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Research (Insikt)


BLUEDELTA EXPLOITS UKRAINIAN GOVERNMENT ROUNDCUBE MAIL SERVERS TO SUPPORT
ESPIONAGE ACTIVITIES

Posted: 20th June 2023
By: Insikt Group®


Recorded Future's Insikt Group, in partnership with Ukraine's Computer Emergency
Response Team (CERT-UA), has uncovered a campaign targeting high-profile
entities in Ukraine that was cross-correlated with a spearphishing campaign
uncovered by Recorded Future’s Network Traffic Intelligence. The campaign
leveraged news about Russia’s war against Ukraine to encourage recipients to
open emails, which immediately compromised vulnerable Roundcube servers (an
open-source webmail software), using CVE-2020-35730, without engaging with the
attachment. We found that the campaign overlaps with historic BlueDelta activity
exploiting the Microsoft Outlook zero-day vulnerability CVE-2023-23397 in 2022.

The BlueDelta activity, identified by Insikt Group, appears to have been
operational since November 2021. The campaign overlaps with activity attributed
by CERT-UA to APT28 (also known as Forest Blizzard and Fancy Bear), which
multiple Western governments attribute to the Main Directorate of the General
Staff of the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation (GRU). In this operation,
BlueDelta primarily targeted Ukrainian organizations, including government
institutions and military entities involved in aircraft infrastructure.

The BlueDelta campaign used spearphishing techniques, sending emails with
attachments exploiting vulnerabilities (CVE-2020-35730, CVE-2020-12641, and
CVE-2021-44026) in Roundcube to run reconnaissance and exfiltration scripts,
redirecting incoming emails and gathering session cookies, user information, and
address books. The attachment contained JavaScript code that executed additional
JavaScript payloads from BlueDelta-controlled infrastructure. The campaign
displayed a high level of preparedness, quickly weaponizing news content into
lures to exploit recipients. The spearphishing emails contained news themes
related to Ukraine, with subject lines and content mirroring legitimate media
sources.

BlueDelta Outlook and Roundcube spearphishing infection chain overlap

BlueDelta has demonstrated a long-standing interest in gathering intelligence on
entities in Ukraine and across Europe, primarily among government and
military/defense organizations. The most recent activity very likely represents
a continued focus on these entities and specifically those within Ukraine. We
assess that BlueDelta activity is likely intended to enable military
intelligence-gathering to support Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and believe that
BlueDelta will almost certainly continue to prioritize targeting Ukrainian
government and private sector organizations to support wider Russian military
efforts.

Recorded Future’s collaboration with CERT-UA further emphasizes the importance
of partnerships between industry and governments to enable collective defense
against strategic threats — in this case, Russia’s war against Ukraine.

To read the entire analysis with endnotes, click here to download the report as
a PDF.



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