Beware of MiniDukeMOSCOW, RUSSIA: Kaspersky Lab has identified 'MiniDuke', a new malicious programme designed for spying on multiple government entities and institutions across the world. The new threat actors combine sophisticated "old school" malware writing skills with newly advanced exploits in Adobe Reader to collect geopolitical intelligence from high-profile targets. Kaspersky Lab's team of experts has published a new research report that analysed a series of security incidents involving the use of the recently discovered PDF exploit in Adobe Reader (CVE-2013-6040) and a new, highly customised malicious programme known as MiniDuke. The MiniDuke backdoor was used to attack multiple government entities and institutions worldwide during the past week. Kaspersky Lab's experts, in partnership with CrySys Lab, analysed the attacks in detail and published their findings. According to Kaspersky Lab's analysis, a number of high-profile targets have already been compromised by the MiniDuke attacks, including government entities in Ukraine, Belgium, Portugal, Romania, the Czech Republic and Ireland. In addition, a research institute, two think tanks, and a healthcare provider in the United States were also compromised, as was a prominent research foundation in Hungary. An unusual attack"This is a very unusual cyber attack," said Eugene Kaspersky, founder and CEO of Kaspersky Lab. "I remember this style of malicious programming from the end of the 1990s and the beginning of the 2000s. I wonder if these types of malware writers, who have been in hibernation for more than a decade, have suddenly awoken and joined the sophisticated group of threat actors active in the cyber world. These elite, 'old-school' malware writers were extremely effective in the past at creating highly complex viruses, and are now combining these skills with the newly advanced sandbox-evading exploits to target government entities or research institutions in several countries." "MiniDuke's highly customised backdoor was written in Assembler and is very small in size, being only 20kb," added Kaspersky. "The combination of experienced old school malware writers using newly discovered exploits and clever social engineering to compromise high profile targets is extremely dangerous." Kaspersky Lab's primary research findings: The MiniDuke attackers are still active at this time and have created malware as recently as 20 February 2013. To compromise victims, the attackers used extremely effective social engineering techniques, which involved sending malicious PDF documents to their targets. The PDFs were highly relevant - with well-crafted content that fabricated human rights seminar information (ASEM) and Ukraine's foreign policy and NATO membership plans. These malicious PDF files were rigged with exploits attacking Adobe Reader versions 9, 10, and 11, bypassing its sandbox. A toolkit was used to create these exploits and it appears to be the same toolkit that was used in the recent attack reported by FireEye. However, the exploits used in the MiniDuke attacks were for different purposes and had their own customised malware. To read the full research report by Kaspersky Lab and the recommendations for protecting against MiniDuke attacks, please visit Securelist. To read CrySys Lab's report, visit this page. Kaspersky Lab's system detects and neutralises the MiniDuke malware, classified as HEUR:Backdoor.Win32.MiniDuke.gen and Backdoor.Win32.Miniduke. Kaspersky Lab also detects the exploits used in the PDF documents, classified as Exploit.JS.Pdfka.giy. |