Mar 20, 2024NewsroomCritical Infrastructure / Network Security

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) said it’s forming a new “Water Sector Cybersecurity Task Force” to devise methods to counter the threats faced by the water sector in the country.

“In addition to considering the prevalent vulnerabilities of water systems to cyberattacks and the challenges experienced by some systems in adopting best practices, this Task Force in its deliberations would seek to build upon existing collaborative products,” the EPA said.

In a letter sent to all U.S. Governors, EPA Administrator Michael Regan and National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan highlighted the need to secure water and wastewater systems (WWS) from cyber attacks that could disrupt access to clean and safe drinking water.

At least two threat actors have been linked to intrusions targeting the nation’s water systems, including those by an Iranian hacktivist group named Cyber Av3ngers as well as the China-linked Volt Typhoon, which has targeted communications, energy, transportation, and water and wastewater systems sectors in the U.S. and Guam for at least five years.

“Drinking water and wastewater systems are an attractive target for cyberattacks because they are a lifeline critical infrastructure sector but often lack the resources and technical capacity to adopt rigorous cybersecurity practices,” Regan and Sullivan said.

The development coincides with the release of a new fact sheet from the U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), urging critical infrastructure entities to defend against the “urgent risk posed by Volt Typhoon” by implementing secure by-design principles, robust logging, safeguarding the supply chain, and increasing awareness of social engineering tactics.

“Volt Typhoon have been pre-positioning themselves on U.S. critical infrastructure organizations’ networks to enable disruption or destruction of critical services in the event of increased geopolitical tensions and/or military conflict with the United States and its allies,” the agency cautioned.

Cybersecurity firm SentinelOne, in a report published last month, revealed how China has launched an offensive media strategy to propagate “unsubstantiated” narratives around U.S. hacking operations for over two years.

“Repeating China’s allegations helps the [People’s Republic of China] shape global public opinion of the U.S. China wants to see the world recognize the U.S. as the ’empire of hacking,'” Sentinel One’s China-focused consultant Dakota Cary said.

“The fact that China is lodging allegations of US espionage operations is still notable, providing insight into the relationship between the US and China, even if China does not support its claims.”

Jan 09, 2024NewsroomMalware / Cyber Threat

A threat actor called Water Curupira has been observed actively distributing the PikaBot loader malware as part of spam campaigns in 2023.

“PikaBot’s operators ran phishing campaigns, targeting victims via its two components — a loader and a core module — which enabled unauthorized remote access and allowed the execution of arbitrary commands through an established connection with their command-and-control (C&C) server,” Trend Micro said in a report published today.

The activity began in the first quarter of 2023 that lasted till the end of June, before ramping up again in September. It also overlaps with prior campaigns that have used similar tactics to deliver QakBot, specifically those orchestrated by cybercrime groups known as TA571 and TA577.

It’s believed that the increase in the number of phishing campaigns related to PikaBot is the result of QakBot’s takedown in August, with DarkGate emerging as another replacement.

PikaBot is primarily a loader, which means it’s designed to launch another payload, including Cobalt Strike, a legitimate post-exploitation toolkit that typically acts as a precursor for ransomware deployment.

The attack chains leverage a technique called email thread hijacking, employing existing email threads to trick recipients into opening malicious links or attachments, effectively activating the malware execution sequence.

The ZIP archive attachments, which either contain JavaScript or IMG files, are used as a launchpad for PikaBot. The malware, for its part, checks the system’s language and halts execution should it be either Russian or Ukrainian.

In the next step, it collects details about the victim’s system and forwards them to a C&C server in JSON format. Water Curupira’s campaigns are for the purpose of dropping Cobalt Strike, which subsequently lead to the deployment of Black Basta ransomware.

“The threat actor also conducted several DarkGate spam campaigns and a small number of IcedID campaigns during the early weeks of the third quarter of 2023, but has since pivoted exclusively to PikaBot,” Trend Micro said.