Privileges and Credentials: Phished at the Request of Counsel

By FireEye

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In May and June 2017, FireEye observed a phishing campaign targeting at least seven global law and investment firms. We have associated this campaign with APT19, a group that we assess is composed of freelancers, with some degree of sponsorship by the Chinese government. APT19 used three different techniques to attempt to compromise targets. In early May, the phishing lures leveraged RTF attachments that exploited the Microsoft Windows vulnerability described in CVE 2017-0199. Toward the end of May, APT19 switched to using macro-enabled Microsoft Excel (XLSM) documents. In the most recent versions, APT19 added an application whitelisting bypass to the XLSM documents. At least one observed phishing lure delivered a Cobalt Strike payload. As of the writing of this blog post, FireEye had not observed post-exploitation activity by the threat actors, so we cannot assess the goal of the campaign. We have previously observed APT19 steal data from law and investment firms for competitive economic purposes. This purpose of this blog post is to inform law firms and investment firms of this phishing campaign and provide technical indicators that their IT personnel can use for proactive hunting and detection.

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