Info security body finds no evidence of infection at Swiss banks as a result of “Sharpshooter” campaign

Switzerland’s Reporting and Analysis Centre for Information Assurance (MELANI) has earlier today posted its 29th semi-annual report which addresses the most important cyberincidents of the first half of 2019 both in Switzerland and abroad.

MELANI noted the Lazarus attacks targeting Swiss banks. In March 2019, security software company McAfee published a follow-up to its December 2018 report on the Sharpshooter campaign. Last year, the campaign targeted 87 companies from all over the world, but mainly in the US. The companies concerned were from the defence, energy, nuclear and financial sectors.

In its second report, McAfee confirmed their initial suspicion that the Lazarus group was behind the attacks. The group is well known for having attacked systems at various banks and is considered by many experts to be connected to the North Korean regime.

In its first report on the matter, McAfee described attempted attacks against Swiss financial institutions.

Today, MELANI said it is in contact with a number of banks, as mentioned in the preceding semi-annual report.

“Then as now, no evidence of infection has been found at the potential target companies in Switzerland”, says MELANI.

Let’s recall that, in December 2018, security firm McAfee released a report on a newly discovered APT campaign against defence, energy, nuclear, and financial companies. The campaign called “Sharpshooter” began on October 25, 2018 with the sending of infected documents to individuals from 87 organisations around the world, mainly in the USA. According to the report, Swiss companies in the financial sector were also hit by the campaign.

Social engineering was used to get the recipients to open the infected documents. The letter was disguised as a letter of application and contained a link to a document on Dropbox which allegedly contained the application dossier. This method is particularly insidious because HR departments often receive unsolicited applications and usually open such documents.

The infection occurred via a macro contained in the Word document. Such macros are now blocked in many companies, or are activated only after confirmation of a corresponding warning message. If the macro is executed despite all warnings, the malware will smuggle Sharpshooter into the working memory of Word. The malware then installs a modular backdoor called “Rising Sun”. The functions of this component include collecting and sending information about documents, user names, network configuration, and system settings. The malware can also reload other functions.

The malware communicates via a command and control server controlled by the attackers.

In analysing the campaign, McAfee found evidence of connections to the “Lazarus” group: “Rising Sun” contains code and configuration data from the “Duuzer” family. Duuzer was also used in the hacker attack on Sony, which is associated with the Lazarus group.