Scammers operating from Nigeria have been fingered in a new and sophisticated wave of cyber crime, primarily targeting industries and corporations.
According to data on 500 companies in 50 countries, which was recently analysed by cyber-security company, Kaspersky Lab, the scams, apparently originating from Nigeria, are thriving on the web,
Security researchers believe Nigerian hackers have stolen sensitive commercial data from industrial firms around the world, since the launch of the latest phishing attacks.
Kaspersky Lab noted there have been over 500 separate attacks in more than 50 countries. It said most of the affected companies are industrial enterprises and large transportation and logistics corporations.
According to data released by the firm, countries particularly hit in the campaign were Germany, Russia, India and the UAE.
The cyber-criminals managed to steal technical drawings, floor plans and diagrams showing the structure of electrical and information networks.
Researchers said that all indications are that these were business email compromise (BEC) attacks that have come to be associated with Nigerian cyber-criminals.
Emails received by victims looked authentic enough to fool people. Some had attachments with names such as “Energy & Industrial Solutions W.L.L_pdf”, “Woodeck Specifications best Prices Quote.uue” and “Saudi Aramco Quotation Request for October 2016”.
“The phishers selected a toolset that included the functionality they needed, choosing from malware available on cyber-criminal forums. At the same time, the malware was packed using VB and .NET packers – a distinct feature of this campaign. To evade detection by security tools, the malicious files were regularly repacked using new modifications of the same packers,” said the researchers.
At least eight different Trojan-Spy and Backdoor families were used in the attacks. Further research found that the domain names of some of the malware command-and-control servers used by the attackers mimicked domain names used by industrial companies, giving “more proof that the attacks were primarily targeting industrial companies,” said researchers.
They added that most domains used for malware C&C servers were registered to residents of Nigeria.
Researchers warned that it would be very dangerous if, because of an infection, cyber-criminals were able to gain access to computers that are part of an industrial control system (ICS), noting: “In such cases, they can gain remote access to the ICS and unauthorised control over industrial processes,” said researchers.
It is believed that the attack is not actually targeting industrial control systems or operational technology. Rather, it is targeting users that work for large companies.
Also, SC Media UK, quoted Mark James, security specialist at ESET, as saying that “the scammers are opportunistic, because they understand they need to adapt and will change their tactics to get the best result.
He further observed: “With the 419 scams being so synonymous with the public, the scope for business users being victims is massive. We also need to consider the scope for larger, single successful attacks reaping the benefits much quicker than the smaller, and often much harder, sells through the public.”
Javvad Malik, security advocate at AlienVault, also told SC that organisations dealing with industrial control systems may not be as savvy to scams as financial services, so it could be that the success rate of targeted emails is higher.
“Allowing criminals to make quick money. On the other hand, it could allow criminals to implant malware on industrial control systems, or at least on systems that support the ICS. This can then be allowed for further nefarious purposes such as deploying ransomware – or selling on the access to other criminals or ever nation states,” he said.
All the emails had malicious attachments: RTF files with an exploit for the CVE-2015-1641 vulnerability, archives of different formats containing malicious executable files, as well as documents with macros and OLE objects designed to download malicious executable files, researchers said.
The malware used in these attacks belonged to families that are popular among cyber-criminals, such as ZeuS, Pony/FareIT, LokiBot, Luminosity RAT, NetWire RAT, HawkEye, ISR Stealer and iSpy keylogger, they added.