MuddyWater is also believed to be a “conglomerate of multiple teams operating independently rather than a single threat actor group,” the cybersecurity firm added, making it an umbrella actor in the vein of Winnti, a China-based advanced persistent threat (APT).
The latest campaigns undertaken by the hacking crew involve the use of malware-laced documents delivered via phishing messages to deploy a remote access trojan called SloughRAT (aka Canopy by CISA) capable of executing arbitrary code and commands received from its command-and-control (C2) servers.
The maldoc, an Excel file containing a malicious macro, triggers the infection chain to drop two Windows Script Files (.WSF) on the endpoint, the first one of them acting as the instrumentor to invoke and execute the next-stage payload.
Also discovered are two additional script-based implants, one written in Visual Basic and the other coded in JavaScript, both of which are engineered to download and run malicious commands on the compromised host.
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