Russia-linked APT29 Targets Diplomatic World Wide

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Security intelligence from Mandiant has discovered a spear-phishing campaign, launched by the Russia-linked APT29 group, designed to victimize diplomats and government entities worldwide including European, the Americas, and Asia. 

The group is believed to be sponsored by the Russian Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR) and to have orchestrated the 2020 SolarWinds attack which hit hundreds of organizations. 
According to the data, the Russia-linked APT29 group popularly known as SVR, Cozy Bear, and The Dukes is active since at least 2014, along with the APT28 cyber threat group which was involved in the Democratic National Committee hack, the wave of attacks aimed at the 2016 US Presidential Elections and a November 2018 attempt to infiltrate DNC. 
The phishing emails have been masqueraded as official notices related to various embassies. Nation-state actors used Atlassian Trello, DropBox, and cloud services, as part of their command and control (C2) infrastructure. 
“APT29 targeted large lists of recipients that Mandiant suspected were primarily publicly-listed points of contact of embassy personnel. These phishing emails utilized a malicious HTML dropper tracked as ROOTSAW, which makes use of a technique known as HTML smuggling to deliver an IMG or ISO file to a victim system.” reads the analysis published by Mandiant. 
The threat actors used the HTML smuggling technique to deliver an IMG or ISO file to the targets. The ISO image contains a Windows shortcut file (LNK) that installs a malicious DLL file when it is clicked. When the attachment file opens, the ROOTSAW HTML droppe

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