A hacker group, which goes by the name of STTEAM, has hit about a half-dozen oil and gas and government agencies in the Middle East using a mix of hacktivist, nation-state, and pure cybercrime techniques, according to researchers at General Dynamics Fidelis.
“The group has also been observed attacking and compromising state government websites in the same area. This group has compromised web pages from various organisations in the Middle East and have added some specific strings. We are providing those strings to local authorities to assist in identifying victim organisations,” Fidelis announced in a threat advisory.
According to Fidelis, which discovered the attacks, the attackers wrest control of the organisations’ website servers and use Trojan backdoors to hack into other systems within the victim organisation.
Jim Jaeger, chief cyber services strategist for General Dynamics Fidelis Cybersecurity Solutions, says the latest twist to the attacks is that there are more victims, including Middle Eastern government agencies.
“It appears to target those organisations and to gain access to their web servers, and then move laterally with backdoors,” he says.
The attackers leave a calling card on the sites, with an Anonymous icon and the message ‘Hacked by STTEAM’, as well as Arabic language text and a note threatening oil and gas ministries. Jaeger says it appears the hacktivist defacement is more of a false flag to hide the attackers’ infiltration of the victims’ network via the Web servers using two different Trojan backdoors.
It doesn’t appear to be a nation-state group, he says, because he malware doesn’t indicate that. “It’s probably criminals trying to get information that they could sell,” he says. “We don’t see nation-state footprints.”
One backdoor contains Turkish words and is able to grab system information, connect to SQL databases, list tables and execute commands, browse directories, and move and copy files and folders or delete them, although there has been no proof thus far of data destruction by the attacks.
A second backdoor is able to do the same as the first, but also can add users to the system, add a user to the administrator group, disable a Windows firewall, enable RDP, delete IIS logs, and run Netcat as a reverse backdoor shell.
Just where the attackers come from is difficult to discern because they use an anonymous tunnel, Jaeger says. Fidelis has contacted the victim organisations, one of which the company has been working with.
“We’re seeing this pick-up of activity in the Middle East,” he says.
