- Category
- Criminal · Financially motivated: ransomware, fraud and theft.
- Origin
- Russia(high confidence)
- Motivation
- Financial crime; Financial gain
- Seen
- 2019
- Sources
- 9 sources carry it
- Identifier
- GINC-APT-0092 · maze-team
What it is
Proofpoint researchers detected campaigns from a relatively new actor, tracked internally as TA2101, targeting German companies and organizations to deliver and install backdoor malware. The actor initiated their campaigns impersonating the Bundeszentralamt fur Steuern, the German Federal Ministry of Finance, with lookalike domains, verbiage, and stolen branding in the emails. For their campaigns in Germany, the actor chose Cobalt Strike, a commercially licensed software tool that is generally used for penetration testing and emulates the type of backdoor framework used by Metasploit, a similar penetration testing tool. Proofpoint researchers have also observed this actor distributing Maze ransomware, employing similar social engineering techniques to those it uses for Cobalt Strike, while also targeting organizations in Italy and impersonating the Agenzia Delle Entrate, the Italian Revenue Agency. We have also recently observed the actor targeting organizations in the United States using the IcedID banking Trojan while impersonating the United States Postal Service (USPS).
Names
The names each vendor, agency and source gives it. Naming differs by who tracks the actor, so one group carries many.
- CrowdStrike
- TUNNEL SPIDER, Twisted Spider
- Mandiant
- UNC2198
- Microsoft
- Storm-0216, DEV-0216
- Proofpoint
- TA2101
- PwC
- White Labyrinth
- Other names
- Gold Village, Hive0104, TA2101, Maze Team
Attribution
Each attribution is a claim: who makes it, and to whom. Western and Eastern sources are kept apart, as they often disagree.
Western sources
Targets
- Countries
- Canada, Costa Rica, France, Germany, Italy, South Korea, Thailand, United Kingdom, United States
- Sectors
- Construction, Education, Energy, Financial, Government, Healthcare, Hospitality, IT, Manufacturing, Media, Non-profit organizations, Oil and gas, Retail, Shipping and Logistics, Technology, Telecommunications, Transportation
Tools
The tools and malware families the sources tie to it.
- 7-Zip
- Archelaus Beta
- Backdoor.Oldrea
- BloodHound
- BokBot
- Buran
- Cobalt Strike
- Egregor
- Maze
- Maze ransomware
- Mimikatz
- PsExec
- Revenge-RAT
- SharpHound
- Trojan.Karagany
- Trojan.Mebromi
- UNITEDRAKE
- WinSCP
- nmap
Sources
- ETDA Threat Group Card apt.etda.or.th
- Malpedia malpedia.caad.fkie.fraunhofer.de