ForumTroll targets political scientists

Our experts from the Global Research and Analysis Team (GReAT) have investigated a new wave of targeted emails from the ForumTroll APT group. Whereas previously their malicious emails were sent to public addresses of organizations, this time the attackers have targeted specific individuals — scientists from Russian universities and other organizations specializing in political science, international relations, and global economics. The purpose of the campaign was to infect victims’ computers with malware to gain remote access thereto.

What the malicious email looks like

The attackers sent the emails from the address support@e-library{.}wiki, which imitates the address of the scientific electronic library eLibrary (its real domain is elibrary.ru). The emails contained personalized links to a report on the plagiarism check of some material, which, according to the attackers’ plan, was supposed to be of interest to scientists.

In reality, the link downloaded an archive from the same e-library{.}wiki domain. Inside was a malicious .lnk file and a .Thumbs directory with some images that were apparently needed to bypass security technologies. The victim’s full name was used in the filenames of the archive and the malicious link-file.

In case the victim had doubts about the legitimacy of the email and visited the e-library{.}wiki page, they were shown a slightly outdated copy of the real website.

What happens if the victim clicks on the malicious link

If the scientist who received the email clicked on the file with the .lnk extension, a malicious PowerShell script was executed on their computer, triggering a chain of infection. As a result, the attackers installed a commercial framework Tuoni for red teams on the attacked machine, providing the attackers with remote access and other opportunities for further compromising the system. In addition, the malware used COM Hijacking to achieve persistency, and downloaded and displayed a decoy PDF file, the name of which also included the victim’s full name. The file itself, however, was not personalized — it was a rather vague report in the format of one of the Russian plagiarism detection systems.

Interestingly, if the victim tried to open the malicious link from a device running on a system that didn’t support PowerShell, they were prompted to try again from a Windows computer. A more detailed technical analysis of the attack, along with indicators of compromise, can be found in a post on the Securelist website.

How to stay safe

The malware used in this attack is successfully detected and blocked by Kaspersky’s security products. We recommend installing a reliable security solution not only on all devices used by employees to access the internet, but also on the organization's mail gateway, which can stop most threats delivered via email before they reach an employee’s device.