- Reaction score
- 1,697
Mandiant Managed Defense has been tracking UNC4990, an actor who heavily uses USB devices for initial infection. UNC4990 primarily targets users based in Italy and is likely motivated by financial gain. Our research shows this campaign has been ongoing since at least 2020.
Despite relying on the age-old tactic of weaponizing USB drives, UNC4990 continues to evolve their tools, tactics and procedures (TTPs). The actor has moved from using seemingly benign encoded text files to hosting payloads on popular websites such as Ars Technica, GitHub, GitLab, and Vimeo.
The legitimate services abused by UNC4990 (including Ars Technica, GitHub, GitLab, and Vimeo) didn’t involve exploiting any known or unknown vulnerabilities in these sites, nor did any of these organizations have anything misconfigured to allow for this abuse. Additionally, the content hosted on these services posed no direct risk for the everyday users of these services, as the content hosted in isolation was completely benign. Anyone who may have inadvertently clicked or viewed this content in the past was not at risk of being compromised.
Mandiant has observed UNC4990 leverage EMPTYSPACE (also known as VETTA Loader and BrokerLoader), a downloader that can execute any payload served by the command and control (C2) server, and QUIETBOARD, which is a backdoor that was delivered using EMPTYSPACE.
Despite relying on the age-old tactic of weaponizing USB drives, UNC4990 continues to evolve their tools, tactics and procedures (TTPs). The actor has moved from using seemingly benign encoded text files to hosting payloads on popular websites such as Ars Technica, GitHub, GitLab, and Vimeo.
The legitimate services abused by UNC4990 (including Ars Technica, GitHub, GitLab, and Vimeo) didn’t involve exploiting any known or unknown vulnerabilities in these sites, nor did any of these organizations have anything misconfigured to allow for this abuse. Additionally, the content hosted on these services posed no direct risk for the everyday users of these services, as the content hosted in isolation was completely benign. Anyone who may have inadvertently clicked or viewed this content in the past was not at risk of being compromised.
Mandiant has observed UNC4990 leverage EMPTYSPACE (also known as VETTA Loader and BrokerLoader), a downloader that can execute any payload served by the command and control (C2) server, and QUIETBOARD, which is a backdoor that was delivered using EMPTYSPACE.
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