In a novel maneuver for a disruption operation against cyber attackers, industry and law enforcement teamed up to conduct a court takedown of two widely-used criminal tools at once rather than individually, Microsoft said Tuesday.

The takedown simultaneously went after Amadey, a botnet that can serve as a malware delivery system, and StealC, an infostealer. Cybercriminals often use them in conjunction and they rely on the same infrastructure, Microsoft said.

“When multiple parts of an operation are disrupted together, attacks are harder to launch, scale, and recover from,” said Steven Masada, assistant general counsel for Microsoft’s Digital Crimes Unit. “The result: fewer disrupted services, fewer opportunities for cybercriminals to profit, and more friction when they try to rebuild. It’s no longer enough to go after threats one by one. We need to interrupt how the attacks are put together.”

Microsoft had been tracking Amadey with ESET, BitSight, Lumen and Mitsui Bussan Secure Directions. Meanwhile, Europol had been investigating StealC alongside law enforcement partners including Germany’s Federal Criminal Police Office and the Dutch and Danish National Police as well as IBM X-Force and Proofpoint.

They then joined forces and turned to the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) Act, used to help authorities go after organized crime, to disrupt more than 200 command-and-control servers. Microsoft said it gained insights from its artificial intelligence product Copilot that “allowed the legal team to treat both malware families as part of a single criminal conspiracy.”

Microsoft regularly leads court-authorized disruption operations, but the industry and law enforcement partnerships combined with AI to expand data collection and identify connections beyond what one company could normally do, it said.

Amadey and StealC were linked to more than 140,000 infected computers around the globe in the first week of May alone, the company said. StealC has ranked among the top infostealers for years since its emergence in 2023 and sells in underground forums as a malware-as-a-service. It’s typically used by Russia-linked groups.

Amadey dates back to 2018, and is also commonly employed by Russian groups, including in attacks on Ukraine.

Their interaction shows the assembly line-like structure of modern cybercrime, Microsoft said. Even if the cybercriminals behind both tools never coordinate, their tools are designed to work together, it said.

“StealC is an infostealer that collects sensitive data from browsers, cryptocurrency wallets, messaging applications, email clients, and gaming platforms,” the company wrote in a separate blog post. “It is a malware-as-a-service (MaaS) offering that threat actors use to generate customized payloads and manage stolen data through a centralized web panel. Meanwhile, Amadey is a MaaS loader that threat actors use to deliver StealC and other malware. Modular, pay-as-you-go models like StealC and Amadey allow threat actors to use a single initial infection to quickly escalate into multiple other threats.”

The post In a first, a court takedown goes after two cybercrime tools at once appeared first on CyberScoop.

An apparent hack-for-hire campaign from a group with suspected Indian government connections targeted Middle Eastern and North African journalists and activists using spyware, three collaborating organizations said in reports published Wednesday.

The attacks shared infrastructure that pointed to the advanced persistent threat group known as Bitter, which most frequently targets government, military, diplomatic and critical infrastructure sectors across South Asia, according to conclusions from researchers at Access Now, Lookout and SMEX.

Each group took on a different piece of the puzzle:

• Access Now got calls on its helpline that led it to examine a spearphishing campaign in 2023 and 2024. It contacted Lookout for technical support about the malware it encountered.
• Lookout attributed the malware to Bitter, concluding it was a likely hack-for-hire campaign, using the Android ProSpy spyware.
• SMEX dived into a spearphishing campaign targeting a prominent Lebanese journalist last year, collaborating with Access Now to discover shared infrastructure between the campaigns.

One of the victims, independent Egyptian journalist Mostafa Al-A’sar, said he contacted Access Now after receiving a suspicious link from someone he’d been talking to about a job position. He was skeptical because his phone had been targeted before, when he was arrested in Egypt in 2018.

The lesson for journalists and civil society groups is that cybersecurity “is not a luxury,” he said.

“I feel like I’m threatened,” Al-A’sar said, and even though he was living in exile, he feels like “they are still following me. I also felt worried about my family, about my friends, about my sources.”

The combined research found a wider campaign than just the original victims.

“Our joint findings expose an espionage campaign that has been operational since at least 2022 until present day primarily targeting civil society members and potentially government officials in the Middle East,” Lookout wrote. “The operation features a combination of targeted spearphishing delivered through fake social media accounts and messaging applications leveraging persistent social engineering efforts, which may result in the delivery of Android spyware depending on the target’s device.”

The Committee to Protect Journalists condemned the campaign.

“Spying on journalists is often the first step in a broader pattern of intimidation, threats, and attacks,” said the group’s regional director, Sara Qudah. “These actions endanger not only journalists’ personal safety, but also their sources and their ability to do their work. Authorities in the region must stop weaponizing technology and financial resources to surveil journalists.”

Access Now said it didn’t have enough information to attribute who was behind the attacks it identified.

ESET first published research on the ProSpy malware last year, after finding it targeting residents of the United Arab Emirates.

The post Hack-for-hire spyware campaign targets journalists in Middle East, North Africa appeared first on CyberScoop.

Carrie Roberts // A fun story from an adventure in social engineering not too long ago. Thought I’d pass on some things I learned and ways to be more prepared in the […]

The post Social Engineering – Sometimes It’s Too Easy appeared first on Black Hills Information Security, Inc..

Brian Fehrman // As described in my last blog post, Powershell Without Powershell – How To Bypass Application Whitelisting, Environment Restrictions & AV (sheeesh…it’s been a bit!), we are seeing more environments in […]

The post Power Posing with PowerOPS appeared first on Black Hills Information Security, Inc..