Clasiopa New Group Targets Materials Research

A campaign targeting the materials research sector with custom and commodity utilities and malware is thought to be related to a recently identified threat group. Symantec is tracking the group as Clasiopa however attribution appears to be of low confidence as the activities continue to be analyzed. Custom malware and utilities include Athravan a custom RAT as well as a custom proxy tool used by the group. Additionally analysis identified a hacking tool called Thumbsender and a commodity RAT were used during the attacks. The group did attempt to evade detection by using Windows binaries such as wsmprovhost used to launch a remote PowerShell session to remove indicators of compromise and took advantage of Windows scheduled tasks to list file names.