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NORTH KOREA-LINKED SCARCRUFT APT USES LARGE LNK FILES IN INFECTION CHAINS

May 2, 2023  By Pierluigi Paganini




NORTH KOREA-LINKED SCARCRUFT APT GROUP STARTED USING OVERSIZED LNK FILES TO
DELIVER THE ROKRAT MALWARE STARTING IN EARLY JULY 2022.

Check Point researchers reported that the infection chains observed in the
attacks attributed to North Korea-linked ScarCruft APT group (aka APT37, Reaper,
and Group123) since 2022 have stopped heavily relying on malicious documents to
deliver malware and instead begun using oversized LNK files embedding malicious
payloads.

“ROKRAT has not changed significantly over the years, but its deployment methods
have evolved, now utilizing archives containing LNK files that initiate
multi-stage infection chains. This is another representation of a major trend in
the threat landscape, where APTs and cybercriminals alike attempt to overcome
the blocking of macros from untrusted sources.” reads the report published by
Check Point. “The first sample we will discuss below was first discovered in
July 2022, the same month that Microsoft began enforcing this new rule.”

ScarCruft has been active since at least 2012, it made the headlines in early
February 2018 when researchers revealed that the APT group leveraged a zero-day
vulnerability in Adobe Flash Player to deliver malware to South Korean users.

Most of the lures used as part of the recent attacks are focused on South Korean
foreign and domestic affairs, all of them are in Korean, suggesting the targets
are Korean-speaking individuals.

The end goal of the nation-state actors is to deploy the ROKRAT on the victims’
systems by using spear-phishing emails.

The ROKRAT RAT was employed in past attacks against South Korean users using the
popular Korean Microsoft Word alternative Hangul Word Processor (HWP). RokRat is
believed to be the handiwork of the ScarCruft group. 

In April 2022, Stairwell detailed GOLDBACKDOOR attacks targing South Korean
journalists. The infection chain used by the threat actors relies on large LNK
files running PowerShell, leading to the execution of the previously undetected
malware. Check Point states that the technique is a unique implementation of a
publicly available tool called EmbedExeLnk, it has become a prominent method to
deliver the ROKRAT. Experts noticed similarities between the implementation of
ROKRAT and GOLDBACKDOOR implants.



Over the last few months, the experts observed the threat actors using multiple
lures utilizing this unique implementation delivered in ZIP and ISO archives.

At the beginning of November 2022, the experts noticed that a file
called securityMail.zip was submitted to VirusTotal. The archive contained two
LNKs have a size of just under 5 MB. The researchers noticed that the
implementation of PowerShell commands within the two LNKs is unique and overlaps
only with ROKRAT and GOLDBACKDOOR LNK infections. In this case, the infection
chain led to the deployment of the commodity malware Amadey. Amadey was
previously linked to Konni, which is another North Korea-linked actor that
aligns with APT37.





The ROKRAT ransomware relies on cloud infrastructure for C2, including DropBox,
pCloud, Yandex Cloud, and OneDrive.

“These infection chains show that since 2022, this group has stopped heavily
relying on malicious documents to deliver malware and instead begun to hide
payloads inside oversized LNK files. This method can trigger an equally
effective infection chain by a simple double click, one that is more reliable
than n-day exploits or the Office macros which require additional clicks to
launch.” concludes the report.



“Although we found that ROKRAT has not changed a lot recently, we see that the
loaders being used to deploy it have indeed changed, shifting to the LNK
method.”

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Pierluigi Paganini

(SecurityAffairs – hacking, RokRAT malware)


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PIERLUIGI PAGANINI

Pierluigi Paganini is member of the ENISA (European Union Agency for Network and
Information Security) Threat Landscape Stakeholder Group and Cyber G7 Group, he
is also a Security Evangelist, Security Analyst and Freelance Writer.
Editor-in-Chief at "Cyber Defense Magazine", Pierluigi is a cyber security
expert with over 20 years experience in the field, he is Certified Ethical
Hacker at EC Council in London. The passion for writing and a strong belief that
security is founded on sharing and awareness led Pierluigi to find the security
blog "Security Affairs" recently named a Top National Security Resource for US.
Pierluigi is a member of the "The Hacker News" team and he is a writer for some
major publications in the field such as Cyber War Zone, ICTTF, Infosec Island,
Infosec Institute, The Hacker News Magazine and for many other Security
magazines. Author of the Books "The Deep Dark Web" and “Digital Virtual Currency
and Bitcoin”.




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CISA ADDS TP-LINK, APACHE, AND ORACLE BUGS TO ITS KNOWN EXPLOITED
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