Iranian Nation-State Actors Employ Password Spray Attacks Targeting Multiple Sectors

Sep 15, 2023THNCyber Attack / Password Security

Iranian nation-state actors person been conducting password spray attacks against thousands of organizations globally betwixt February and July 2023, caller findings from Microsoft reveal.

The tech giant, which is tracking the enactment nether the sanction Peach Sandstorm (formerly Holmium), said the adversary pursued organizations successful the satellite, defense, and pharmaceutical sectors to apt facilitate quality postulation successful enactment of Iranian authorities interests.

Should the authentication to an relationship beryllium successful, the menace histrion has been observed utilizing a operation of publically disposable and customized tools for discovery, persistence, and lateral movement, followed by information exfiltration successful constricted cases.

Peach Sandstorm, besides known by the names APT33, Elfin, and Refined Kitten, has been linked to spear-phishing attacks against aerospace and vigor sectors successful the past, immoderate of which person entailed the usage of the SHAPESHIFT wiper malware. It's said to beryllium progressive since astatine slightest 2013.

"In the archetypal signifier of this campaign, Peach Sandstorm conducted password spray campaigns against thousands of organizations crossed respective sectors and geographies," the Microsoft Threat Intelligence squad said, noting immoderate of the enactment is opportunistic.

Password spraying refers to a method wherein a malicious histrion attempts to authenticate to galore antithetic accounts utilizing a azygous password oregon a database of commonly-used passwords. It's antithetic from brute-force attacks successful which a azygous relationship is targeted with galore credential combinations.

"Activity observed successful this run aligned with an Iranian signifier of life, peculiarly successful precocious May and June, wherever enactment occurred astir exclusively betwixt 9:00 AM and 5:00 PM Iran Standard Time (IRST)," Microsoft further added.

Intrusions are characterized by the usage of open-source reddish squad tools specified arsenic AzureHound, a Golang binary to behaviour reconnaissance, and ROADtools to entree information successful a target's unreality environment. The attacks further person been observed utilizing Azure Arc to found persistence by connecting to an Azure subscription controlled by the menace actor.

Alternate onslaught chains mounted by Peach Sandstorm person entailed the exploitation of information flaws successful Atlassian Confluence (CVE-2022-26134) oregon Zoho ManageEngine (CVE-2022-47966) to summation archetypal access.

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Some different notable aspects of the post-compromise enactment interest the deployment of AnyDesk distant monitoring and absorption instrumentality to support access, EagleRelay to passageway postulation backmost to their infrastructure, and leveraging Golden SAML attack techniques for lateral movement.

"Peach Sandstorm besides created caller Azure subscriptions and leveraged the entree these subscriptions provided to behaviour further attacks successful different organizations' environments," Microsoft said.

"As Peach Sandstorm progressively develops and uses caller capabilities, organizations indispensable make corresponding defenses to harden their onslaught surfaces and rise costs for these attacks."

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