Just released research by Kaspersky reveals hacker group 'Bad Magic,' linking past campaigns, shedding light on motivations, and revealing similarities to Ukrainian espionage. 📷: Kirill Kudryavtsev/Getty Images
Meanwhile, Malwarebytes had found that one particularly invasive tactic the group used in a more recent campaign was to record audio directly from the microphones of victims' compromised devices in addition to collecting other data like documents and screenshots.
In its work last week, Malwarebytes could not come to a conclusion about the actors behind the group and whether they are aligned with Russian or Ukrainian interests. In 2016, ESET found evidence that Operation Groundbait's malware had been in use all the way back to 2008 and attributed the activity to Ukraine.
“Our research into these attack campaigns and the [Groundbait] malware itself suggests that this threat is the first publicly known Ukrainian malware that is being used in targeted attacks,” ESETKaspersky cites this conclusion in its new research but notes that the firm does not engage in state attribution and did not investigate or verify ESET's findings.
Kucherin says that the group has been able to remain largely hidden for so long because their attacks are typically highly targeted, focusing on at most dozens of individuals at a time rather than launching mass exploitation. The group also rewrites its malware implants, which makes them difficult to connect until you have the full picture of multiple attack chains.
“The most interesting thing, even shocking perhaps, is that the group has been acting for 15 years. That is a lot, and it's quite rare when you are able to attribute one campaign to another campaign that happened years and years ago,” Kucherin says. “We’ll see more activity from them in the future. In my opinion, it is unlikely that they will stop what they’re doing. They are very, very persistent.
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