As oil-and-gas supplies have become increasingly disrupted in the Middle East and Eastern Europe, Russia- and China-linked cyberespionage groups have followed the economic ripples, targeting countries in which they have not always taken an interest.
In the latest example, the China-linked FamousSparrow group has targeted an Azerbaijanian oil-and-gas company in the South Caucasus region, which sits between Iran, Turkey, and Russia, according to research published by cybersecurity firm Bitdefender today. The group used a unique sideloading technique for dynamic link libraries (DLLs) that allowed them to evade some defenses and install remote access tools, the firm stated. The operational technology (OT) networks were not affected.
While Russian cyberthreat groups have targeted companies in the region, this is the first time that China-linked groups have been discovered in Azerbaijanian industries, says Martin Zugec, technical solutions director at Bitdefender.
“This definitely looks like targeted attack based on everything we’ve seen,” he says, adding: “China-aligned APTs are pushing at Russia’s traditional sphere of influence whereas before, it was staying away from it.”
The South Caucasus region — comprising Armenia, Azerbaijan, and Georgia — has become an increasingly important energy corridor for the European Union, serving 16 nations with gas exports that have grown 56% over the past five years. Russia has typically taken a geopolitical interest in the region, often turning to cyberespionage and cyberattacks as a way to exert influence, especially around its 2008 invasion of northern Georgia.
The latest research suggests that China has begun to focus on South Caucasus with its own cyber operations.
Is FamousSparrow Flocking With Salt Typhoon?
The FamousSparrow operations in Azerbaijan appear to have started in late December, and lasted until the end of February, according to Bitdefender’s research. The tools discovered in the attack have shown signs of improvement, including the addition of a two-stage mechanism for sideloading malware using DLLs, and modifications to the Deed RAT remote access tool.
The DLL side-loading changes gates the payload behind a specific execution path, only allowing it to run if the application follows an expected sequence of instruction — which makes analysis and sandbox detection more difficult, the researchers stated in the analysis.
FamousSparrow has targeted firms across the globe, but Azerbaijan marks a new front. Source: Bitdefender
“The malicious library will just prepare the staging and the payload, and not execute it, and as the legitimate executable is going through the process of execution, all the little pieces of the puzzle are being put in place, and then suddenly it becomes malicious,” Bitdefender’s Zugec says. “If you analyze all the pieces on its own, you can’t see anything, they don’t have any malicious behavior individually.”
First detected in 2021 by cybersecurity firm ESET, FamousSparrow has targeted hotels, government agencies, and financial organizations in North America, Europe, South America, and the Middle East. Azerbaijan appears to be a new focus, Zugec says.
While other researchers have posited that FamousSparrow and the infamous Salt Typhoon are the same group, or significantly overlapping groups, there is not enough information to link the two, Alexandre Côté Cyr, a malware researcher with ESET, said in a recent analysis of FamousSparrow. Microsoft originally named Salt Typhoon, and has not released indicators of compromise that would help others to determine whether they are analyzing the same group, he says.
“FamousSparrow appears to be its own distinct cluster with loose links to the others,” such as Salt Typhoon (which many also link to Earth Estries), and GhostEmperor, Côté Cyr says. “We believe those links are better explained by positing the existence of a shared third party, such as a digital quartermaster, than by conflating all of these disparate clusters of activity into one.”
China’s Central Armory of APT Tools & Malware?
A central repository of knowledge for Chinese threat groups would also explain Bitdefender’s observation that once a tool or technique appears in one attack by a Chinese state-sponsored actor, it often appears to propagate out to other groups linked to China.
“One thing that you can see across all of these groups is that if one of them comes up with new technique, then probably all of them will start copying it,” Bitdefender’s Zugec says. “With Chinese APTs we are seeing that there is some kind of centralized knowledge about what works and what doesn’t.”
Some companies have allowed them to build on that knowledge through poor cyber-hygeine. In the latest case, the unnamed oil-and-gas company detected the attack on specific workstations and cleaned those systems, but the initial access vector — a vulnerable Microsoft Exchange server — was not fixed. FamousSparrow swooped in for two subsequent attacks as a result.
Doing a full incident analysis and patching vulnerable systems could go a long way to keeping out the attackers, Bitdefender’s Zugec says.
“This attack could be prevented if the victim would follow the basic security best practices that we’ve been teaching for many, many years,” he says. “This is really good example of if you don’t fix the underlying problem, they will come back.”
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