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SWEED

APT Group Information theft and espionage ETDA ✓

Also Known As

No alias recorded

Target Countries 18

Countries highlighted in red

Bosnia and Herzegovina Canada Switzerland China Germany Djibouti France Hong Kong India Italy Republic of Korea Monaco Qatar Singapore Turkey Province of China Taiwan United States South Africa

Sectors Targeted

Shipping and Logistics Financial Manufacturing Human Resources Energy Defense

Details

Origin 🇳🇬 NG

Last Updated 01 Jun 2022

Malware Families 2

agent_tesla

lokipws

MITRE ATT&CK 4

T1040 T1059.003 T1071 T1189

Related Zero-Days

No zero-day CVE linked to this actor

Known Names 1 entries

Sweed Talos

Observed Target Countries 21

Based on ETDA data — countries highlighted in red

Bosnia and Herzegovina Canada China Djibouti France Germany Hong Kong India Italy Monaco Russia Qatar Singapore South Africa South Korea Switzerland Taiwan Turkey UAE UK USA

Description

(Talos) Cisco Talos recently identified a large number of ongoing malware distribution campaigns linked to a threat actor we’re calling “SWEED,” including such notable malware as Formbook, Lokibot and Agent Tesla. Based on our research, SWEED — which has been operating since at least 2017 — primarily targets their victims with stealers and remote access trojans. SWEED remains consistent across most of their campaigns in their use of spear-phishing emails with malicious attachments. While these campaigns have featured a myriad of different types of malicious documents, the actor primarily tries to infect its victims with a packed version of Agent Tesla — an information stealer that’s been around since at least 2014. The version of Agent Tesla that SWEED is using differs slightly from what we’ve seen in the past in the way that it is packed, as well as how it infects the system. In this post, we’ll run down each campaign we’re able to connect to SWEED, and talk about some of the actor’s tactics, techniques and procedures (TTPs).

Tools Used 4

Agent Tesla Formbook LokiBot RDP

Operations 5

2017 Steganography One of the earliest SWEED campaigns Talos identified dates back to 2017. In this attack, the actors placed droppers inside of ZIP archives, and then attached those ZIPs to emails. The attachments usually had file names similar to “Java_Updater.zip” or “P-O of Jun2017.zip”.

2018-01 In early 2018, we observed that SWEED began leveraging Java-based droppers. Similar to previous campaigns, the JAR was directly attached to emails and used file names such as “Order_2018.jar”. The purpose of the JAR was to obtain information about the infected system and facilitate the download of a packed version of Agent Tesla.

2018-04 In April 2018, SWEED began making use of a previously disclosed Office exploit. One of the documents featured in these email campaigns was notable because it was a PowerPoint document (PPXS). Code contained inside one of the slides triggers an exploit for CVE-2017-8759, a remote code execution vulnerability in Microsoft .NET framework.

2018-05 In May 2018, campaigns being conducted by SWEED began leveraging another vulnerability in Microsoft Office: CVE-2017-11882, a remote code execution bug in Microsoft Office that is commonly observed being leveraged in malicious documents used in commodity malware distribution.

2019 Beginning in 2019, the campaigns associated with SWEED began leveraging malicious Office macros. As with previous attacks, they are leveraging spear-phishing emails and malicious attachments to initiate the infection process. https://blog.talosintelligence.com/2019/07/sweed-agent-tesla.html

Reports & References 1

https://blog.talosintelligence.com/2019/07/sweed-agent-tesla.html

ETDA Profile

Sweed

Origin

[Unknown]

First Seen 2017

Motivation

Information theft and espionage

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