| Title | North Korea-Backed Hackers Have a Clever Way to Read Your Gmail | |
| Date | Friday August 05 2022, @02:42PM | |
| Author | janrinok | |
| Topic | ||
| from the dept. | ||
North Korea-backed hackers have a clever way to read your Gmail:
Researchers have unearthed never-before-seen malware that hackers from North Korea have been using to surreptitiously read and download email and attachments from infected users' Gmail and AOL accounts.
The malware, dubbed SHARPEXT by researchers from security firm Volexity, uses clever means to install a browser extension for the Chrome and Edge browsers, Volexity reported in a blog post. The extension can't be detected by the email services, and since the browser has already been authenticated using any multifactor authentication protections in place, this increasingly popular security measure plays no role in reining in the account compromise.
The malware has been in use for "well over a year," Volexity said, and is the work of a hacking group the company tracks as SharpTongue. The group is sponsored by North Korea's government and overlaps with a group tracked as Kimsuky by other researchers. SHARPEXT is targeting organizations in the US, Europe, and South Korea that work on nuclear weapons and other issues North Korea deems important to its national security.
Volexity President Steven Adair said in an email that the extension gets installed "by way of spear phishing and social engineering where the victim is fooled into opening a malicious document. Previously we have seen DPRK threat actors launch spear phishing attacks where the entire objective was to get the victim to install a browser extension vs it being a post exploitation mechanism for persistence and data theft." In its current incarnation, the malware works only on Windows, but Adair said there's no reason it couldn't be broadened to infect browsers running on macOS or Linux, too.
The blog post added: "Volexity's own visibility shows the extension has been quite successful, as logs obtained by Volexity show the attacker was able to successfully steal thousands of emails from multiple victims through the malware's deployment."
Installing a browser extension during a phishing operation without the end-user noticing isn't easy. SHARPEXT developers have clearly paid attention to research like what's published here, here, and here, which shows how a security mechanism in the Chromium browser engine prevents malware from making changes to sensitive user settings. Each time a legitimate change is made, the browser takes a cryptographic hash of some of the code. At startup, the browser verifies the hashes, and if any of them don't match, the browser requests the old settings be restored.
[...] "When Volexity first encountered SHARPEXT, it seemed to be a tool in early development containing numerous bugs, an indication the tool was immature," the company said. "The latest updates and ongoing maintenance demonstrate the attacker is achieving its goals, finding value in continuing to refine it."
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printed from SoylentNews, North Korea-Backed Hackers Have a Clever Way to Read Your Gmail on 2024-04-24 11:48:16