A beforehand undocumented “versatile” backdoor known as Kapeka has been “sporadically” noticed in cyber assaults concentrating on Japanese Europe, together with Estonia and Ukraine, since no less than mid-2022.
The findings come from Finnish cybersecurity agency WithSecure, which attributed the malware to the Russia-linked superior persistent menace (APT) group tracked as Sandworm (aka APT44 or Seashell Blizzard). Microsoft is monitoring the identical malware below the title KnuckleTouch.
“The malware […] is a versatile backdoor with all the required functionalities to function an early-stage toolkit for its operators, and in addition to offer long-term entry to the sufferer property,” safety researcher Mohammad Kazem Hassan Nejad stated.
Kapeka comes fitted with a dropper that is designed to launch and execute a backdoor element on the contaminated host, after which it removes itself. The dropper can also be liable for establishing persistence for the backdoor both as a scheduled job or autorun registry, relying on whether or not the method has SYSTEM privileges.
Microsoft, in its personal advisory launched in February 2024, described Kapeka as concerned in a number of campaigns distributing ransomware and that it may be used to hold out quite a lot of capabilities, resembling stealing credentials and different information, conducting damaging assaults, and granting menace actors distant entry to the system.
The backdoor is a Home windows DLL written in C++ and options an embedded command-and-control (C2) configuration that is used to ascertain contact with an actor-controlled server and holds details about the frequency at which the server must be polled to be able to retrieve instructions.
Moreover masquerading as a Microsoft Phrase add-in to make it seem real, the backdoor DLL gathers details about the compromised host and implements multi-threading to fetch incoming directions, course of them, and exfiltrate the outcomes of the execution to the C2 server.
“The backdoor makes use of WinHttp 5.1 COM interface (winhttpcom.dll) to implement its community communication element,” Nejad defined. “The backdoor communicates with its C2 to ballot for duties and to ship again fingerprinted data and job outcomes. The backdoor makes use of JSON to ship and obtain data from its C2.”
The implant can also be able to updating its C2 configuration on-the-fly by receiving a brand new model from the C2 server throughout polling. A number of the foremost options of the backdoor permit it to learn and write recordsdata from and to disk, launch payloads, execute shell instructions, and even improve and uninstall itself.
The precise methodology by means of which the malware is propagated is at the moment unknown. Nevertheless, Microsoft famous that the dropper is retrieved from compromised web sites utilizing the certutil utility, underscoring the usage of a professional living-off-the-land binary (LOLBin) to orchestrate the assault.
Kapeka’s connections to Sandworm come conceptual and configuration overlaps with beforehand disclosed households like GreyEnergy, a probable successor to the BlackEnergy toolkit, and Status.
“It’s doubtless that Kapeka was utilized in intrusions that led to the deployment of Status ransomware in late 2022,” WithSecure stated. “It’s possible that Kapeka is a successor to GreyEnergy, which itself was doubtless a substitute for BlackEnergy in Sandworm’s arsenal.”
“The backdoor’s victimology, rare sightings, and degree of stealth and class point out APT-level exercise, extremely doubtless of Russian origin.”
