The risk actor often called House Pirates has been linked to a malicious marketing campaign focusing on Russian data know-how (IT) organizations with a beforehand undocumented malware referred to as LuckyStrike Agent.
The exercise was detected in November 2024 by Photo voltaic, the cybersecurity arm of Russian state-owned telecom firm Rostelecom. It is monitoring the exercise beneath the title Erudite Mogwai.
The assaults are additionally characterised by way of different instruments like Deed RAT, additionally referred to as ShadowPad Mild, and a personalized model of proxy utility named Stowaway, which has been beforehand utilized by different China-linked hacking teams.
“Erudite Mogwai is without doubt one of the energetic APT teams specializing within the theft of confidential data and espionage,” Photo voltaic researchers stated. “Since a minimum of 2017, the group has been attacking authorities businesses, IT departments of varied organizations, in addition to enterprises associated to high-tech industries akin to aerospace and electrical energy.”
The risk actor was first publicly documented by Optimistic Applied sciences in 2022, detailing its unique use of the Deed RAT malware. The group is believed to share tactical overlaps with one other hacking group referred to as Webworm. It is recognized to focus on organizations in Russia, Georgia, and Mongolia.
In one of many assaults focusing on a authorities sector buyer, Photo voltaic stated it found the attacker deploying numerous instruments to facilitate reconnaissance, whereas additionally dropping LuckyStrike Agent, a multi-functional .NET backdoor that makes use of Microsoft OneDrive for command-and-control (C2).
“The attackers gained entry to the infrastructure by compromising a publicly accessible net service no later than March 2023, after which started on the lookout for ‘low-hanging fruit’ within the infrastructure,” Photo voltaic stated. “Over the course of 19 months, the attackers slowly unfold throughout the client’s programs till they reached the community segments related to monitoring in November 2024.”
Additionally noteworthy is the usage of a modified model of Stowaway to retain solely its proxy performance, alongside utilizing LZ4 as a compression algorithm, incorporating XXTEA as an encryption algorithm, and including help for the QUIC transport protocol.
“Erudite Mogwai started their journey in modifying this utility by chopping down the performance they did not want,” Photo voltaic stated. “They continued with minor edits, akin to renaming features and altering the sizes of constructions (in all probability to knock down present detection signatures). In the intervening time, the model of Stowaway utilized by this group may be referred to as a full-fledged fork.”
