On November 14, 2018, FireEye detected new targeted phishing activity at more than 20 of our clients across multiple industries.
The attacker appears to have compromised the email server of a hospital and the corporate website of a consulting company in order to use their infrastructure to send phishing emails. The phishing emails were made to look like secure communication from a Public Affairs official at the U.S. Department of State, hosted on a page made to look like another Department of State Public Affairs official’s personal drive, and used a legitimate Department of State form as a decoy. This information could be obtained via publicly available data, and there is no indication that the Department of State network was involved in this campaign. The attacker used unique links in each phishing email and the links that FireEye observed were used to download a ZIP archive that contained a weaponized Windows shortcut file, launching both a benign decoy document and a Cobalt Strike Beacon backdoor, customized by the attacker to blend in with legitimate network traffic.
Several elements from this campaign – including the resources invested in the phishing email and network infrastructure, the metadata from the weaponized shortcut file payload, and the specific victim individuals and organizations targeted – are directly linked to the last observed APT29 phishing campaign from November 2016. This blog post explores those technical breadcrumbs and the possible intentions of this activity.
