New Spear Phishing Campaign Targets Russian Dissidents

In Russia, a new spear-phishing campaign targeting dissenters with alternative views to those presented by the state and national media over the war in Ukraine is underway. The campaign distributes emails to government personnel and public servants, alerting them about software and online platforms that are illegal in the country. 

The mails contain a malicious attachment or link that sends a Cobalt Strike beacon to the recipient’s computer, allowing remote operators to execute eavesdropping on the victim. The campaign was discovered and reported on by Malwarebytes Labs threat analysts, who were able to sample some of the bait emails. 

To persuade recipients to open the attachment, the phishing emails pretend to be from a Russian state organisation, ministry, or federal service. The main two spoofed organizations are the “Russian Federation Ministry of Information Technologies and Communications” and the “Russian Federation Ministry of Digital Development, Communications, and Mass Communications.” 

To attack their targets with Cobalt Strike, the threat actors use three different file types: RTF (rich text format) files, archive attachments of malicious documents, and download links inserted in the email body. Since it involves the exploitation of CVE-2021-40444, a remote code execut

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