Scaly Wolf APT conducts cyberespionage against Russian engineering firm

Advanced persistent threat operation Scaly Wolf has sought to compromise a Russian engineering firm in a new cyberespionage campaign, two years after an initial attack involving modular backdoors, GBHackers News reports.

Malicious emails purporting to be financial documents have been distributed by Scaly Wolf to spread fake PDF files and password-protected ZIP files, which facilitate the delivery of the Updatar backdoor upon execution, findings from Doctor Web showed. After deploying Meterpreter using more modules installed by Updatar, Scaly Wolf proceeded to exploit FileManager.exe, Tool.HandleKatz, and RDP Wrapper for data exfiltration, credential harvesting, and remote access, respectively, while the Tool.Frp and Tool.Chisel utilities ensured the concealment of nefarious activity. Despite Scaly Wolf's use of RemCom to deactivate Windows Defender following Doctor Web's aversion of the group's initial Metasploit payloads, antivirus systems ultimately prevailed against the threat, according to researchers, who urged the implementation of more robust antivirus configurations and up-to-date patches to prevent such a threat.