Nautilus

The Turla hacking group is an APT (Advanced Persistent Threat), which is known to be operating from the Russian Federation. Malware researchers believe that the Turla hacking group is sponsored directly by the Kremlin and is used in politically motivated attacks aimed at furthering Russian interests in the global political scene. They tend to attack organizations operating in the military, technology, and energy industries. The Turla hacking group also often launches attacks against various government bodies. Recently, cybersecurity experts have detected two new malware families who are believed to belong to the Turla hacking group – Nautilus and Neuron. So far, the Turla hacking group has used these two new strains in campaigns targeting companies in the United Kingdom. However, if these operations are successful, it is likely that these two new threats may be used in future campaigns with different targets.

Turla Updates Its Hacking Tools Regularly

It would appear that the Turla hacking group is almost always using these two hacking tools in unison. Traces of the Nautilus-Neuron power-duo have been found on the Web and mail servers infiltrated by the Russian APT. Both the Nautilus and Neuron tools are fully equipped to detect and avoid sandbox environments. This means that cybersecurity experts are going to have a really hard time trying to dissect these threats. Furthermore, their task has been made even more difficult because the code of the Nautilus and Neuron malware is heavily obfuscated. The Turla hacking group is known to be very active and careful when carrying out campaigns, and this case is no exception. Malware researchers have noticed that the hacking group is keeping a close eye on both their hacking tools and are making sure to introduce regular updates in order to make their threats almost undetectable by anti-malware solutions and very difficult to reverse engineer for cybersecurity experts.

The goal of the operations involving the Nautilus and Neuron malware is to steal sensitive data from the infiltrated system. Malware researchers are certainly going to have a hard time trying to combat this latest Turla APT campaign.