Palestinian, Middle East Targets Hit with New Surveillance Attacks

The attackers who infected Palestinian law enforcement agencies with the MICROPSIA remote access Trojan (RAT) last spring have now been detected running surveillance attacks against the Palestinian Authority and other targets in the Middle East.

According to researchers at the Check Point Threat Intelligence Team, the attackers are sending phishing emails purporting to be from the Palestinian Political and National Guidance Commission. Attached to each messages is a self-extracting archive file that contains a malicious executable and a Word document, which serves as a decoy.

The modular malware can take screenshots of the infected machine and send them to the command-and-control server, locate and send a list of documents with file extensions .doc, .odt, .xls, .ppt, .pdf and others, log system details, reboot a system, and destroy the executable.

The threat actor is now dubbed "Big Bang" because some of the malware's modules were named after characters in the television show "The Big Bang Theory." Check Point researchers believe this is the same group that was discovered by Cisco Talos in June 2017.

Read more here. 

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