Menace actors of unknown provenance have been attributed to a malicious marketing campaign predominantly focusing on organizations in Japan since January 2025.
“The attacker has exploited the vulnerability CVE-2024-4577, a distant code execution (RCE) flaw within the PHP-CGI implementation of PHP on Home windows, to achieve preliminary entry to sufferer machines,” Cisco Talos researcher Chetan Raghuprasad said in a technical report printed Thursday.
“The attacker makes use of plugins of the publicly out there Cobalt Strike kit ‘TaoWu’ for-post exploitation actions.”
Targets of the malicious exercise embody firms throughout expertise, telecommunications, leisure, schooling, and e-commerce sectors in Japan.
All of it begins with the menace actors exploiting the CVE-2024-4577 vulnerability to achieve preliminary entry and run PowerShell scripts to execute the Cobalt Strike reverse HTTP shellcode payload to grant themselves persistent distant entry to the compromised endpoint.
The subsequent step entails finishing up reconnaissance, privilege escalation, and lateral motion utilizing instruments like JuicyPotato, RottenPotato, SweetPotato, Fscan, and Seatbelt. Further persistence is established by way of Home windows Registry modifications, scheduled duties, and bespoke providers utilizing the plugins of the Cobalt Strike package referred to as TaoWu.
“To keep up stealth, they erase occasion logs utilizing wevtutil instructions, eradicating traces of their actions from the Home windows safety, system, and software logs,” Raghuprasad famous. “Finally, they execute Mimikatz instructions to dump and exfiltrate passwords and NTLM hashes from reminiscence on the sufferer’s machine.”
The assaults culminate with the hacking crew stealing passwords and NTLM hashes from the contaminated hosts. Additional evaluation of the command-and-control (C2) servers related to the Cobalt Strike software has revealed that the menace actor left the listing listings accessible over the web, thereby exposing the complete suite of adversarial instruments and frameworks hosted on the Alibaba cloud servers.
Notable among the many instruments are listed under –
- Browser Exploitation Framework (BeEF), a publicly out there pentesting software program for executing instructions inside the browser context
- Viper C2, a modular C2 framework that facilitates distant command execution and technology of Meterpreter reverse shell payloads
- Blue-Lotus, a JavaScript webshell cross-site scripting (XSS) assault framework that allows the creation of JavaScript net shell payloads to conduct XSS assaults, seize screenshots, receive reverse shell, steal browser cookies, and create new accounts within the Content material Administration System (CMS)
“We assess with reasonable confidence that the attacker’s motive extends past simply credential harvesting, based mostly on our statement of different post-exploitation actions, similar to establishing persistence, elevating to SYSTEM degree privilege, and potential entry to adversarial frameworks, indicating the probability of future assaults,” Raghuprasad mentioned.
