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สำนักงานพัฒนาธุรกรรมทางอิเล็กทรอนิกส์ Electronic Transactions Development Agency |
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สำนักงานพัฒนาธุรกรรมทางอิเล็กทรอนิกส์ Electronic Transactions Development Agency |
APT group: El Machete| Names | El Machete (Kaspersky) TEMP.Andromeda (FireEye) APT-C-43 (Qihooo 360) ATK 97 (Thales) TAG-NS1 (Recorded Future) | |
| Country | [Unknown] | |
| Motivation | Information theft and espionage | |
| First seen | 2010 | |
| Description | (Kaspersky) “Machete” is a targeted attack campaign with Spanish speaking roots. We believe this campaign started in 2010 and was renewed with an improved infrastructure in 2012. The operation may be still “active”. The malware is distributed via social engineering techniques, which includes spear-phishing emails and infections via Web by a fake Blog website. We have found no evidence of exploits targeting zero-day vulnerabilities. Both the attackers and the victims appear to be Spanish-speaking. In some cases, such as Russia, the target appears to be an embassy from one of the countries of this list. | |
| Observed | Sectors: Defense, Education, Embassies, Energy, Government, Telecommunications. Countries: Argentina, Belgium, Bolivia, Brazil, Canada, China, Colombia, Cuba, Dominican Republic, Ecuador, France, Germany, Guatemala, Malaysia, Mexico, Nicaragua, Peru, Russia, South Korea, Spain, Sweden, UK, Ukraine, USA, Venezuela and others. | |
| Tools used | LokiBot, Machete, Pyark, Living off the Land. | |
| Operations performed | Mar 2017 | We’ve found that this group has continued to operate successfully, predominantly in Latin America, since 2014. All attackers simply moved to new C2 infrastructure, based largely around dynamic DNS domains, in addition to making minimal changes to the malware in order to evade signature-based detection. <https://threatvector.cylance.com/en_us/home/el-machete-malware-attacks-cut-through-latam.html> |
| Mar 2019 | From the end of March up until the end of May 2019, ESET researchers observed that there were more than 50 victimized computers actively communicating with the C&C server. This amounts to gigabytes of data being uploaded every week. <https://www.welivesecurity.com/2019/08/05/sharpening-machete-cyberespionage/> | |
| Jun 2020 | Operation “HpReact” In June 2020, 360 Security Center discovered a new backdoor Pyark written in Python by the fileless attack protection function. <https://blog.360totalsecurity.com/en/apt-c-43-steals-venezuelan-military-secrets-to-provide-intelligence-support-for-the-reactionaries-hpreact-campaign/> | |
| Mar 2022 | In mid-March, El Machete was spotted sending spear-phishing emails to financial organizations in Nicaragua, with an attached Word document titled “Dark plans of the neo-Nazi regime in Ukraine.” <https://research.checkpoint.com/2022/state-sponsored-attack-groups-capitalise-on-russia-ukraine-war-for-cyber-espionage/> | |
| Information | <https://securelist.com/el-machete/66108/> | |
| MITRE ATT&CK | <https://attack.mitre.org/groups/G0095/> | |
Last change to this card: 05 April 2022
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