The actor of the threat, known as space pirates, was associated with a malicious company aimed at Russian information technology (IT) with previously unregistered malware programs called Luckystrike Agent.
The activity was discovered in November 2024 by the solar, cybersecurity of the Russian state telecommunications company Rostelecom. This is the tracking activity under the name of Erudite Mogwai.
The attacks are also characterized by the use of other tools such as Act Ratalso called Shadowpad Light and an individual version Associate utility call Stowawaypreviously used by other China groups.
“Erudite Mogwai is one of the active apt groups specializing in the theft of sensitive information and espionage,” solar researchers – Note. “At least 2017 the group attacks state institutions, IT departments of various organizations, as well as enterprises related to high-tech industries such as aerospace and electricity.”
The actor of the threat was the first Publicly documented According to positive technologies in 2022, in detail about its exclusive use of malicious software for rats. The group is assumed that the group divides tactical overlapping of a group called Webworm. It is known that it focuses on organizing in Russia, Georgia and Mongolia.
In one of the attacks aimed at the government sector client, Solar said he had found that the attacker deployed various tools to facilitate the intelligence, as well as giving up Luckstrike agent, a multifunction.
“The attackers gained access to the infrastructure by compromising a public web service not later than March 2023, and then began to look for” fruits “in the infrastructure,” said Solar. “For 19 months, the attackers slowly spread to the client systems until the network segments connected to the monitoring in November 2024 were reached.”
Also paying attention to the use of the modified version of Stowaway to preserve only its proxy, as well as the use of LZ4 as a compression algorithm, incorporating XXTEA as an encryption algorithm and add support to support for support for Whatever Transport protocol.
“Erudite Mogwai began its journey to change this usefulness, reducing the functionality they do not need,” Solar said. “They continued with minor edits such as renaming functions and changing the size of the structures (perhaps to knock down the existing detection signatures). At the moment, the Stowaway version used by this group can be called a full fork.”
