A threat actor, not yet identified, has been targeting German companies with information stealing malware since at least mid-2021.
The German companies targeted have been in the automotive sector or have known ties to the automotive and manufacturing industry.
The infrastructure used in the campaign mimicked target and partner sites and often retrieved payloads from infrastructure hosted in Iran.
Throughout the campaign recipients received emails with a malicious ISO attachment to bypass an NTFS Mark-of-the-Web control.
Once the ISO had been opened by the recipient, a decoy purchase agreement was displayed while a combination of PowerShell and VB scripts retrieved and executed malicious payloads and modified registry settings.
Much of the malware used in the campaigns are Malware-as-a-Service payloads including AZORult, BitRAT and Raccoon info stealers.