Nigerian
hackers and cyber criminals are being accused of masterminding a grand
theft of information and money running into billions of dollars,
worldwide.
According to experts, the Nigerians are able to carry out the heist
by sending phishing emails to commercial organizations and industrial
enterprises, which they later steal dry.
The FBI estimates that these phishing attacks have cost companies
over $3 billion. The number of affected companies exceeds 22,143.
Kaspersky Labs, an internet security company said it has found over
500 companies that are under attack in at least 50 countries.
Those under attack are mostly industrial enterprises and large
transportation and logistics corporations, based in Germany, UAE, Russia
and India.
In a blog post, Kaspersky said the cyber-criminals managed to steal
technical drawings, floor plans and diagrams showing the structure of
electrical and information networks.
Researchers said that all indications are that these were business
email compromise (BEC) attacks that have come to be associated with
Nigerian cyber-criminals.
Emails received by victims looked authentic enough to fool people.
Some had attachments with names such as “Energy & Industrial
Solutions W.L.L_pdf”, “Woodeck Specifications best Prices Quote.uue” and
“Saudi Aramco Quotation Request for October 2016”.
These are well crafted emails that look legitimate and are crafted to make the victim open the malicious attachment.
The emails ask the recipients to check information as soon as
possible, clarify product pricing or receive goods specified in the
delivery note attached. The malicious attachments contain RTF files with
an exploit for the CVE-2015-1641 vulnerability.
They may also contain archives of different formats containing
malicious executable files or macros and OLE objects designed to
download malicious executable files.
Kaspersky discovered that the malicious files are intended to steal
confidential data and install stealthy remote administration tools on
infected systems.
Using Whois services, Kaspersky found that the domains used to host
the malware were registered to residents of Nigeria. Once in, the
hackers compromise a legitimate email and change the banking account
details.
The malware used in these attacks belonged to families that are
popular among cyber-criminals, such as ZeuS, Pony/FareIT, LokiBot,
Luminosity RAT, NetWire RAT, HawkEye, ISR Stealer and iSpy keylogger.
”The phishers selected a toolset that included the functionality they
needed, choosing from malware available on cyber-criminal forums. At
the same time, the malware was packed using VB and .NET packers – a
distinct feature of this campaign. To evade detection by security tools,
the malicious files were regularly repacked using new modifications of
the same packers,” said the researchers.
At least eight different Trojan-Spy and Backdoor families were used in the attacks.
Further research found that the domain names of some of the malware
command-and-control servers used by the attackers mimicked domain names
used by industrial companies – “more proof that the attacks were
primarily targeting industrial companies,” said researchers.
They added that most domains used for malware C&C servers were registered to residents of Nigeria.
Researchers warned that it would be very dangerous if, because of an
infection, cyber-criminals were able to gain access to computers that
are part of an industrial control system (ICS). “In such cases, they can
gain remote access to the ICS and unauthorised control over industrial
processes,” said researchers.
Owen Connolly, vice president services (EMEA) at IOActive, told SC
Media UK that this attack is not actually targeting industrial control
systems or operational technology. “It’s just targeting users that work
for large companies. The fact that those companies may also have OT
systems could just be coincidence, not correlation,” he said.
Mark James, security specialist at ESET, told SC Media UK that
scammers are opportunistic. They understand they need to adapt and will
change their tactics to get the best result.
“With the 419 scams being so synonymous with the public, the scope
for business users being victims is massive. We also need to consider
the scope for larger, single successful attacks reaping the benefits
much quicker than the smaller, and often much harder, sells through the
public,” he said.
Javvad Malik, security advocate at AlienVault, told SC that
organisations dealing with industrial control systems may not be as
savvy to scams as financial services, so it could be that the success
rate of targeted emails is higher.
“Allowing criminals to make quick money. On the other hand, it could
allow criminals to implant malware on industrial control systems, or at
least on systems that support the ICS. This can then be allowed for
further nefarious purposes such as deploying ransomware – or selling on
the access to other criminals or ever nation states,” he said.
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