North Korean Hackers Target Energy and Aerospace Industries with New MISTPEN Malware

Cyber Espionage / Malware

A North Korea-linked cyber-espionage group has been observed leveraging job-themed phishing lures to target prospective victims in energy and aerospace verticals and infect them with a previously undocumented backdoor dubbed MISTPEN.

The activity cluster is being tracked by Google-owned Mandiant under the moniker UNC2970, which it said overlaps with a threat group known as TEMP.Hermit, which is also broadly called Lazarus Group or Diamond Sleet (formerly Zinc).

The threat actor has a history of targeting government, defense, telecommunications, and financial institutions worldwide since at least 2013 to collect strategic intelligence that furthers North Korean interests. It’s affiliated with the Reconnaissance General Bureau (RGB).

The threat intelligence firm said it has observed UNC2970 singling out various entities located in the U.S., the U.K., the Netherlands, Cyprus, Sweden, Germany, Singapore, Hong Kong, and Australia.

“UNC2970 targets victims under the guise of job openings, masquerading as a recruiter for prominent companies,” it said in a new analysis, adding it copies and modifies job descriptions according to their target profiles.

“Moreover, the chosen job descriptions target senior-/manager-level employees. This suggests the threat actor aims to gain access to sensitive and confidential information that is typically restricted to higher-level employees.”

The attack chains, also known as Operation Dream Job, entail the use of spear-phishing lures to engage with victims over email and WhatsApp in an attempt to build trust, before sending across a malicious ZIP archive file that’s dressed up as a job description.

In an interesting twist, the PDF file of the description can only be opened with a trojanized version of a legitimate PDF reader application called Sumatra PDF included within the archive to deliver MISTPEN by means of a launcher referred to as BURNBOOK.

It’s worth noting that this does not imply a supply chain attack nor is there a vulnerability in the software. Rather the attack has been found to employ an older Sumatra PDF version that has been repurposed to activate the infection chain.

This is a tried-and-tested method adopted by the hacking group as far back as 2022, with both Mandiant and Microsoft highlighting the use of a wide range of open-source software, including PuTTY, KiTTY, TightVNC, Sumatra PDF Reader, and muPDF/Subliminal Recording software installer for these attacks.

It’s believed that the threat actors likely instruct the victims to open the PDF file using the enclosed weaponized PDF viewer program to trigger the execution of a malicious DLL file, a C/C++ launcher called BURNBOOK.

“This file is a dropper for an embedded DLL, ‘wtsapi32.dll,’ which is tracked as TEARPAGE and used to execute the MISTPEN backdoor after the system is rebooted,” Mandiant researchers said. “MISTPEN is a trojanized version of a legitimate Notepad++ plugin, binhex.dll, which contains a backdoor.”

TEARPAGE, a loader embedded within BURNBOOK, is responsible for decrypting and launching MISTPEN. A lightweight implant written in C, MISTPEN is equipped to download and execute Portable Executable (PE) files retrieved from a command-and-control (C2) server. It communicates over HTTP with the following Microsoft Graph URLs.

Mandiant also said it uncovered older BURNBOOK and MISTPEN artifacts, suggesting that they are being iteratively improved to add more capabilities and allow them to fly under the radar. The early MISTPEN samples have also been discovered using compromised WordPress websites as C2 domains.

“The threat actor has improved their malware over time by implementing new features and adding a network connectivity check to hinder the analysis of the samples,” the researchers said.

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