GINC-APT-0092 · Criminal

Maze Team

Also Storm-0216, TA2101, DEV-0216, Gold Village, Hive0104, TA2101, Maze Team and 4 other names.

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.

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