preliminary entry related to the newly found exercise is at the moment unclear, though the group is understood to leverage spear-phishing and social engineering assaults to activate the an infection chain.
The start line of the assault is a ZIP archive that purports to be about Korean army historical past and which accommodates two recordsdata: A Hangul Phrase Processor doc and an executable.
Launching the executable leads to the retrieval of a PowerShell script from an attacker-controlled server, which, in flip, exports details about the compromised sufferer to a GitHub repository and downloads further PowerShell code via a Home windows shortcut (LNK) file.
Zscaler stated it discovered the GitHub account, created on February 13, 2024, briefly internet hosting the TRANSLATEXT extension underneath the identify “GoogleTranslate.crx,” though its supply technique is presently unknown.
“These recordsdata have been current within the repository on March 7, 2024, and deleted the following day, implying that Kimsuky meant to reduce publicity and use the malware for a brief interval to focus on particular people,” safety researcher Seongsu Park stated.
TRANSLATEXT, which masquerades as Google Translate, incorporates JavaScript code to bypass safety measures for companies like Google, Kakao, and Naver; siphon electronic mail addresses, credentials, and cookies; seize browser screenshots; and exfiltrate stolen information.
It is also designed to fetch instructions from a Blogger Blogspot URL in an effort to take screenshots of newly opened tabs and delete all cookies from the browser, amongst others.
“One of many main aims of the Kimsuky group is to conduct surveillance on tutorial and authorities personnel in an effort to collect priceless intelligence,” Park stated.
