Canadian organizations, including a law firm and a national staffing agency, are among the companies recently targeted by malware spread by infected resumés in job applications, says a new report by researchers at eSentire.
The spear-phishing campaign is a resumption of the spread of malware dubbed more_eggs, which contains several components for stealing usernames and passwords for corporate bank accounts, email accounts and IT administrator accounts.
“Hackers are posing as job applicants and luring corporate hiring managers into downloading what they believe are resumés from job applicants,” says the report. However, the bogus resumés contain the more_eggs malware.
In addition to the Canadian targets, a U.S.-based aerospace/defense company and a large U.K.-based accounting firm were hit, says the report. eSentire says it shut all four attacks down.
The last time eSentire came across a spearphishing campaign infecting victims with more_eggs was 12 months ago, when threat actors targeted professionals on LinkedIn who were looking for jobs, as opposed to hiring managers looking for job candidates. The hackers sent the job seekers infected .zip files disguised as job offers. That .zip file was named after the job seeker’s current job title and adding “position” at the end. For example, if the targeted person’s job title seen on LinkedIn was ‘Senior Account Executive—International Freight,’ the malicious .zip file would be titled ‘Senior Account Executive — International Freight position.’
More_eggs is a malware-as-a-service suite used by the FIN6, Evilnum and Cobal cyber gangs, says the report. The suite includes VenomLink, a component used to trick the victim into installing TerraLoader. TerraLoader is an intermediate component used to install numerous modules designed to take malicious actions such as credential theft, lateral movement, and file encryption throughout a victim’s IT network.
eSentire says anti-virus software isn’t enough to detect more_eggs attacks because it bypasses binary detection approaches. Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR) agents need to be installed on all hosts, it says.
Employees also need to be given security awareness training that emphasizes avoiding downloading and executing files from unverified sources, particularly ones that prompt users to ‘Enable Macros’. Infosec teams should disable the automatic running of macros in office productivity software, because macro-infected files are a common way of spreading malware.
