Zebrocy Go

The Zebrocy APT (Advanced Persistent Threat) is believed to be a Russian based hacking group. They seem to have teamed up with another Russian hacking group – the infamous Fancy Bear (also called APT28 or Safocy). Malware researchers speculate that Zebrocy and Fancy Bear are working together because they seemed to have very similar targets, launched their attacks almost at the same time, and the tools employed in these attacks were very alike. The Zebrocy APT is well-known for its ability to create malware using a wide variety of programming languages. Cybersecurity experts speculate that the reason behind this may be that the Zebrosy APT intends to begin targeting systems eventually, which run other operating systems apart from Windows. The Zebrocy group recently created a downloader in three different languages – AutoIT, Delphi and the Google Go language. Today we are going to describe a variant of this downloader, which was written in Go and named Zebrocy Go as it seems to be the most well-built version of this threat.

The authors of the Zebrocy Go downloader are propagating it via spear-phishing email campaigns. The fraudulent emails would contain a file that appears to be a legitimate Microsoft Office document but is, in fact, a '.lnk' file. When the users attempt to open the attachment, they will launch the Zebrocy Go. However, to make sure that the victim does not notice that something is wrong when the infected attachment is opened, a decoy document would be displayed too.

The Zebrocy Go malware is capable of receiving commands regarding what payloads should be dropped onto the infiltrated system. The goal of the Zebrocy Go downloader is to collect system information. To achieve this, the attackers have made sure that the Zebrocy Go Trojan taps into the 'systeminfo' utility and then employs it to collect the sought after details. Then, the Trojan downloader would contact the Command and Control server of the attackers and export the collected information about the compromised host. The Command and Control server will then instruct the Zebrocy Go threat on what actions to take next.

Much like the Fancy Bear hacking group, the Zebrocy APT has a particular taste in government entities. Most of the attacks launched by the Zebrocy group appear to be against entities located in Central Asia and countries from the former Soviet block. Government organizations need to be very vigilant and up their cybersecurity, because sharks like the Zebrocy hacking group are always lurking in the shadows.