North Korean state-sponsored advanced persistent threat group TA444 has engaged in a credential harvesting campaign targeting the U.S. and Canada with OneDrive phishing emails beginning last month, according to SecurityWeek.
Phishing emails sent by TA444 lure recipients into clicking a SendGrid URL redirecting to a credential harvesting page that establishes legitimacy using the ClearBit logo-rendering service, according to a Proofpoint report. Such a shift in attack tactics for TA444, which originally targeted cryptocurrencies in 2017 before increasing macro usage for malware delivery last year, may represent the group's expanding attack playbook, a side job aimed at evading North Korean sanctions, or an infrastructure compromise by another threat actor, the report noted.
Proofpoint researchers found that the December phishing campaign yielded nearly twofold of TA444's email volumes for the entirety of 2022. Moreover, the campaign has been attributed to TA444 based on the attacker's infrastructure exclusivity.
"The emails also had valid DMARC and SPF records, indicating that the sender has control of that domain," researchers added.