The threat actors behind the current malware campaign targeting software developers have demonstrated new malware and tactics as they expand their focus to Windows, Linux and macOS systems.
Activity cluster, dubbing DEV#POPER and linked to North Korea, has been found to have singled out victims in South Korea, North America, Europe and the Middle East.
“This form of attack is an advanced form of social engineering designed to manipulate people into revealing sensitive information or taking actions they might not normally take,” Securonix researchers Dan Yuzwick and Tim Peck said in a new the report shared with The Hacker News.
DEV#POPPER is an alias appointed to an active malware campaign that tricks developers into downloading mined software hosted on GitHub under the guise of a job interview. It overlaps with a company tracked by Palo Alto Networks Unit 42 called Contagious interview.
Signs that the campaign was broader and cross-platform emerged earlier this month when researchers uncovered artifacts targeting both Windows and macOS that delivered an updated version of the malware called BeaverTail.
The attack chain document from Securonix is more or less consistent in that threat actors pose as interviewers for a developer position and prompt candidates to download a ZIP archive for a coding job.
The archive contains an npm module that, once installed, runs obfuscated JavaScript (such as BeaverTail) that detects the operating system it’s running on and contacts a remote server to steal interesting data.
It is also capable of loading next-stage payloads, including a Python backdoor called InvisibleFerret, which is designed to collect detailed system metadata, access cookies stored in web browsers, execute commands, upload/download files, and log clicks keys and clipboard contents.
New features added to recent samples include the use of improved obfuscation, AnyDesk Remote Monitoring and Management (RMM) software for security, and improvements to the FTP mechanism used for data theft.
In addition, the Python script acts as a conduit to run a helper script that is responsible for stealing sensitive information from various web browsers – Google Chrome, Opera and Brave – on various operating systems.
“This sophisticated extension of the original DEV#POPPER campaign continues to use Python scripts to execute a multi-stage attack focused on extracting sensitive information from victims, but now with much more robust capabilities,” the researchers said.
